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”.
The training involves a specific series of exercises that build upon each other. The successful comprehension and execution of each exercise is essential to the success of the next and so on. Everyone begins at the beginning and moves through each step laying essential groundwork for the second semester’s focus of demonstrating a clear and full understanding of emotional preparation, relationships, and objectives.
Method of Instruction
The Meisner technique is a progressive system of structured improvisations for developing concentration and imagination, stimulating instincts and impulses, and achieving “the reality of doing” in performance.
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.
The Meisner technique is an acting technique developed by the American theatre practitioner Sanford Meisner.[1]
As opposed to "the method," which develops acting from an internal source, through emotional recall, sense memory, etc, the "Meisner technique" creates the actor externally. The focus is for the actor to "get out of his head," such that he or she is behaving instinctively. To this end, some exercises for the Meisner technique are rooted in repetition so that the words are deemed insignificant compared to the reactions. In the Meisner technique, there is a greater focus on the other actor as opposed to one's internal thoughts or feelings associated to the prescribed character.
Meisner developed this technique after working with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at the Group Theatre and while working as head of the acting program at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse. He continued its refinement for fifty years.
Components
Meisner Training is an interdependent series of training exercises that build on one another. The more complex work supports a command of dramatic text. Students work on a series of progressively complex exercises to develop an ability to first improvise, then to access an emotional life, and finally to bring the spontaneity of improvisation and the richness of personal response to textual work. The techniques developed the behavioral strand of Stanislavski's. The technique is used to develop improvisation skills as well as "interpreting a script, and creating the specific physical characteristics of each character the actor played"[2] and is still taught as an acting technique at the Sanford Meisner Center in Los Angeles.[3]
The basic exercise that Meisner invented to train actors' responses is called the Repetition Exercise. It is described thus:
"In this exercise, two actors sit across from each other and respond to each other through a repeated phrase. The phrase is about each other's behavior, and reflects what is going on between them in the moment, such as "You look unhappy with me right now." The way this phrase is said as it is repeated changes in meaning, tone and intensity to correspond with the behavior that each actor produces towards the other. Through this device, the actor stops thinking of what to say and do, and responds more freely and spontaneously, both physically and vocally. The exercise also eliminates line readings, since the way the actor speaks becomes coordinated with his behavioral response."[2]
List of Meisner-trained actors
Throughout his career, Meisner worked with, and taught, students who became well known, such as Sandra Bullock, David Duchovny, James Franco, Michelle Pfeiffer, Naomi Watts, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Jon Voight, Dylan McDermott, Eileen Fulton,James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Eli Wallach, Jack Lord, Bob Fosse, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Lee Grant, Peter Falk, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Kelly, James Doohan, Jason Boss, Manu Tupou, Tony Randall and Sydney Pollack. Pollack together with Charles E. Conrad served as Meisner's senior assistants. The technique is helpful not just for actors, but also for directors, writers, and teachers. A number of directors also studied with him, among them Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, and writers such as Arthur Miller and David Mamet.
Prominent actors who trained at The Neighborhood Playhouse or elsewhere in the Meisner technique include:[4]
“It takes twenty years to be a master!”That’s how Sanford Meisner felt about everything, and particularly acting. Perhaps that explains why the legendary New York acting teacher, and creator of the Meisner Technique, waited so long to found his first and only theater. When the doors opened to the Sanford Meisner Center in 1995, the theater Great had reached his eighth decade of life. As passionate as ever, Meisner was determined to turn the sixty seat theater into a lively venue in which Meisner graduates would interact with other artists, producing a unique exchange of artistic ideology and succession of outstanding performances.
Born August 31, 1905 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Sanford Meisner graduated from Erasmus Hall in 1923 and attended The Damrosch Institute of Music (now Juilliard), where he studied to become a concert pianist before talking his way into a job in a Theatre Guild production of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. He realized then that acting which really “dug at him” was what he was looking to find.
In 1931, a fervent group of young actors, including Meisner, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman, amongst others, joined together to establish the Group Theatre. It was the first permanent theatre company that brought “method” acting, rooted in methods of Konstantin Stanislavsky, to practice and prominence in America. Meisner appeared in twelve Group productions, including the first, The House of Connelly, and all of Clifford Odets’ plays, including Waiting for Lefty which Meisner co-directed with Odets in 1935.
