By Jean Schiffman

Pianists practice scales, singers vocalize, dancers work out, visual artists sketch, and writers well, we keep journals and overload the blogosphere with our ramblings. What do actors do, when they're not working or in class, to keep their instrument in order? Not much, other than memorize lines, work on audition monologues, and read scripts, right? So I pulled together a few fun exercises you can do entirely on your own whenever you feel like it, just to hone your chops.

1. At Ease Most acting books and classes emphasize relaxation as a warm-up to acting, so let's start with a basic relaxation exercise used by many teachers. Loosen your clothing; get comfy. Tighten the muscles in your toes and count to 10. Relax. Flex your feet for a 10 count; relax. Proceed upward legs, abdomen, etc. contracting and relaxing, always breathing deeply and slowly and savoring the release.

2. Mouth On Another routine exercise this one to polish your articulation comes from a British voiceover website, www.theshowreel.com. Place a cork between your teeth and read a text aloud very slowly, overenunciating the vowels, consonants, and syllables. Don't barrel through the little words (a, the, of, etc.). The text can be anything, even street signs as you're driving, silly as it'll look to other motorists. "You'll find your cheeks, jaw, and tongue will start to get tired after just a few minutes," observes the Showreel, "but you'll also notice that after this exercise you will speak much more clearly without sounding forced."

3. Barely Breathing Here's a breathing exercise from Gavin Levy (another Brit!), author of Acting Games for Individual Performers and other books. Cover your right nostril with your thumb. Breathe in through your left nostril. Just before you get to the top of the breath, switch and cover your left nostril. Breathe in for another second, then breathe all the way out. Then do the same thing in reverse. Repeat for two minutes. If you get dizzy, stop. Levy tells me his students say it calms and focuses them and helps with concentration. They also say they feel silly doing it in public, but Levy assures them it can be managed in a subtle way.

4. Versify One more Brit, writer-director Declan Donnellan, writes in The Actor and the Target that to learn how to act in blank verse, as in Shakespeare, read aloud verse from all periods as much as possible, and try to write some yourself. It'll help you learn your own individual way of speaking verse, he counsels, not some generic, cookie-cutter method.

5. Walk the Walk This is a no-brainer, taken from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Acting by Paul Baldwin and John Malone, but bear with me. Observe how different people move differently. I once did this when walking down the street with three friends. Respectively, we galumphed, sashayed, bounced, and strutted. Some people use their hands in unique ways. How do their heads move when they're laughing? What do they do with their legs when they sit? What do all these things tell you about them?

6. Be an Observatory Here's another observational technique, this one from Levy: "Observe people doing mundane tasks such as putting sugar in their coffee, tying their shoelace, taking money out of their pocket. Notice the difference in the way people behave when performing these mundane and monotonous tasks." He explains that continual everyday observation strengthens your understanding of human nature.

7. Observe Yourself Also crucial, of course, is self-observation. Uta Hagen writes in A Challenge for the Actor about the importance of understanding the fundamentals of human behavior in a specific and personal way. She recommends meticulously re-creating two "seemingly routine minutes of life when alone at home" and gives examples: getting up in the morning, preparing for bed at night, tidying your room for company, fixing lunch. When she first experimented with this exercise, she discovered that her habits were always affected by the circumstances of the day: "The more exact I was in determining these circumstances," she writes, "the easier it was to define what I was really doing and, consequently, to do it again as if for the first time."

8. Sound Around To experiment with your range of sounds and learn how to fill a space, call out into the ozone or into a wall, writes Elizabeth Swados in At Play: Teaching Teenagers Theater. She has roared in the ruins of Greece, shrieked on the Staten Island ferry, and hollered on the Paris metro and in other unlikely venues. And here's a bonus vocal exercise from Levy: Take a monologue or speech and do it changing your projection first whispering, then as if performing for one individual, then to several people (conversational mode), then to a big auditorium. This helps you learn how to manipulate your vocal level, he says, which makes you more versatile in your acting. And it shows you how "by changing your vocal levels you can totally change the meaning of the piece" important information for the actor.

9. Touch Me, Feel Me In her final book, Theater Games for the Lone Actor, Viola Spolin, the late, great guru of improv, talks about the necessity of being present in the moment when acting. To get in the habit of connecting to your environment, try her "Touch and Be Touched/See and Be Seen" exercise. While engaged in an activity, train yourself to see and touch objects and imagine you're allowing the objects to see and touch you. "This exercise removes attitudes, information, and narration about what you are touching and seeing so that a direct experience may occur," she writes. "It can help to maintain freshness in a role." She adds, "Preparation for the lone actor, getting into the process at home or on the set, requires that you turn your light on to see Where you are, Who you are, and What you are really doing."

10. On a Role If you've ever tried Gestalt therapy, you know this role-playing exercise. As Robert Blumenfeld explains in Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation, you can use it to explore and deepen your character's relationships with the other characters in the script. Sit facing an empty chair and "talk to that person, telling him or her everything you really want to say, whether you as the character would actually be able to say it or not and whether or not the script allows you to say it." Take notes.

11. Raid Your REM To expand your imagination, writes Swados, dream, dream, dream: What character would you like to be? What world do you inhabit as that character and what happens there? Dreaming helps creativity, she says, noting some of director Peter Brook's inspirations, including West African storytelling, Hindu legends, Noh and Kabuki, Arabic legends, Kabbalah, Indonesian shadow puppets, Sufi spinning, and Gypsy lore.

12. Sense Your Censor Finally, here's something that's less an exercise and more a mindset you want to encourage in yourself, recommended by Donnellan. "Censored feelings are a great problem for the actor," he writes. He encourages actors to "admit and accept" that we all hold within us memories of "unacknowledged and unowned intensities." We need to believe that we have "the potential if not the experience" of feeling every possible feeling under the sun.

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