ABSTRACT
The purpose of emotional preparation is for actors to come into a scene emotionally full. To get emotionally prepared, actors use their imagination and they use daydreams. These daydreams must be filled with personal meaning and with an element of truth. In other words, in emotional preparation and daydreaming, actors exclusively use their imagination to create a detailed hypothetical situation for themselves where the stakes are high and have big personal meaning. The main idea with sensation exercises is that sensations lead to feelings, and feelings can eventually lead to emotions. Since emotions can be capricious, like Chekhov used to say, we begin to approach them by the first two steps: sensations and feelings. Chekhov organized sensations into three types of inner movement: falling: all the negative feelings one have experienced; floating: all the positive feelings one have experienced; and equilibrium or balancing: a transitory sensation of trying not to fall or float.
