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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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.
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Character Mirror Circle
Character Mirror Circle is an exercise in which players stand in a circle and one player steps to the center, adopting a character through physicality and voice. The rest of the circle mirrors the character as precisely as possible. The exercise sharpens observational skills and teaches performers to read and reproduce physical character details.
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How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Making Faces. Retrieved September 28, 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 September 28, 2026.
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