And certainly, text analysis undertaken wrongly, as, for example, an exercise in literary criticism, will land an actor in her head.
The phobia about “text analysis” bespeaks the actor’s perennial fear of being “in her head”. As we address ourselves to these questions in scene work, being able to frame things like who you are in a scene, what you expect, and what happened in the past in a compelling way are critical in rising to the challenge presented by any scene. Or, a set of questions which point you toward the significant and urgent elements of the character’s situation, elements that will unquestionably impact how you play the scene, such as: what do I most need? What do I expect to happen next, best-case and worst-case? What are my strengths? What are my vulnerabilities? What are the greatest losses or failures I have suffered? Who is the person I am interacting with to me? etc. “Organizing principles” has an abstract sound to it, but what she meant by that term was this: a set of priorities, when approaching a scene or a role. What she said is that Meisner is great for learning to “take it off of the other person”, but not so great for learning organizing principles of working on a scene or a role.
Evan chaired the acting program at Yale for five years, and she still teaches the last year and a half of the acting curriculum there. I once spoke to one of my mentors at Yale, Evan Yionooulis, about Meisner. Techniques are nothing more than ways of approaching things, and they are nothing to be afraid of.īut beyond that, this teacher had imprinted upon him a prejudice about text analysis that is more disturbing. This person’s Meisner teacher had instilled in him a suspicion, a fear, a paranoia even, of “technique” and “text analysis.” The first thing to say about this is Meisner is itself a technique. Moment-to-moment and less about script analysis. Interaction between the actors, and staying truthful Comingįrom a Meisner background, I want the class to be more about the
UPDATE: See also this recent post, which extends the discussion presented here.Ī while back I received an inquiry about my classes which contained the following:Ī scene study class with a minimal focus on technique.
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