Monday, 16 February 2015

How did I apply acting technique?

Jack was very fond of using Mike Alfreds in his directing technique and so we regularly did improvisation exercises from him, that helped to build the characters and establish their relationships.

At one point me and Hayden did 2 hours of just Meisner to try and build that tension that immediately exists between the two characters as soon as the arrive on stage, that was very difficult to do but gave way to the style in which I did "I'll damn well make you!" followed by the pacing and eventually the fight. This really helped to cement our relationship in our minds and to create that kind of anger and disappointment I needed to feel against him, which results in the fight. Me and Ffion also did about a half-hours Meisner in order to build the peculiar relationship they have, it worked because on stage it felt like we cared deeply for each other, but that there was something wrong just under the surface, it gave a third-dimension to their relationship.

I also worked a lot using Declan Donnellan, as I mentioned in my other blog, one of things i was commended for was moving with intention. I felt in that play, that I would either be still or going somewhere, i think this was effective and made a bold impression of the audience. If one were to watch carefully to my performance, they would see that in which ever direction I walked, I had always, with my eyes, first identified a target and after doing this a few times, it became natural allowing to do it without thinking, I think it became one of the fathers habits that made him have such a bold presence.

Workshop Plan

1. Engage the actor and their emotional center by doing some core exercises and stretches. The core is important, as it is where emotion builds from and we need them to be emotional and instinctive in this work.
2. The actors will split into pairs and remain with these pairs throughout, so as to build a relationship.
3. The actors will start by choosing something to describe about them physically (physical calls) and this will be repeated back to them. Me and Poppy demonstrate, i.e. You have brown eyes, I have brown eyes, you have brown eyes, I have brown eyes, you have brown eyes, I have brown eyes, you have brown eyes, I have brown eyes, You have blue eyes, I have blue eyes etc.
4. Maintain eye contact with partner through full 20 mins including explanation and keep a neutral body stance
5. Actors will do the same thing with physical action calls i.e. you laughed etc. Demonstrate.
6. Actors will see if they are able to build to emotional calls.
7. If there is one particularly good pair at the end we will ask others to watch them.

Chekov Article

This article helps explain his technique, the people he worked with and the contemporaries he influenced.

Source: http://www.michaelchekhovactingstudio.com/technique.htm

All approaches to acting in America and Europe stem from the pioneering work of Constantine Stanislavsky. His unending quest for truth on the stage resulted in a revolution in the way an actor prepared and presented a role. Unfortunately, in America, his system arrived in its nascent form and was not allowed to develop, leaving us with naturalism as the actor's highest artistic achievement. This work has found its way back to Europe as a result of the American cinema and now prevails as the dominant approach to acting. Stanislavsky's research continued, however, and took him beyond naturalism. Among his followers, were three of the most important theater artists of the 20th century:

Michael Chekhov: An outstanding Russian actor, director and teacher of acting lived and worked in Russia, in different European countries, and in the USA. Nephew of the famous writer and dramatist Anton Chekhov, an ideal pupil of Constantine Stanislavsky and considered by Stanislavsky to be his most brilliant actor. Marked by the Soviets for arrest, he escaped to the West bringing us his invaluable methods and techniques;

Eugene Vakhtangov: Actor, teacher who died as a young and very promising director, and whose name is associated with an existing School and a Theater in Moscow;

Vsevolod Meyerhold: Actor, teacher who became the premier Socialist Director of a new form of theater in Soviet Russia until his extermination by Stalin.

These artists helped the naturalistic theater flourish until they understood, along with Stanislavsky, that actors were artists; they needed to move away from the mere "photographic" representation of life by seeking truth in more inspiring ways. They believed strongly that life on the stage needed to be bold, expressive, and theatrical. Consequently they developed imaginative methods using psycho-physical techniques, exercises that use the undeniable connection between the body and psychology, movements and principles that generate various sensations and emotions. They found these techniques liberated and excited the actor to truthful expressions.

In an article in the NY Times, "Dispensing With Dogma in the Education of Actors" (8/2/98), it states, "...naturalism has sometimes seemed unequal to the task of portraying characters on the stage. And there is renewed interest now in discovering ways to train actors that go beyond the Method."

In the same article, Jon Jory (Actor's Theater of Louisville) is quoted as saying "Today, American conservatories and studios alike are trying to create new theatrical languages ......this is the most exciting period in acting in 35 years."

And Melissa Smith, director of the actor training program at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco said, "People who are going to work in film, television and theater are looking for a range of ideas about training."

The acting community is hungry for alternatives to the Method. The Michael Chekhov Technique, rooted in Stanislavsky, influenced by Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, is one of the most viable alternatives.

