Acting Exercises for
the Lone Actor -
​Building your Acting and Improv Skill Set
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Lesson 1 - Self with Self
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Based on the work of Viola Spolin, Kelley guides you through this first exercise on how to feel your surroundings and stay in the present as an actor with a guided body check to explore how a character would react to their surroundings.

Lesson 2 - Object Permanence 
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Based on the theater games of Viola Spolin, Kelley Cody-Grimm teaches you how to mime objects for improv scenes
​to increase the scene's realism and expand it's depth.

Lesson 3 - Finding Levels in Your Monologues

In this lesson, Kelley uses the improv exercise "Emotions" to help find levels in your monologue as she times you for a minute calling out different emotions. The first minute clock starts at 7:05 and the second one starts at 8:26 so you can time your piece a few times.

Lesson 4 - Creating Your World and Status

Kelley explains how creating a realistic world can help propel your improv scenes to the next level by exploring not only what the world would be like but also the actor's status in the world. Using examples of high and low status as well as different points in time, students are challenged to:

1. Create five different worlds in five different countries and five different points in time (one country can be the US).
2. In each world, create a high-status character and a low-status character.

Lesson 5 - Subtle Character Traits 
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In this segment - we look at how little verbal and non-verbal quirks traits can make your character more believable. Using acting traits used by Steve Carell, Leslie David Baker, John Krasinski, Jennifer Aniston, Kristin Stewart, Harrison Ford, and Jim Carrey, Kelley illustrates how these subtle quirks can make your acting more believable.