The Unlimited Actor: Easy, New Techniques for Auditions, Character Development, and Unlocking Your Full Creative Range

By Nancy Mayans

The Unlimited Actor is an exciting new paradigm in actor training. Step by step this book will guide you into sensing and controlling the body's mental, emotional, and physical energy centers. Train these "power points" to change at will and your acting range will take a quantum leap.
* Boost Your Confidence * Easily Access Any Emotion
* Embody Any Character on Cue

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504362405

Nancy Mayans

Nancy Mayans has been on the Faculty of the renown William Esper Studio in New York City since 1990. She has also taught in many wonderful MFA and BFA acting programs including NYU, Rutgers, Columbia, Carnegie-Mellon and the Yale School of Drama. Backstage readers have voted her runner up for Favorite Acting Coach in New York City and Favorite Vocal/Singing Coach four times. As an Acting/Dialect coach, Nancy has worked for feature films, MTV news, HBO specials and two PBS television series. As a performer Nancy sang and puppeteered internationally with Julie Taymor's Obie-Award winning Juan Darien. In New York she has performed with the Manhattan Theatre Club and The Public Theatre, and in Boston with the American Repertory Theatre where she is a founding member. Nancy received her MFA in Acting from the Yale School of Drama and her BA in Drama from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa). She has also trained extensively in various healing arts and spiritual practices all of which inform her teaching style. Nancy maintains a private practice in New York City and travels to offer The Unlimited Actor workshops and Teacher Certification. She sends much gratitude to the numerous students and professional clients that she has worked with over the years, so many of whom you have seen in feature films, television and on Broadway.

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Copyright © 2017 Nancy A. Mayans.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Please seek medical clearance from your physician before engaging in any strenuous activity.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6221-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6222-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6240-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911693

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/26/2017

Acclaim for The Unlimited Actor

This book is a true gift to the actor. Nancy Mayans is a genuine master teacher and her exciting, original techniques train the actor to make deeper contact with character and text, leading to a more vivid and compelling performance.

—Deb Jackel, Acting & Audition Coach, William Esper Studio

The Unlimited Actor techniques have increased my confidence and artistry. For any performer serious about their craft and passionate about bringing light to their work, Nancy without a doubt will guide you to your highest potential.

—Emmanuelle Chriqui, Entourage, You Can’t Mess with the Zohan

I would recommend this book to anyone who is seeking a deeper connection to themselves and is certainly a must-have for creating a complete performance.

—Bobby Campo, Being Human, CSI, Scream, Grey’s Anatomy

On Acting: I have experienced that moment, where I got stuck. I knew my objectives, my actions, I did all of my homework, and I could visualize the results. However, numbness took over. The Unlimited Actor method provided the vehicle to move forwards, backwards, up and down. I could finally break through.

—Maryam Hassouni, Emmy Award Winner, Best Actress

There really is no one like Nancy Mayans. Period. Her Unlimited Actor method is awe inspiring, one that moves us all—actors, stage directors, and filmmakers alike—to grasp our highest caliber of work in a pure and easeful manner. The results are undeniable.

—Jamie Wollrab, Acting Coach, Director. Faculty: Warner Loughlin

Energy work is a very important part of my life as an artist and a human being, because we weren’t given an instruction manual when we entered this realm, but I believe that manual was already inside of us and we just need to tap into it! One of the best ways to do this is with a nurturing guide such as Nancy. From there you’re off and running as your full self!

—Juan Antonio, Modern Family, How to Get Away with Murder, Empire

As a young actress, Nancy’s method gave me the confidence, grounded feeling, and quick flexibility that I had been missing in my commercial auditions. As I integrated her techniques, I started booking regularly and now have over a hundred commercial and print campaigns in the US and abroad.

—Talia Castro-Pozo, Coca Cola, Google, Expedia

"The Unlimited Actor should be a staple for all improvisation and character breakdown classes! It opens up actors, dancers, and creative artists so they can develop more imaginative characters."

—LaQuet Sharnell Pringle, Broadway: The Lion King, Memphis, Faculty: The American Musical and Dramatic Academy

I’ve had the honor of working with Nancy Mayans over the years and absolutely adore her. The time we have spent together in both workshops and privates have strengthened my artistry.

—Lana Parrilla, Once Upon a Time, Teen Choice Award

Nancy Mayans is one of the finest teachers anyone can learn from. She understands the concrete physical instrument as well as the intangible essence of the actor’s spirit.

