Making Faces
Making Faces is a warm-up exercise in which players practice exaggerated facial expressions, cycling through emotions, mirroring a partner, or responding to facilitator prompts. The exercise loosens inhibition around physical expressiveness and helps performers discover how facial choices communicate character and emotion instantly. Many performers rely primarily on voice and words; Making Faces redirects attention to the face as a primary communication instrument. The exercise serves as an accessible entry point for physical comedy work and character creation.
Structure
Players stand in a circle or face a partner. The facilitator calls out emotions or character types, and the players create the most exaggerated facial expression possible for each prompt: rage, ecstasy, suspicion, bewilderment, disgust, delight.
The exercise begins with broad, extreme expressions held for several seconds. Players push past their comfort zone, making the biggest, most distorted faces they can. The facilitator encourages players to engage their entire face: forehead, eyebrows, eyes, cheeks, mouth, and jaw.
The exercise progresses through variations. Mirror Faces: partners face each other and one player leads while the other matches every facial movement in real time. Emotion Carousel: the group cycles through a rapid sequence of emotions, changing expression on the facilitator's call every three to five seconds. Character Faces: players create a face that suggests a complete character and then hold a brief conversation in character, letting the face drive the voice and physicality.
Advanced versions connect facial expression to full-body character work. Players create a face, then walk through the space as the character the face suggests, discovering how the face influences posture, gait, gesture, and vocal quality.
The exercise runs for five to ten minutes and transitions naturally into character work or scene exercises.
How to Teach It
How to Explain It
"Make a face. Hold it. Do not choose a good one: choose the first one that comes. Now let the face spread through your whole body. Walk as this face. Meet other faces. The face decides who you are."
Making Faces is effective early in a session because it is impossible to do the exercise self-consciously. The deliberate exaggeration gives players permission to look ridiculous, which breaks down the social inhibitions that constrain physical expressiveness in scene work.
Coach for maximum distortion in the early rounds. Players who make "normal" angry or happy faces have not engaged with the exercise. The goal is grotesque, theatrical exaggeration that pushes the face beyond its habitual range. The exaggerated version reveals the face's full expressive capacity; subtlety comes later.
The mirror variation teaches a specific and valuable skill: the ability to read and reproduce another person's facial expression in real time. Performers who develop this skill become more responsive scene partners, unconsciously matching and reacting to their partner's emotional state through facial mirroring.
The exercise connects to the principle that the face is the audience's primary point of attention. An audience reads a performer's face before anything else. Performers who develop a wide facial vocabulary communicate character, emotion, and reaction before speaking a word.
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Related Exercises
Faces
Faces is an exercise in which players explore extreme facial expressions and the emotions they generate. By exaggerating the muscles of the face, performers discover how external expression triggers internal feeling. The exercise loosens facial tension and builds expressive range.
Barney
Barney is an energy and movement warm-up exercise in which players adopt an exaggerated, lumbering physical character and interact with the group through simple, playful commands. The exercise asks participants to embody a large, slow, friendly creature (often described as a dinosaur or monster) and move through the space with maximum physical commitment and minimum self-consciousness. The inherent silliness of the character lowers inhibitions quickly, making Barney effective as an early warm-up for groups that are new to physical work or uncomfortable with large physical choices. The exercise builds comfort with exaggerated movement, vocal projection, and the willingness to look ridiculous in front of others, all foundational skills for improv performance.
Big Body Tiny Head
Big Body Tiny Head is a physicality exercise in which performers exaggerate the proportions of their body in movement, leading with an oversized physical presence while minimizing the head and face. The distortion forces players out of cerebral, face-focused performance habits and into full-body expressiveness. The exercise develops physical range and breaks self-conscious patterns.
Strike a Pose
Strike a Pose is a physical exercise in which players assume strong, committed physical positions and use each pose as a starting point for character, scene, or interpretive discovery. The exercise demonstrates that physical choices precede and inform emotional and character choices, rather than following from them. Multiple documented variants use the same core mechanic of striking and holding a pose to develop ensemble responsiveness, scene inspiration, and interpretive skill.
Complete Bodies
Complete Bodies is a physicality exercise in which players practice using their entire body to communicate rather than relying primarily on face and hands. The exercise challenges performers to express emotional states, status, and character through the spine, torso, hips, and legs as well as through their more habitual expressive channels. It builds physical range and presence for scene work and performance.
Aerobics
Aerobics is a physical warm-up exercise in which one player leads the group through exaggerated, often absurd exercise movements. The leader adopts the persona of a fitness instructor and guides the ensemble through increasingly ridiculous physical routines, all performed with full commitment. Participants mirror the leader's movements and match their energy regardless of how outlandish the routine becomes. The exercise serves multiple functions in improv training: it raises the group's physical energy at the start of a rehearsal or class, breaks down self-consciousness by requiring participants to look foolish together, and establishes a shared physical vocabulary before scene work begins. Aerobics belongs to a family of physical warm-ups that draw from fitness disciplines such as yoga, tai chi, and martial arts, adapted for the specific needs of ensemble performance training.
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Making Faces. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/making-faces
The Improv Archive. "Making Faces." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/making-faces.
The Improv Archive. "Making Faces." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/making-faces. Accessed March 17, 2026.
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