In 1933 Meisner became disenchanted with pure “method” acting. He wrote “actors are not guinea pigs to be manipulated, dissected, let alone in a purely negative way. Our approach was not organic, that is to say, not healthy.” Meisner has ongoing discussion about technique with Adler, who worked with Stanislavsky in Paris and Clurman, who took deep interest in the American character. Eventually Meisner realized that if American actors were ever going to achieve the goal of “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” an American approach was needed. The Neighborhood Playhouse provided him with a venue to develop that approach on his own. In 1935, he headed the Drama Department at The Playhouse, while continuing to act and direct plays produced by The Group Theatre until its demise in 1940. He also appeared on Broadway in Embezzled (1944) and Crime and Punishment(1948). He directed The Time of Your Life (1955) and acted in The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958).
Meisner left The Playhouse in 1958 to become director of the New Talent Division of Twentieth Century Fox. He moved to Los Angeles, where he was also able to cultivate his career as a film actor.
He returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse as head of the Drama Department from 1964-1990. In 1985, Meisner and James Carville co-founded The Meisner/Carville School of Acting on the Island of Bequia in the West Indies. They later extended the school to North Hollywood, California, with Martin Barter. Meisner, Carville and Barter opened The Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts in March 1995, and later the school and theatre were combined to form the Sanford Meisner Center.
Meisner received commendations from Presidents Clinton, Bush and Reagan. He was honored by California Governor Pete Wilson and was named the “Humanitarian of the Year 1990” by The Washington Charity Awards. His final appearance as an actor was in a guest starring role on a special episode of ER in 1995. Backstage West dedicated an issue to Meisner and his world-renowned “Meisner Technique.”
Arthur Miller once said of Meisner, “He has been the most principled teacher of acting on this country for decades now, and every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don’t lay on complications that aren’t necessary.”
Sanford Meisner passed away on February 2nd, 1997. An all day, public memorial service was held at the Sanford Meisner Center on February 6th, 1997. But he didn’t leave without assurance of the future success of his creation. Long before the Meisner Center’s opening, longtime protégé Martin Barter had been groomed as Sandy’s successor at the Meisner/Carville school. When the time came, Barter was well-equipped and took the reigns as the Meisner Center’s Artistic Director and head teacher. He was one of the fifteen trained teachers of the Meisner Technique personally chosen by Mr. Meisner to carry his technique to the next generations, a position he holds to this day.
Originally located on Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood, California, The Sanford Meisner Center was the only school in Los Angeles created by Sanford Meisner himself. While the theatre was closed in 2013, Martin Barter continues to carry on Sandy’s Technique to a new generation of actors.
External links[edit]
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”.
The training involves a specific series of exercises that build upon each other. The successful comprehension and execution of each exercise is essential to the success of the next and so on. Everyone begins at the beginning and moves through each step laying essential groundwork for the second semester’s focus of demonstrating a clear and full understanding of emotional preparation, relationships, and objectives.
Method of Instruction
The Meisner technique is a progressive system of structured improvisations for developing concentration and imagination, stimulating instincts and impulses, and achieving “the reality of doing” in performance.
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.
The Meisner technique is an acting technique developed by the American theatre practitioner Sanford Meisner.[1]
As opposed to "the method," which develops acting from an internal source, through emotional recall, sense memory, etc, the "Meisner technique" creates the actor externally. The focus is for the actor to "get out of his head," such that he or she is behaving instinctively. To this end, some exercises for the Meisner technique are rooted in repetition so that the words are deemed insignificant compared to the reactions. In the Meisner technique, there is a greater focus on the other actor as opposed to one's internal thoughts or feelings associated to the prescribed character.
Meisner developed this technique after working with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at the Group Theatre and while working as head of the acting program at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse. He continued its refinement for fifty years.