—Elizabeth Mestnik, Director/Owner, Elizabeth Mestnik Acting Studio

"Actors, acting teachers, and directors—you must read this book! The Unlimited Actor is a phenomenal, original approach that quickly brings artists to imaginative places they never knew were possible. Nancy is a master teacher and her method takes you on a quantum leap into your natural creative genius."

—Janet Mitchko, Co-Artistic Director, LA Public Theater

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue: How It All Happened

1 So Why Did They Get the Part?

2 What Is Energy?

3 Sensing Energy: How to Feel It, How to See It

4 Your Magical Doorways: The Chakras

5 Chakras and Their Character Traits

6 Chakras In Motion: The Movie Version!

7 Physical Warm-Ups for Each Chakra

8 Laugh, Sing, Dance: The Creative Warm-Ups

9 Controlling the Doorways:

Opening and Closing the Chakras

10 How to Create Sudden Shock, Trauma, and Drama!

11 The Vitality within All Actions:

The Four Primal Energy Modes

12 Beyond the Rainbow: The Full Cast of Colors

13 Intro to Downloading Energy

14 Embodying Any Essence

15 Downloading Emotions

16 Kings, Queens, and Clowns: Exploring Archetypes

17 Three Archetypal Aspects of Character: Sexuality, Profession, Nationality

18 Instant Ingenuity: Downloading The Character

19 In Support of the Actor: Clearing, Protection, and Troubleshooting

20 THE UNLIMITED ACTOR: Rehearsal and Audition Protocols

Epilogue: You Take it from Here

Appendix A: A World of Color in Other Fields

Appendix B: Additional Physical Warm-Ups for the Chakras

Appendix C: The Unlimited Actor: Exercise Guide

Glossary

Bibliography

About the Author

To Learn More

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I want to thank the incomparable William Esper and the William Esper Studio in New York City for creating an exceptional professional and artistic home for me for over twenty-five years. Bill’s brilliance as a Sanford Meisner teacher, along with his own expanded wisdom, his impeccable dedication to the actor’s art and craft, and his deep understanding of human behavior will forever inspire me. With the remarkable Suzanne Esper and other expert teachers, I have been blessed to be part of a special program, able to help train thousands of dedicated acting students from all over the world.

Thank you to those actors who helped me develop The Unlimited Actor method by being willing guinea pigs in the early experimental days. Some of you offered spaces to play, others feedback to chew on, and all offered their openhearted and openminded talent: these include Talia Castro-Pozo, Anette Norgaard, Leo Kin, Marnie Pomerantz MacLean, Alida Thomas and Laura Beckett. And my gratitude also goes to the 2016 Esper graduates who modeled for the photographs—I will miss you!

I have six special helpers to thank: Barry Kleinbort for his wit, talent and creative advice; Ayesha Adamo for her years of practical and energetic assistance through numerous workshops; Jamie Wollrab and Elizabeth Mestnik for generously sharing my work in Los Angeles; Aiman Hassani for his friendship as well as his technical support; and Bekah Mulberg for her artistic support with photographs, drawings, and videos.

To Laith Nakli, Jared Szafman, and the terrific Esper office staff—Angela Atwood, Quincy Beard, Eddie Wong, and Kristina Osterling—thank you for your kindness, your skills, and for making a teacher’s job a whole lot easier!

So much gratitude goes to my dear friends for their love, advice, and support in writing this book, especially Sue Burns, Cindy Michel, Alla Antsis, Carol May, Cindy Hays, and Janet Mitchko.

And to my artistic and spiritual teachers, too numerous to name here, I send boundless gratitude for opening my heart and mind to the beauty, depth, and complexity of the human spirit.

—Nancy Mayans

PROLOGUE

How It All Happened

In Life, as well as Art, anything is possible.

—Marc Chagall

When I was in my early thirties, I had an extraordinary audition experience. A regional theater company was auditioning actors in New York City to appear in their upcoming production of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. I was hired at the last minute to be their reader that day, acting out the scenes with those auditioning for the roles of Bella, the mentally challenged, Jewish, Brooklyn-born daughter, and her stern German mother, the matriarch of the family. At one point, the director said, Nancy, why don’t you audition for Bella? Read opposite the woman we’re auditioning for the mother. I realized they were squeezing me into their tight schedule, and that I had only a few minutes in the hall to prepare.

