Apartment Finder: Meisner Acting

Friday 23 November 2012

Meisner Acting

Early training is heavily based on actions, in line with Meisner's emphasis on "doing." The questions "what are you playing?" and "what are you doing?" are asked frequently, in order to remind actors to commit themselves to playing what Stanislavski called a "task" or "objective," rather than focusing on the words of a play's dialogue. Silence, dialogue, and activity all require the actor to find a purpose for performing the action involved. By combining the two main tasks of focusing attention on a partner and committing to an action, the technique aims to force an actor into "the moment" (a common Meisner phrase), while simultaneously propelling the actor forward with concentrated purpose. The more an actor can take-in about the partner and the surroundings while performing in character, the more Meisner believed they can "leave themselves alone" and "live truthfully." One of Meisner's famous quotations that illustrates the emphasis on "doing" was "An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words."The most fundamental exercise in Meisner training is the Repetition exercise.