What will I work on in the first year Meisner Acting training?

The first year of the Meisner training is a deeply experiential journey. You will encounter a wide variety of circumstances and engage in meaningful interactions, all within the imaginative world of your improvisation exercise or scene work. While you are deeply engaged in your circumstances, you’ll hone crucial acting skills while overcoming the barriers that prevent you from being truly authentic.

Listening on a Deep Level

As arbitrary as it may seem, listening is the cornerstone of acting. In this training, listening is treated as a critical skill. You will learn to perceive what lies beyond the spoken words and truly “listen” to someone’s behavior, understanding the subtext and experiencing its implications.

Become a Behavior Expert

What really happens during a conversation is not simply about the words exchanged. As a matter of fact, more than 80% of our communication is nonverbal. The Meisner training cultivates a quality of genuine curiosity in the other person’s circumstances and behaviors. You will learn to receive the behavior beyond the words while allowing it to affect you. This process, as a result, enables you to create truthful, spontaneous, and colorful behavior. After all, an actor’s fundamental currency is behavior.

Rely on Your Impulses

Sanford Meisner emphasized that “an actor should do nothing unless the other person makes them do something.” Through attentive listening, you open up to your scene partner, allowing impulses to arise naturally. This leads to authentic and unanticipated responses, which is the hallmark of any great performance. Meisner’s signature repetition exercise helps you grow into trusting in your impulses, ensuring every performance is authentic and surprising.

Be in the Moment

By focusing solely on listening, you anchor yourself in the moment. This eliminates hanging onto about what happened before or anticipate of what might come next, enabling you to work from “unanticipated moment to unanticipated moment”.

Be Open and Vulnerable

In order to truly listen to both your partner and what happens within yourself you must be open and vulnerable. Stanislavski asserted vulnerability is an actor’s most crucial tool. Meisner training aids you in shedding the defensive barriers and conditioning instilled by upbringing and societal expectations, enhancing your openness and receptivity continuously.

Foster your Sense of Truth

Being truthful is essential for actors, but striving to impress jeopardizes the truth. Attempting to captivate an audience might result in reproducing preconceived ideas rather than letting the scene unfold organically, or one might push to be emotional out of the fear of being boring.

The Meisner training sharpens your ability to distinguish the false from the truthful, ridding you from any imposed behavior and anticipation.

Expand Your Imagination

Since plays aren’t about your personal experiences, connecting with unfamiliar circumstances is vital. The Meisner training vigorously engages, develops, and broadens your imagination, taking you to places which were once beyond imagination.

Nurture Emotional Fluidity

Acting is inherently emotional, yet paradoxically, actors should never aim for emotions. The training engages your emotional life, but you are trained to trust that emotions arise naturally from the doing rather than aiming for a specific sentiment.

Understanding how to access emotions and being able to have fluid emotions are the hallmarks of a well-trained Meisner actor. This is because you will have learned emotions will ebb and flow from within moment to moment.

Working from empathy, tuning in, being flexible, stamina, public solitude… the list of tools and techniques you learn in the first year Meisner training continues. The training instills these fundamentals so deeply that they become second nature. Starting with simple exercises, the training evolves into a sophisticated improvisational practice and scene work that sharpens your ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

This comprehensive approach cannot be mastered in just a few weeks or even months; but if you are serious about your acting and are fully dedicated to it, this training will truly transform you as an actor from the inside out.

Gia (first year student)

The fascinating thing about Meisner training is that it’s like a magic formula for all actors, called ‘All in one and one for all’. If you’re willing, it will help you find the areas you need to work on, and the most fulfilling part is that teachers, assistants, and partners will all accompany you on your journey of growth! Here, we have partners from all over the world. Our starting and ending points might be different, but we will all grow and thrive together, seeking advice and living our own unique lives!