The first thing I did was pray, Oh God, help me do this! Although I had seen the Broadway play several years before, I only vaguely remembered the details of the plot. In the hall, I had barely read through half the new scene when I heard my name being called. Before entering the room, I remember asking for the role of Bella to come to me.

As I was auditioning, something came over me. All my senses suddenly felt heightened. I deeply felt Bella’s fear of her terrifying mother, and how brave Bella was to stand up to her. I then effortlessly went into Bella’s agonizing, yet liberating confession of her shocking past. It was as if it had happened to me, and the traumatic revelations popped off the page in full emotional bloom—even though I didn’t know what words I’d be reading next! I fully responded in the moment with all the playwright’s intentions fleshed out, regarding my mother and the new boyfriend I was about to run away with. It all emerged organically and instantaneously, with all the character’s impediments. What I felt and the words I spoke could have come out only as Bella—New Yorker, Jewish, and mentally challenged. Bella’s reality was now my own: a slow-witted mind, a new sense of rebellion, a wounded yet innocent heart.

The artistic director of the theater, who had been casting and directing for over twenty years, told me it was one of the best auditions he had ever seen—You really captured the heart and soul of the character. And what’s even more remarkable, it was practically a cold reading! My acting was more powerful, connected, and multilayered than in any other audition, rehearsal, or performance I had ever done or would ever experience again for many years afterward.

Although I ultimately didn’t get the part (they were looking for a different physical type), the experience changed my perspective on acting forever. I thought, How complex, deep, yet easy acting could be if one were in the right state of mind! But the truth was I didn’t know what had actually happened that day. My experience reminded me of the old story about Sir Laurence Olivier when he was playing Othello at the National Theatre in London. During one particular performance, he took a quantum leap in realism. Everything seemed incredibly connected and truthful, as if he weren’t acting at all. Many cast members noticed the difference and went to his dressing room afterward to congratulate him. Instead of being gracious and happy, Olivier fumed in a state of intense fury, throwing furniture around his dressing room.

What’s wrong? asked a surprised cast member. Olivier screamed back,I don’t know how I did it!

Even though I’d had extensive Sanford Meisner training as a Stanford undergraduate majoring in Drama, Stella Adler and Michael Chekov training as a Yale School of Drama graduate majoring in Acting, and Lee Strasberg and more Meisner training afterward from prestigious New York City acting studios, I had never had an experience like this one where all the best of my training and more fell into place in an instant, and under pressure. What had allowed me to become so attuned to the role that a full performance seemed to fall into me? What allowed the unfamiliar lines to leap off the page into me and then flow out with all their history and depth, as if I had written the play myself?

After that audition, I was driven to find out how to get back into that creative zone—and how to train others to be able to do so as well. I continued to gather experience as a professional actress, singer, voice teacher, and acting coach, but found that my traditional trainings and teachings, although effective, were not enough to bring me into that heightened creative state on a regular basis. It took me the next fifteen years of experimenting, by myself and with scores of other actors, to figure out what I had done that day, how I had done it, and how I might be able to train others to routinely tap into this kind of remarkable experience.

This book is the distillation of that research.

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All right, before you say to yourself, Oh no, not another acting book! I think there’s something else you need to know about me. Actors can be complicated individuals, and they usually have other great passions in their lives besides acting. Sometimes, they’re avid collectors: Jerry Seinfeld collects Porsches, Johnny Depp … dolls(!). Sometimes, they seek self-improvement. Gwyneth Paltrow loves learning foreign languages, Brad Pitt interior design and architecture. All of these extracurricular activities help to enrich our craft. Mine? Well, along with acting and teaching, I have been actively immersed in the exploration of energy. By energy, I mean the chi or life force that moves not only through the subtle channels in our bodies (such as those used in acupuncture) but also vibrates all around us. This energy affects all aspects of our being: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

I’ve trained in lots of healing modalities: some were easy and took only a weekend to master, while others took decades. I am certified in three levels of Reiki, have done four levels of Theta Healing, became a Light Body Graduate, and took trainings in Brain Gym, Emotional Freedom Technique, and Family Constellation work. I’ve taken workshops with highly regarded figures in the field, like Barbara Brennan and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and trained extensively with Sanaya Roman, Dr. Frank Alper, Dr. Patricia Fields, and other renowned healers.

I eventually became a professional healer with a practice in New York City, specializing in work with actors and creative artists. Many of the healing modalities I’ve studied have amazing tools to control one’s energy that are fantastic for an actor. How to be more grounded, powerful, and emotionally present. How to radiate confidence and create more harmonious relationships. How to clear creative blocks.