Following Michael Chekhov's method an actor gains freedom of all limitations of the subjective personality and has endless opportunities for the creative authorship in any theater system, director's conception, or performance structure.

Chekhov's technique is a completely imaginative approach to experiencing the truth of the moment. According to Chekhov, the work of the actor is to create an inner event which is an actual experience occurring in real time within the actor. This inner event as it is being experienced by the actor is witnessed by the audience as an outward expression related to the contextual moment of the play. This event and the ability to create it belong to what Michael Chekhov calls the Creative Individuality of the actor, and is not directly tied to his personality. This Creative Individuality allows the artist actor to use parts of himself that are not just the smaller meaner more banal elements that make up his daily life, but rather parts of his unconscious, where dwell more universal and archetypal images. In Chekhov's own words:

"All you experience in the course of your life, all you observe and think, all that makes you happy or unhappy, all your regrets or satisfactions, all your love or hate, all you long for or avoid, all your achievements and failures, all you brought with you into this life at birth -your temperament, abilities, inclinations etc., all are part of the region of your so called subconscious depths. There being forgotten by you, or never known to you they undergo the process of being purified of all egotism. They become feelings per se. Thus purged and transformed, they become part of the material from which your Individuality creates the psychology, the illusory "soul" of the character."

(To The Actor by Michael Chekhov)

In this way the ego of the character is not subjected to the ego of the actor, because the Individuality seeks a creative union with the character, and will not allow the smaller personality to invade the character thereby distorting this character into one more representation of the actor's personality. The actor's work continually becomes an artistic creation.

Chekhov Notes

. Michael Chekhov is the nephew of playwright Anton Checkov.
. He is an actor, director and practitioner.
. Establish the differences between an actor and their character and this will help to work out the main physical and psychological differences between the actor and their character.
. The next exercise we did was to lie down and ask our characters questions i.e. what are you wearing
. Chekhov believed that you should re-imagine things and be constantly reviewing your character choices, so we explored this by re-imagining our entire character.
. Chekhov also believes that every actor is part of a whole and that they need to understand that part of a whole, and so we were told to analyse the job of our character in the play.
. Another thing that he believed in was psychological gestures, that each line in the play should start by having a gesture, before it becomes more natural. We were asked to take a section from our CG audition speech and perform it using psychological gestures, whilst repeating it over and over to cement the movement in our mind.

Donnellan Video

Below is a very interesting video in which Donnellan explains his philosophies on acting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdWDXyC-MV8

Donnellan Notes

. In 1981 he started Cheek by Jowl and has directed 25 plays for them.

. Blocks are big thing he worked with, these are identified as states of mind i.e. I don’t know what I’m doing or I don't know who I am.

. He says the reason for blocks being a issue is that they are a symptom of pride, they affirm (know) something about ourselves (I) instead of allowing us to focus on what we should be focusing on, that which is outside ourselves.

. The Target is what he calls this, one thing we did to explore this was by getting into partners and scrutinising one another’s faces whilst acting a scene, to see what we could discover. We all noticed they looked at something outside themselves.

. Declan Donnellan presented six rules for the target:

1. There is always a target.

2. An actor can’t know what they are doing without knowing who they are doing it too.

3. It can be real or imaginary

4. It can be tangible or abstract

5. It can be yourself

6. An actor can do nothing without a target

. Double takes are another part of his work, this is when you look twice at your target to emphasise its existence.

. To explore this, we got in pairs a did a short scene with a double take.

Alfreds Article

This is a very good article written on by the independent and helped explain not only his technique, but also how his technique has impacted on some of my favourite actors lives "(i.e. Sir Ian Mckellen)

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/alfreds-way-more-method-less-madness-1349648.html

