Thursday, 7th April
Character Exercise One: Scale of Potential
During this exercise, we walked around the space in neutral, until our teacher gave us instructions. For example, 'Anger' would be the set emotion and there would be a set scale, e.g 10 being extremely angry and we'd have to play extremely angry or In Love would be the set emotion and given the number 5 we'd have to play being in love at the scale of 5. This exercise is useful because it plays with what happens if..... and helps us experience our characters more and experiment more with them.
Character Exercise Two: A Day in the Life
In this exercise, we had to play our character's daily activities, from waking up, what they do during the day, sleeping, eating breakfast etc. This is called Imaginary Acting however can be problematic as you're just assuming and changing a character from how the playwright made that character. This acting technique shows how lots of different actors use differing ways of acting, for example this exercise compared to the first one, to get to know your character. This got me thinking about the different acting techniques there are:
Meisner: Life & Acting Technique
Sanford Meisner (August 31st 1905-February 2nd, 1997) was an American actor/teacher. He developed a new approach to acting known as The Meisner Technique.
Meisner was born in Brooklyn as the oldest child of four, to Hermann Meisner and Bertha Knoepfler, both Jewish immigrants who came to the US from Hungary. When Sanford's brother Jacob died of tuberculosis after being fed unpasteurised milk, Meisner said in an interview years later that it was "the dominant emotional influence in my life from which I have never, after all these years, escaped." Meisner became very isolated from his parents after they blamed him for his brother's death. (The trip on which Jacob died was one intended to help Sanford's health)
Meisner became very interested in the piano and went to the Juilliard School where he studied to become a concert pianist. However, soon The Great Depression hit and he was taken out of school to help in the family business. Meisner later recalled that the only way he got through the lull of business work was to recall in his head all the classical musical pieces he'd studied in school. This gave him a great sense of sound and when he later became an acting teacher, he often closed his eyes and listened to student's work to 'listen more closely and pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting'.
By 1935, Sansford Meisner had joined the faculty of 'The Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theatre', continuing as the director of the Acting department. This school first opened in 1928 and was exclusive to only nine students who were taught by acting experts. Over his time at the school, he developed and refined the Meisner Technique: "to live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances". This was influenced by Meisner's dis illusion with method acting (1933) : "Actors are not guinea pigs to be manipulated, dissected". His classroom was peppered wth signs advising students to 'act before you think' and remember that 'an ounce of behaviour is worth a pound of words'. He continued to teach until his 80s despite his cataracts being removed (meaning he needed huge glasses). Also, after a largyngectomy, he also needed a microphone headset during teaching to amplify his voice.
Meisner's teaching techniques were usually to guide students in pairs through improvisational exercise, in order to be ''introducing you to a way of making yourself one with the text and getting you to work off of the other fellow.''
Acting is based on instinct and intuition, he told the class, and ''the emotional rhythm that goes on inside the actor is the least controllable part of any performance, but it must be present in the right proportion if the scene is to work.''
Meisner died on February 2nd, 1977 at Sherman Oaks, LA, US.
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The Meisner Technique:
Sanford Meisner said that his approach to training “is based on bringing the actor back to his emotional impulses and to acting that is firmly rooted in the instinctive. It is based on the fact that all good acting comes from the heart, as it were, and that there’s no mentality to it.”
Learn to live in the moment as an actor, and let go of any idea of result. Learn what it means to really “do” and to respond truthfully to a given moment based on what you get from your partner. Through improvisation, emotional truth and personal response learn to resonate authenticity within a given circumstance. Only in this way will you begin to understand the definition of real acting, which is “to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances”.
In Meisner’s view, great acting depends on the actor’s impulsive response to what’s happening around him. His key exercise, spontaneous repetition, is designed for the actor to develop that dormant capacity. Meisner’s approach trains the actor to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” to discover or create personally meaningful points of view with respect to the (written or improvised) word, and to express spontaneous human reactions and authentic emotion with the utmost sense of truth.
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