In the process of practicing my healing skills, I began having more and more experiences in what some call higher states of consciousness. Examples of spontaneous knowing started showing up in my daily life. One afternoon, while sitting with a friend in Starbucks, she told me about a persistent pain that runs down her legs, and suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw the cause—a small milky-white cap at the bottom of her tailbone. It turned out she had a cyst there! I was in a New York City cab when a friend called from Maryland to ask for healing help for her cat. I suddenly saw a cat with orange-colored fur and felt a stabbing pain in his back left hip. In that case, she was rushing her cat (who did turn out to have orange fur), to the vet, as he had just been bitten on that particular spot by a feral tomcat.

If I had the ability to zero in on a cyst in someone else’s body over a cappuccino, or a painful bite in an ailing cat several states away, why couldn’t the same tools that opened me to healing be used to open actors to the subtleties of a character? Why couldn’t an actor imitate the same energy blocks that a real person has, in order to create the same behavior? And could my energy exercises be tailored to train the actor to enter that place of knowing, that creative zone where he could easily pick up on a character’s reality in detail, as I had done with Bella? More important, if I could master this technique in myself, would I then be able to pass this information successfully on to others?

Well, you don’t know until you try, so I gathered all I’d learned as an actor, teacher, and healer, and started working with a few experimental groups. I ran these sessions for years, mostly working with actors, but also with singers, dancers, writers, composers, and casting directors. I developed many of my own energy techniques, as well as adjusted ancient ones to assist any creative artist, but most specifically, the Actor.

And you know what? It works! The actors in these workshops learned it, they embraced it, they incorporated it, and they continue to achieve terrific results because of it. They proved to me that this is a genuinely worthy approach, a one-of-a-kind method that produces results. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ll love how profound, easy, and fun it is! You’ll widen, broaden, and deepen your natural talent, discover your boundless imagination, and expand your commitment to your craft. These techniques will ignite an energy in you that will magnify all the other acting techniques you’ve learned, and bring greater depth and reality to the characters you play. You’ll be able to integrate any character you choose into every level of your being, bringing an authenticity that goes beyond the realm of acting into the natural realm of being.

ONE

So Why Did They Get the Part?

The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.

—Jimmy Johnson

An actress walks into a competitive audition for a featured role on the long-running hit television series Grey’s Anatomy. In the scene she is to be helped by the attending doctor after injuries endured from a shocking explosion in the local mall. She tunes into the character in a particular way and suddenly sees a hospital emergency room filled with dozens of victims, doctors shouting, and general chaos. She also feels her character is not moving her lower body much. She decides to sit for the audition and include the frightening, chaotic environment in her reading. She gets the part!

Why? The casting director said it’s because she was one of the few to sit down for the audition—and the scene would be shot on a gurney. Even more important, she was the only actress to pick up on the chaotic environment.

An actress is auditioning for the role of a newspaper reporter in a feature film. She tunes into the character in a particular way and suddenly feels very aggressive. She takes a chance and shoves her face practically nose to nose with the reader’s as she demands answers. Against stiff competition, she lands the role.

Why? It turns out the director wanted that much aggression, though there was no such indication from the audition sides. He ends up shooting a close-up with her face shoved right into the face of—this time—Sean Penn.

An actress is in final callbacks for a major feature film starring Harrison Ford. At the previous audition she was emotionally weak in a pivotal scene where she had to walk into the hospital room to find her husband mangled after a horrific car accident. Though she had done all her acting homework, she wasn’t able to instantaneously break down as the script had demanded. This time is different: she lands the role.

Why? She added a new technique she had just learned and suddenly all the tears and pain came flying out on cue.

A model, new to acting, gets called in for his first film audition: to play the imaginary boyfriend of the lead character. In the audition, the director has him quickly shift into many different personas. The model works with a new technique he just learned and is able to swiftly and thoroughly make the shifts. He gets the part.

Why? The director says it’s because he is so flexible, believably changing his type in a moment. The project turns out to be a huge hit and wins two Academy Awards.

So why are these actors getting cast? What are they specifically doing that gives them that extra edge?

They are all using techniques they learned in The Unlimited Actor workshops. They are now working consciously with their energy, having grasped new ways to shift organically into the character. They know how to attune to the energy beneath the writer’s words and within the director’s vision.

As an Unlimited Actor you, too, can learn to easily shift into any character you want. You’ll be able to exactly match your energy—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually—to that of the character’s, and