# What Are Rasaboxes? The Emotion Exercise for Actors, Explained > Rasaboxes is a floor grid of nine emotions that trains you to switch feelings instantly with your body, breath, and voice. What the nine rasas are, where they come from in the Natyashastra, how a session runs step by step, and how to use one rasa to wake up a scene that has gone flat. - URL: https://www.offbook.com/blog/rasaboxes-for-actors - Published: 2026-11-07 - Last updated: 2026-11-07 The workshop schedule says "Rasaboxes, Saturday, 10 a.m." You look it up and find a journal essay about Sanskrit theory and the gut, a few theses, and a book listing. Nobody tells you what you'll actually be doing for three hours on the floor. Or a director stops a scene that's going nowhere and says, "Try it from raudra." Half the room nods. You're in the other half. The short version: rasaboxes is a physical emotion exercise built by director Richard Schechner and developed with his colleagues Michele Minnick and Paula Murray Cole. A grid of nine boxes goes on the floor. Eight boxes hold the classic emotions of Indian performance theory, called rasas, and the center box stays empty. You step into a box and express its emotion fully with your body, then your breath, then your voice, and you step out to neutral. Later you switch boxes with no transition, and finally you bring a text in and let the emotions shift under fixed words. For a flat scene, that last stage is the useful one: pick one rasa as the scene's undertone, play it, then try the least logical one. ## Know what the exercise is for before you step in Schechner laid out the exercise in his essay "Rasaesthetics," published in *TDR* in 2001. He describes the full procedure in the essay's [section on the Rasabox exercise](https://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/603/rasaesthetics.pdf), and says it rests on one idea: emotions are socially constructed, while feelings are individually experienced. That distinction is the whole point. In rasaboxes you aren't digging for a private memory to make yourself sad. You're learning the public shape of sadness, the breath, posture, and sound an audience reads as grief, and learning to produce it on demand. Whether you also feel it is left open. Minnick, in a sidebar to the same essay, says Schechner designed it in answer to Antonin Artaud's demand that the actor be an "athlete of the emotions." Schechner's image is a basketball player on the bench who goes from a towel on the shoulders to full effort the moment he's called in. The exercise trains that kind of switch. Paula Murray Cole put it plainly to [Greater Good magazine](https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/acting_on_empathy): "The physical expression isn't necessarily what the actors are feeling." What matters, she said, is knowing the forms of expression that carry the emotion to the audience. If you've worked on [emotional preparation](https://www.offbook.com/blog/emotional-preparation-acting) from the inside out, rasaboxes comes at the same problem from the outside in. ## Learn the nine rasas and where they come from The rasas come from the *Natyashastra*, a Sanskrit treatise on drama, dance, and music. Tradition attributes it to the sage Bharata, and scholars usually date its first complete version to [between 200 BCE and 200 CE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natya_Shastra). A rasa is literally a "taste" or "flavor": the emotional experience a performance lets the audience savor. Schechner explains it with fruit. The sweetness in a ripe plum is the underlying emotion; tasting that sweetness is the rasa; preparing and serving it is the acting. Each rasa sits on a lasting emotional state, called a sthayi bhava. The Natyashastra lists eight. Here they are, with short glosses based on Schechner's: - **Sringara:** desire and love. - **Hasya:** humor and laughter. - **Karuna:** pity and grief. - **Raudra:** anger and rage. - **Vira:** energy and vigor. - **Bhayanaka:** fear, and also shame. - **Bibhatsa:** disgust, the urge to spit something out. - **Adbhuta:** surprise and wonder. The ninth, **shanta**, means peace or tranquility, and it wasn't in the original list. Later writers added it, and according to the [overview of rasa theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasa_(aesthetics)) on Wikipedia, it took centuries of argument, roughly the sixth to the tenth, before "navarasa," the nine rasas, became standard. Schechner credits the philosopher Abhinavagupta, writing around 1000 CE, with adding it. That history explains the grid. Eight boxes hold the eight original rasas. Shanta goes in the empty center, and it's treated differently from the rest. Spellings vary (bibhatsa, bibhasta); nobody will mind which you use. ## How a rasaboxes session runs, step by step Schechner is clear that the exercise is open-ended and can't be done in one session; it carries over from day to day. Teachers adapt it, but the sequence he published is a good backbone: 1. Draw or tape a grid of nine equal rectangles on the floor, each about six feet by three. 