Components
Meisner Training is an interdependent series of training exercises that build on one another. The more complex work supports a command of dramatic text. Students work on a series of progressively complex exercises to develop an ability to first improvise, then to access an emotional life, and finally to bring the spontaneity of improvisation and the richness of personal response to textual work. The techniques developed the behavioral strand of Stanislavski's. The technique is used to develop improvisation skills as well as "interpreting a script, and creating the specific physical characteristics of each character the actor played"[2] and is still taught as an acting technique at the Sanford Meisner Center in Los Angeles.[3]
The basic exercise that Meisner invented to train actors' responses is called the Repetition Exercise. It is described thus:
"In this exercise, two actors sit across from each other and respond to each other through a repeated phrase. The phrase is about each other's behavior, and reflects what is going on between them in the moment, such as "You look unhappy with me right now." The way this phrase is said as it is repeated changes in meaning, tone and intensity to correspond with the behavior that each actor produces towards the other. Through this device, the actor stops thinking of what to say and do, and responds more freely and spontaneously, both physically and vocally. The exercise also eliminates line readings, since the way the actor speaks becomes coordinated with his behavioral response."[2]
List of Meisner-trained actors
Throughout his career, Meisner worked with, and taught, students who became well known, such as Sandra Bullock, David Duchovny, James Franco, Michelle Pfeiffer, Naomi Watts, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Jon Voight, Dylan McDermott, Eileen Fulton,James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Eli Wallach, Jack Lord, Bob Fosse, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Lee Grant, Peter Falk, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Kelly, James Doohan, Jason Boss, Manu Tupou, Tony Randall and Sydney Pollack. Pollack together with Charles E. Conrad served as Meisner's senior assistants. The technique is helpful not just for actors, but also for directors, writers, and teachers. A number of directors also studied with him, among them Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, and writers such as Arthur Miller and David Mamet.
Prominent actors who trained at The Neighborhood Playhouse or elsewhere in the Meisner technique include:[4]
- Aaron Eckhart
- Aaron Lind
- Alec Baldwin
- Alexandra Daddario
- Amanda Setton[5]
- Amy Schumer[6]
- Billy Sharpe
- Christoph Waltz[7]
- Christopher Lloyd
- Christopher Meloni
- Connie Britton
- David Duchovny
- Diane Keaton
- Dylan McDermott
- Geraldine Page
- Grace Kelly
- Gregory Peck
- Hannah New
- Illeana Douglas
- James Caan
- James Franco
- James Gandolfini[8]
- Jason Priestley[9]
- Jeff Bridges
- Jeff Goldblum
- Jennifer Sky
- Jessica Walter
- John Turturro
- Jon Voight
- Karl Urban[10]
- Krysten Ritter[11]
- Louise Lasser
- Ian Thomas Malone
- Leslie Nielsen
- Mark Rydell
- Mary Steenburgen
- Michael K. Williams
- Michelle Pfeiffer
- Naomi Watts
- Nick Ferrucci[12]
- Noah Emmerich
- Paul Sorvino
- Raymond Mamrak
- R.J. Adams
- Renee O'Connor
- Robert Duvall
- Roger Bart
- Sandra Bullock[not in citation given]
- Scott Caan
- Sean Astin
- Sherie Rene Scott
- Stephen Colbert[13]
- Steve McQueen
- Sydney Pollack
- Tatiana Maslany[14]
- Tina Fey
- Tom Cruise
- Ty Burrell
- Wil Wheaton
“It takes twenty years to be a master!”That’s how Sanford Meisner felt about everything, and particularly acting. Perhaps that explains why the legendary New York acting teacher, and creator of the Meisner Technique, waited so long to found his first and only theater. When the doors opened to the Sanford Meisner Center in 1995, the theater Great had reached his eighth decade of life. As passionate as ever, Meisner was determined to turn the sixty seat theater into a lively venue in which Meisner graduates would interact with other artists, producing a unique exchange of artistic ideology and succession of outstanding performances.
Born August 31, 1905 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Sanford Meisner graduated from Erasmus Hall in 1923 and attended The Damrosch Institute of Music (now Juilliard), where he studied to become a concert pianist before talking his way into a job in a Theatre Guild production of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. He realized then that acting which really “dug at him” was what he was looking to find.
In 1931, a fervent group of young actors, including Meisner, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman, amongst others, joined together to establish the Group Theatre. It was the first permanent theatre company that brought “method” acting, rooted in methods of Konstantin Stanislavsky, to practice and prominence in America. Meisner appeared in twelve Group productions, including the first, The House of Connelly, and all of Clifford Odets’ plays, including Waiting for Lefty which Meisner co-directed with Odets in 1935.
