Theatrical facial warmups are SO GOOD, face muscles that don’t get encouraged to move tend to not, and waking them up can give you a way to feel more engaged and expressive and it’s just Lovely:
- ball up your face like a fist, try to cram all of your facial features as close to your nose as possible, hold for three.
- big exaggerated smile, eyes may close with the effort of stretching your whole face out to the ears, and even your ears should feel like they’re pulling back into your hairline, hold for three.
- forward, like a vacuum is pulling your face, lips stuck out in an ooooooo, go bug-eyed, everything pushing out to the front, hold for three.
- wiiiiide in all directions, mouth open as far as it will go, eyebrows all the way up, eyes wide, tongue as far out and down as possible, everything on your face trying to reach the nearest Edge of your face, hold for three.
- Now do it over and over, faster each time, scrunch, smile, forward, wide, scrunch, smile, forward, wide…
- stick your tongue into your cheek, lips closed, hard as it’ll go
- push it into your upper lip, mouth still closed
- round to your other cheek, down into your lower lip, and back to your first cheek.
- do a few circles, then switch directions
this one builds up the strength/dexterity of your tongue (it is impressive how fast your tongue will get tired, don’t strain anything) which helps with enunciation, and at the same time it stretches your relaxed face muscles (as opposed to the last one that stretched them but also engaged them)
- blow raspberries with just your lips. this one seems like a catch-22 because it’s great for relaxing your lip muscles and loosening them, but it’s almost impossible to do if they’re tense/tight - but there’s a trick! jab your fingers into your cheeks and push a little in and a little up. Now it should be no problem.
- practice wiggling one eyebrow at a time, alternate back and forth. Most people have one dominant eyebrow that’s the only one they can move independently, but literally just hold that one down with a couple fingers, and with practice you’ll get the other one working independently.
- “Buh Duh Guh, Puh Tuh Kuh, BuhDuhGuhBuhDuhGuhBuhDuhGuh, PuhTuhKuhPuhTuhKuhPuhTuhKuh”