“One can use standard principles and textbooks in educating people for law, medicine, architecture, chemistry or almost any other profession, but not for the theater.” – Sanford Meisner
The First Year of Meisner Technique Training
The Meisner technique is listening based so you will learn the very vital skill of going moment to unanticipated moment. We begin with the Repetition Exercise, designed to cultivate genuine listening and spontaneous, instinctual responses, breaking actors free from self-consciousness and mechanical habits.
Consider how present you must be if you are never anticipating and working from authentic impulses. Repetition is often misused but the genesis of the game was to reach a habit of “unthoughtful” listening based connection. This may be the only place you are encouraged to act before you think.
“What you do on stage doesn’t depend on you, it depends on the other fella.” –Sanford Meisner
This year is about building a solid foundation through disciplined practice and patient discovery. As the weeks progress, the work deepens into emotional availability, and truthful connection, and building your sense of truth by way of “the reality of doing.” Mr. Meisner’s idea that to live truthfully on stage, you must do everything with truth and reality upon it. So, we begin your investigation of doing things with reality. By the end of the first year, students have developed the tools to approach their work with confidence in their ability to be present, fully available, and authentically connected moment to unanticipated moment—just as Mr. Meisner intended.
Second Year Training
Building on your new habit of listening and answering instinctually, living truthfully, and doing things with reality we add character building elements that fill out the use of the actors imagination. Immediate contact with the other actor being established, one can add the specific layers that lead to a full understanding of the story, and character, the imaginary circumstances, the writer has created for you.