For Alfreds, the job is about skill. Or, rather, skills. "A lot of work is done by people on instinct; they've got a hunch and a little flair. That's all right up to a point, but it doesn't carry through. The trouble is people think, 'I'll direct,' and it seems possible because the role is not defined. It's not like saying, 'I'll be a choreographer,' because that would mean you'd have to learn about the body."
He started reading plays early - "I was loving Coward at 12 and, I think, understanding it, rather surprisingly" - but then read a couple of books about film direction. "A great bell chimed in my head and I thought, 'That's it.' All feelings I had about wanting to be in theatre suddenly focused." After doing his national service in Singapore, he was demobbed, got in a cargo boat and went across the Pacific to the US. He worked in the publicity department at MGM but left to study directing at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
"We learnt to make technical drawings and set models. We learnt about colour, we analysed paintings to see how the eye was carried through. We had to act and stage manage, build scenery, make costumes, do make- up, write publicity. I go into workshops now with young directors and I'm amazed. You ask them what part of the stage is hot and what's cold and they haven't a clue. We did endless exercises on that sort of skill and faced a barrage of questions about work we directed for which you had to have answers. It was an extraordinary four years."
That sense of rigour has remained. A warm, urbane, soft-spoken figure with a hint of Lionel Bart about him, he comes across as a man with a mission but with little to prove. In the Seventies, he did away with elaborate sets, costumes and lighting to return the focus to the actor, embodying the philosophy in his influential touring company Shared Experience, performing his own adaptations of literary classics on the scale of The Arabian Nights, Bleak House and A Handful Of Dust. His equally acclaimed Chekhov productions led to an associate directorship at the National Theatre in the mid-Eighties, climaxing in a multi-award-winning Cherry Orchard with Sheila Hancock, who described him as "the perfect director to coax a performance out of me".
In the TV and video age Alfreds is passionate about the essential "live" quality of theatre. Warming to his theme, he points to the exciting things that happen in rehearsal that almost never happen in performance. "Those electric moments where an actor opens up and discovers something amazing or where two actors suddenly take off in a scene. That is usually contained and neatly reproduced and the impact is lost. The truthfulness, the immediacy and vivacity, the spontaneity, the daring and vulnerability, all the things that actors have, must be worked on to give them freedom.
"I have auditioned about 200 actors in the past 18 months, and again and again they tell me that although they've been busy, they've had no useful experience. They haven't been pushed or changed. It's because there's no real process and I don't believe you can give anything to an audience unless you go through something. You can give them tricks or externals like timing or charm or your standard repertoire, but to give audiences something real the actor must stretch him or herself."

To achieve this, he and his actors create a complete infrastructure and framework, breaking texts down into simple actions and then connecting the actors back to it once they have made all sorts of discoveries about character and motivation. "They do an awful lot of work on the environment and space, their relationships, style and what the play's actually about, hopefully embodied in a very organic way through the very long and elaborate rehearsal process. Then, whatever they choose to play will be right, because it's true to that particular moment. They have to give up getting, say, a laugh on a specific line. You must be absolutely in the moment, playing whatever the moment demands."
If that sounds like all talk and no action, Alfreds is at pains to refute the charge. "I make them forge the work on the floor. They have to discover by doing. Get them free with the text so they never do it the same way twice."
His latest venture is the reinvention of the repertory system, spending a year working with a cast of four on his own adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Noel Coward's Private Lives and a new Philip Osment play, Flesh and Blood. To do this, he took Cambridge Theatre Company by the scruff of the neck, shook it up and renamed it Method and Madness. Judging by the overwhelming response - audiences often returning for all three plays - the move is less mad than the new company's name suggests.
His method hasn't always worked. If an actor is resistant to the approach, problems quickly arise. Alfreds regards his production of Emma as a failure - "I just couldn't find a consistent convention for the show" - but cresting the wave of a successful tour, he exudes quiet confidence. The response to Private Lives, particularly from younger audiences, has taken him by surprise.
"Coward said that the second act was the hardest thing he and Gertrude Lawrence ever did. Here I am doing it with actors who have never done Coward, but it just works." So how did they cope with the style? "Style is not something you put on, it's a world view, an attitude to life, a set of values. Coward's characters have a lot of money, they talk fast and strike poses, but it's the result of something. Why do they talk fast? Because they don't want to be found out. There's a lot of smart talking in order to keep your emotions held in." The company rehearsed the Coward for seven weeks. "I doubt he's ever been rehearsed that long," laughs Alfreds, but then he loathes the convention of how theatre is put on. "It works against the actor. You rehearse for three or four weeks, the actors never get near the scenery until a few days before the opening and often don't get costumes until the last minute. It's nonsense. A writer does a draft, leaves it, comes back to it, but there's a period where you can just leave it to cook. This never happens in the theatre."
Unless you're working with Method and Madness, that is. Jude was rehearsed for 10 weeks, performed, then left alone while the cast worked on Private Lives instead. When they revived Jude, says Alfreds, "they played it without the sweat. Doing the Coward, they had learnt to relax."
Alfreds knows he's asking a lot, creating that unfashionable thing, a true ensemble company. As with Theatre de Complicite, whose work he admires, Mike Alfreds's actors return to work with him time and again. "They've got to have that text completely fluently; they've got to be totally in command of their bodies and their minds and then come out and improvise and go with whatever happens for two-and-a-half hours. In Jude, they're handling puppets, moving scenery, acting as narrators and playing highly emotional characters and dealing with a whole series of conventions creating spaces and places, creating worlds." He grins. "They've got to be extraordinary people."

