From:www.actiontheater.com/articl08.htm MRSA Prevention for Athletes – Is my locker room properly protected?

EXPRESSION

One thing that Action Theater students do is practice changing the expressions on their faces in front of a mirror, or in front of each other. They mirror each other's changing faces. Sometimes they change their expressions slowly, sometimes quickly. No thought. No story. No emotions like sad, happy, angry, or seductive are guiding them. Their instruction is to follow the flesh of the face-to let sensations of the flesh lead them through changes-to notice what is happening on a sensation level (the chin is pulling down or the lips are tight or the brow is creasing) and then go further in that direction until some other sensation becomes noticeable and then follow that. The trick is to allow inner feelings to change along with the flesh, to stay connected-to feel the congruence of the inner experience with the outer manifestation. One is not leading the other. Both the face and feeling simultaneously ride waves of evolving mind/body states.
Why do we practice facial flexibility? The job of Action Theater improvisers is to manifest their moment-to-moment experience-not just what they're doing but how they are experiencing what they're doing: either its meaning or how it feels or both. Meaning and feeling may be two different things. For example, I can lift my shoulders in disgust-"disgust" being the meaning. Or the lift of the shoulders connect with a mind state that has no name, that can't be called anything, but has an energetic quality to it (light, dense, constricted, open, askew, dull, etc.), and that quality extends through my face and eyes.
Try this: Raise your right hand and look directly ahead. Raise it again and shift your eyes (not your head) to the right, now down, now up. Now directly ahead and raise one eyebrow. These little adjustments may add or change the meaning of what might have been simply a physical action.
The facial changes are experienced as movement, as are those of the eyes, the arm, the foot. Facial movement is an equal player in every perceived frame of action, all the components of each frame, share, respond, and loop back into the same source: the continuum of consciousness.
In Action Theater it's feeling states rather than emotions that play out. Emotions are what we call psycho-physical experiences that are the result of conceptual interpretations of past, current, future, or imaginal events. For example, something-an image, memory, current event-comes into our awareness. We make a judgment about it, consciously or unconsciously. It's good. It's bad. It's mean, ugly, sublime, sexy. Then our bodies react to the story we've created, and as long as we continue to fuel the story, our bodies continue to fuel the story, our bodies continue to react. Our attention is on the story. It could go like this:
I hear a piece of music. It reminds me of my father who passed away last year. That was one of his favorites. I begin to long for my father, feel deserted, unprotected. That's where I dwell-under the weighted thoughts of being unprotected. I think of all the ways I'm unprotected, vulnerable, etc. I feel lonely, angry at having to always fend for myself. Now I'm caught in a downward spiral of a pathetic story. My mood changes, my body feels heavy, my perceptions are contracted. I lie in bed in a state of gloomy inertia.
Feeling states may look like emotions but the improvisor's relationship to the experience is quite different. There is no judgment or evaluation, no thing is good or bad. Feeling states arise spontaneously and linger until replaced by another. The shift from one feeling of state to another is determined by the content and musicality of each moment of the improvisation, as sensed by the improviser. Unlike emotions, feelings states are unnameable. They can't be called happy, sad, or lonely. The state of the mind and body are congruent, intentional, and happen simultaneously, whereas with an emotion, the condition of the body is a response to the thoughts of the mind. In a sense, feelings ar passing fancies, whether dark or light, tense or relaxed, pretty or ugly. They appear only to be replaced by others. The improviser is free to play within a vast array of mind states.
In Action Theater, we practice performing from a non-conceptual base. Using movement and sound, we improvise through feeling states and actions that are preverbal, that have no language or story supporting them. Yet they are true, recognizable, and content-ful.
Later, when we introduce language into our practice, we remain rooted in the nonconceptual experience of the moment. We hear the sound and feel the passage of the word as it moves through our mouths.