2. The leader gives a rough definition of each rasa: raudra is anger, rage, roaring; bibhatsa is disgust, spitting out. 3. Write one rasa's name in each box in colored chalk, placing them by chance, and leave the center box empty. 4. Everyone draws or writes their own associations inside the boxes, moving between them only along the lines or around the outside. 5. When everyone is done, walk around the edge and read and describe the grid aloud, with no questions or explanations. Then pause in silence. 6. Step into a box and take a pose for that rasa. On the lines or outside, you're neutral; inside a box, you must express it. 7. Add a sound to the pose, then move from box to box faster, with no time to plan. 8. Two people enter at once, first ignoring each other, then answering each other in rasas and switching boxes as they go. 9. Bring in a text, a monologue or a short scene. The words stay fixed while the rasas change. Minnick's sidebar adds the progression inside those steps. First you find a "statue," a fixed pose for each rasa. Then breath, then sound, then movement and sound together. The aim is to move between boxes with no "daylight," no transition at all, so that you can go from rage to love to disgust in a single step. And the center? Schechner writes that a person may enter the shanta box only when they're "clear," and that each person decides what that means. In his years leading the exercise, he says, it was occupied "very rarely, one or two times." Don't worry if you never go in. ## Expect clichés first, and keep going Your first poses will be obvious. Schechner names them himself: "Big laughs for hasya, clenched fists for raudra, weeping for karuna." That's fine. The cliché is how you get in. Keep returning to the box until something less expected arrives. With practice, he writes, the stock gestures are joined by more personal ones. For example, you might find fear living in your toes, or love coming out as a laugh. Three habits help. Commit fully, even when it feels silly; a half-committed raudra teaches you nothing. Breathe the rasa, not just pose it, because the breath is what carries into your voice. And when you step out of a box, really drop it. The clean switch between neutral and full is the muscle you're building. Minnick notes that many movement vocabularies combine well with the boxes. She describes asking for "Light, Quick rage," for example, using Laban's effort qualities. Our guide to [Laban efforts for actors](https://www.offbook.com/blog/laban-efforts-for-actors) explains those terms if you want to try that layer. ## Use one rasa to wake up a flat scene This is where rasaboxes earns a place in your own rehearsal. Minnick writes that rasaboxes answers the "how" questions of acting, while objectives and through-lines answer the "what." So keep your objective. Change the flavor you pursue it in. Schechner's later steps give you the method. Play a scene with one underlying rasa, then let bits of it flash into others. Minnick adds two discoveries that are worth testing on any scene: a scene played with laughter on top may have rage underneath, and the least "logical" emotion is often the one that makes it interesting. Try it on the start of the dawn scene in Act III of *Romeo and Juliet* (text from [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1513)). The lovers have spent the night together. Romeo is banished: he must be gone by daybreak, and if he's found in Verona, he dies. > **JULIET.** Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. > It was the nightingale, and not the lark, > That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear; > Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree. > Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. > > **ROMEO.