Minor Project: Sandford Meisner

Sandford Meisner is one of people like Strasberg  who took what Stanislavski was doing and reshaped it into his own technique this came about as a falling out with Lee Strasberg about how acting should be taught and particularly around its focus, Strasberg focused upon the emotion and persona that should be presented from an individual in a scene, whereas Meisner wanted to focus upon the other person in the scene and make the performance authentic throughs these means.
Meisner himself worked with and trained with the likes of Sydney Pollack, Robert Duvall, Tom Cruise and Diane Keaton as well as other oscar winners such as Jeff Bridges, Anthony Hopkins and Jack Nicholson. This then shows that there is certainly a degree of credibility to what Meisner was teaching.

Meisner’s technique revolved around the identification of  two issues within actors, firstly that they don’t listen and second being that they are self-conscious. As I previously mentioned Meisner looked to focus the actors upon each other rather than on themselves and their own performance. This dealt with the first issue of not listening because by having them focus on someone else they are locked onto another person so to speak so they will be listening. It also deals with the self conscious issue because again they are no longer thinking of themselves they are now thinking of what the other person is doing and not worrying about their own performance in front of the camera. The beauty of this style is also in the fact that the emotion comes from the scene based upon  relationships that are played out between characters. Once the actor has a good understanding of the mentality and personality of the character then they can form relationships on top of this. When said relationships have been formed it is at this point that the acting really shines and begins to feel authentic and real because it is a real outpouring of a genuine relationship on show.

This acting style is also extremely useful from a directorial stand point because it is capable of completely absorbing issues into the performance without a hitch. Because of the complete focus on the external rather than the internal and the self then if something external goes wrong it can be quite easily just absorbed and worked around because of the genuine encounter between two people rather than a fabricated performance. This, like other method performance, also makes improvisation very easy for the actors, if an actor has really engaged with the ideas of this technique it means that they will have no issue in adapting to whatever the other person has said regardless of what it is, this again comes back to the authenticity and the fact that if a relationship is genuine they will react regardless just as a real person would react to something a friend (for example) says to them. This comes back to an idea I have thought often, which is that if you really want to see if someone is in character then you need to ask them to improvise something, in doing this if the improvised bit is seamless from the rest of the performance then they are completely engaged with the character. I would like to briefly explain the most famous technique from Meisner was his repetition technique, this technique was a simple exercise where two actors would stand opposite each other, one states to the other an item of the others clothing, the other actor (not the one who said the clothing article) then says how the actor in front of them seems emotionally, i.e. "I think you seem happy" the actor then repeats the item of clothing over and over and the actor says how they feel every time. The idea of said technique is to let the actor move and act freely without thinking about what they are saying or doing. This is the first and probably most important exercise in Meisner's arsenal.