In 1933 Meisner became disenchanted with pure “method” acting. He wrote “actors are not guinea pigs to be manipulated, dissected, let alone in a purely negative way. Our approach was not organic, that is to say, not healthy.” Meisner has ongoing discussion about technique with Adler, who worked with Stanislavsky in Paris and Clurman, who took deep interest in the American character. Eventually Meisner realized that if American actors were ever going to achieve the goal of “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” an American approach was needed. The Neighborhood Playhouse provided him with a venue to develop that approach on his own. In 1935, he headed the Drama Department at The Playhouse, while continuing to act and direct plays produced by The Group Theatre until its demise in 1940. He also appeared on Broadway in Embezzled (1944) and Crime and Punishment(1948). He directed The Time of Your Life (1955) and acted in The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958).
Meisner left The Playhouse in 1958 to become director of the New Talent Division of Twentieth Century Fox. He moved to Los Angeles, where he was also able to cultivate his career as a film actor.
He returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse as head of the Drama Department from 1964-1990. In 1985, Meisner and James Carville co-founded The Meisner/Carville School of Acting on the Island of Bequia in the West Indies. They later extended the school to North Hollywood, California, with Martin Barter. Meisner, Carville and Barter opened The Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts in March 1995, and later the school and theatre were combined to form the Sanford Meisner Center.
Meisner received commendations from Presidents Clinton, Bush and Reagan. He was honored by California Governor Pete Wilson and was named the “Humanitarian of the Year 1990” by The Washington Charity Awards. His final appearance as an actor was in a guest starring role on a special episode of ER in 1995. Backstage West dedicated an issue to Meisner and his world-renowned “Meisner Technique.”
Arthur Miller once said of Meisner, “He has been the most principled teacher of acting on this country for decades now, and every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don’t lay on complications that aren’t necessary.”
Sanford Meisner passed away on February 2nd, 1997. An all day, public memorial service was held at the Sanford Meisner Center on February 6th, 1997. But he didn’t leave without assurance of the future success of his creation. Long before the Meisner Center’s opening, longtime protégé Martin Barter had been groomed as Sandy’s successor at the Meisner/Carville school. When the time came, Barter was well-equipped and took the reigns as the Meisner Center’s Artistic Director and head teacher. He was one of the fifteen trained teachers of the Meisner Technique personally chosen by Mr. Meisner to carry his technique to the next generations, a position he holds to this day.
Originally located on Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood, California, The Sanford Meisner Center was the only school in Los Angeles created by Sanford Meisner himself. While the theatre was closed in 2013, Martin Barter continues to carry on Sandy’s Technique to a new generation of actors.
External links[edit]
- Sanford Meisner at the Internet Movie Database
- The Acting Studio-New York; Meisner protege
- The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre
- The Sanford Meisner Center
- Meisner Acting - The Maggie Flanigan Studio
- Meisner Technique at the Michelle Danner Studio
- The New York Studio for Stage & Screen in Asheville; Meisner training in the Southeast
- Hirsch (2000, 498).
- ^ Jump up to:a b "About the Meisner Acting Technique". Complete Actors Training. Retrieved April 12, 2015.
- "History… Tradition… Legacy…" The Sanford Meisner Center. Retrieved April 12, 2015.
- [1]
- "Between Takes at CBS - Amanda Setton". CBS. Retrieved 2013-10-29.
- "Amy Schumer Biography". TV Guide. Retrieved 2014-04-15.
- "Christoph Waltz - Dill Pickle". YouTube. Retrieved 2013-08-19.
- Itzkoff, Dave (19 June 2013). "James Gandolfini Is Dead at 51; a Complex Mob Boss in ‘Sopranos’". The New York Times. p. 2. Retrieved 19 June 2013.
- http://corogues.com/the-curriculum/meisner-training. Missing or empty |title= (help)
- http://johnsonlaird.com/assets/documents/1569/1569_actor_biography.pdf. Missing or empty |title= (help)
- http://m.fastcocreate.com/1681796/krysten-ritter-on-how-to-be-a-likeable-bitch. Missing or empty |title= (help)
- http://www.NickFerrucci.com
- "Stephen Colbert shmoozes about family deaths". YouTube. Retrieved 2013-08-19.
- "Conversations with Tatiana Maslany of ORPHAN BLACK". YouTube. Retrieved 2014-05-11.
- "A post about acting, and the imporance of keeping it simple". 2013-11-08.
- http://www.themeisnercenter.com/history.html