In the 1930s, Sanford Meisner was an actor in the Group Theatre, the
most
important repertory theatre in modern American History, which spawned
the major
American acting teachers, and several of the most important playwrights
and
directors of the 20th century. Meisner and his fellow actor Stella
Adler fell out
with their director Lee Strasberg over his use of Emotional Recall, a
technique in
which the actor used personal emotion from his own past memories to feed
the
acting process. Meisner and Adler chose to use the imagination to
stimulate
emotion and involvement in a play's imaginary circumstances. Both
Strasberg's and
Meisner and Adler's techniques came out of the work of Konstantin
Stanislavski in
Russia, but they differed on which parts of Establish's work was most
important
to the actor's work and training. The Group Theatre broke up partially
because of
the conflict over these techniques. Meisner, Adler and Strasberg all
went on to
become acting teachers who had a profound influence on American acting
and
culture, as well as a strong influence on European acting.
At the
Neighborhood
Playhouse in New York, Meisner created a full-blown acting technique
which would
train an actor to create all the layers of a complete performance over a
two year
period. It was, and still is, one of the most systematic and complete
acting
techniques in the Western world. Meisner's work was based on the
principle that
acting found its most profound expression in specific behavior that came
out of
the actor's real human response to circumstances and other people.
Because of
this, his entire training method relied heavily on accessing the actor's
impulses,
through which real responses and real behavior were accessed in the
moment. This
technique was not only applied to improvisation with another person, but
also to
the actor's way of finding things to do in rehearsal, interpreting a
script, and
creating the specific physical characteristics of each character the
actor played.
The basic exercise that Meisner invented to train the actor's
responses is
called the Repetition Exercise. 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.
As the
exercise continues over a period of months, more detailed imaginary
circumstances
are added to the exercise, and it gradually becomes a kind of improvised
scene.
When this is fully developed, the actors are ready to start working with
actual
scripts. The course gradually makes its way through more complex script
material
and work on creating characters before it concludes with a final
performance which
incorporates all the student's training.
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