** It was the lark, the herald of the morn, > No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks > Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. > Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day > Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. > I must be gone and live, or stay and die. It's easy to play it in sringara with a wash of karuna: tender, sad, and flat, because both actors play the same soft mood. Run it that way once as a baseline. Now give Juliet hasya. She's teasing him about the bird, almost laughing, because if she treats it as a joke it can't be true. Give Romeo bhayanaka under the poetry: the streaks of light are a death sentence, and he can see them. Run it again. The words haven't changed, but now the two of them want different things from the same moment, and that gap is what was missing. Then try a switch mid-speech. Romeo starts in adbhuta at the sunrise, it's beautiful, and lands in raudra on "I must be gone and live, or stay and die." You don't have to keep any of it. The point is to find out what the text will hold. You can read the whole scene in our [play library](https://www.offbook.com/plays/romeo-and-juliet), and the same move works on anything in our [monologue collection](https://www.offbook.com/monologues). ### A rasa as a character's baseline Minnick also suggests using one rasa as a character's resting state. Her example is Blanche DuBois: a Blanche built on karuna has a different breath, voice, and body from a Blanche built on raudra or bhayanaka. Pick a baseline for your character, then notice the moments the script pushes them out of it. Those are often the beats worth marking. ## Practice rasaboxes on your own You don't need a studio or a group to get value from it. You need a clear patch of floor, some tape, and a text you know. Tape a small grid or pick nine spots in a room, and write the rasa names on paper. Do pose, breath, and sound for each, then the quick switches. Ten or fifteen minutes makes a good warm-up. For the text stage you need your lines solid, because you can't play with the color of words you're still searching for. Offbook helps here: realistic voices read every other part, and it listens through your microphone and plays the next cue when you finish your line. Hide your own lines so you're testing recall, not reading. Once the words come easily, run the scene several times with a different rasa each pass. Because Offbook waits for your line before it cues the next one, you can take a long beat in bhayanaka or rush through a line in raudra and the scene still follows you. If you're not sure which rasa a moment holds, Offbook's Genie can answer questions about the scene's context and your character's motivation, which gives you a starting point to push against. Our free [run lines online](https://www.offbook.com/tools/run-lines-online) tool reads the other part in a classic scene and waits for you, so you can try a rasa pass tonight. For the next step after a rasa pass, our guide to [playing subtext](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-play-subtext) covers how to keep a hidden emotion under a line without announcing it. ## Take it further with the people who teach it Rasaboxes has grown well past the original essay. In 2023 Routledge published [*Inside The Performance Workshop*](https://www.routledge.com/Inside-The-Performance-Workshop-A-Sourcebook-for-Rasaboxes-and-Other-Exercises/Bowditch-Cole-Minnick/p/book/9781138680029), edited by Rachel Bowditch, Paula Murray Cole, and Michele Minnick, which the publisher calls the first full-length volume on these exercises. It includes chapters on rasaboxes in school drama, telenovela coaching, and directing productions such as *Machinal*. Cole has taught it to acting and musical theater students at Ithaca College, and studios run weekend intensives. One studio's [rasaboxes workshop page](https://www.actorsmovementstudio.com/rasaboxes/) quotes Cole saying the work "integrates rather than separates acting, voice, and movement." ## Questions actors ask ### Do I have to feel the emotion for rasaboxes to work? No. The exercise trains the expression of an emotion, its breath, shape, and sound, and leaves the inner feeling open. Some people feel it strongly; others don't. Both are doing the exercise correctly, as long as the expression is fully committed. ### Why is the center box empty? The center belongs to shanta, peace, which was added to rasa theory after the original eight. In the exercise you may enter it only when you feel completely "clear," and you decide what that means. Schechner says it has been entered very rarely. ### Is rasaboxes the same as Viewpoints or Laban? No, though they mix well. [Viewpoints](https://www.offbook.com/blog/viewpoints-for-actors) trains time, space, and ensemble awareness; Laban describes the qualities of movement. Rasaboxes is specifically about emotional range and switching between emotions quickly. Minnick has layered Laban's effort qualities onto the boxes. ### Can I use rasaboxes for an audition piece? Yes, as rehearsal. Run the monologue through several rasas to find options you hadn't considered, then choose the strongest and rehearse that one. Don't plan to switch boxes live in the room unless the piece really calls for it; a clear, committed version reads better than a sampler.