Alfreds Notes

Mike Alfreds:

. Mike Alfreds is primarily know for his techniques on directing.

. When directing he wanted to allow actors to express themselves creatively and he wanted actors to have freedom from directing to manifest their artistic nature.

. He used auctioning, one of the things he would often start with as an actor is to go through every line and know what action he was playing on that.

. He thought that improvisation was a good way to start building a character and to explore and establish relationships portrayed in the text.

. He did an exercise whilst directing called TNT or Text, No Text, Text. This is when an actor is first presented with a script and they perform it once on book and then subsequently without book to allow them to establish the motives behind each line and to be freed from the text. Then to go on to perform it again with those texts, bringing the motive and intention that was discovered in the No Text section of the exercise.

. When improvising he believed every actor had the right to express themselves and so one of his rehearsal room rules was, no blocking or no saying no. This is particularly important in devising.

. He was famous for writing the book Different Every Night, something Jack used a lot of in Common ground, its aim is to free the actor.

Sunday, 15 February 2015

Meisner Article

I found and read this fascinating article from the Internet. It really helped me to understand Meisner's philosophies, motivations and theories on acting, but it also helped me to know about the work still being done in his name.

Source: http://www.themeisnercenter.com/history.html

Our History…

“It takes twenty years to be a master!”

That’s how Sanford Meisner felt about everything, and particularly acting. Perhaps that explains why the legendary New York acting teacher, and creator of the Meisner Technique, waited so long to found his first and only theater. When the doors opened to the Sanford Meisner Center in 1995, the theater Great had reached his eighth decade of life. As passionate as ever, Meisner was determined to turn the sixty seat theater into a lively venue in which Meisner graduates would interact with other artists, producing a unique exchange of artistic ideology and succession of outstanding performances.

Born August 31, 1905 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Sanford Meisner graduated from Erasmus Hall in 1923 and attended The Damrash Institute of Music (now Juilliard), where he studied to become a concert pianist before talking his way into a job in a Theatre Guild production of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. He realized then that acting which really “dug at him” was what he was looking to find.

In 1931, a fervent group of young actors, including Meisner, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman, amongst others, joined together to establish the Group Theatre. It was the first permanent theatre company that brought “method” acting, rooted in methods of Konstantin Stanislavsky, to practice and prominence in America. Meisner appeared in twelve Group productions, including the first, The House of Connelly, and all of Clifford Odets’ plays, including Waiting for Lefty which Meisner co-directed with Odets in 1935.

In 1933 Meisner became disenchanted with pure “method” acting. He wrote “actors are not guinea pigs to be manipulated, dissected, let alone in a purely negative way. Our approach was not organic, that is to say, not healthy.” Meisner has ongoing discussion about technique with Adler, who worked with Stanislavsky in Paris and Clurman, who took deep interest in the American character. Eventually Meisner realized that if American actors were ever going to achieve the goal of “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” an American approach was needed. The Neighborhood Playhouse provided him with a venue to develop that approach on his own. In 1935, he headed the Drama Department at The Playhouse, while continuing to act and direct plays produced by The Group Theatre until its demise in 1940. He also appeared on Broadway in Embezzled (1944) and Crime and Punishment(1948). He directed The Time of Your Life (1955) and acted in The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958).

Meisner left The Playhouse in 1958 to become director of the New Talent Division of Twentieth Century Fox. He moved to Los Angeles, where he was also able to cultivate his career as a film actor.

He returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse as head of the Drama Department from 1964-1990. In 1985, Meisner and James Carville co-founded The Meisner/Carville School of Acting on the Island of Bequia in the West Indies. They later extended the school to North Hollywood, California, with Martin Barter. Meisner, Carville and Barter opened The Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts in March 1995, and later the school and theatre were combined to form the Sanford Meisner Center.

Meisner received commendations from Presidents Clinton, Bush and Reagan. He was honored by California Governor Pete Wilson and was named the “Humanitarian of the Year 1990” by The Washington Charity Awards. His final appearance as an actor was in a guest starring role on a special episode of ER in 1995. Backstage West dedicated an issue to Meisner and his world-renowned “Meisner Technique.”

Arthur Miller once said of Meisner, “He has been the most principled teacher of acting on this country for decades now, and every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don’t lay on complications that aren’t necessary.”

Sanford Meisner passed away on February 2nd, 1997. An all day, public memorial service was held at the Sanford Meisner Center on February 6th, 1997. But he didn’t leave without assurance of the future success of his creation. Long before the Meisner Center’s opening, longtime protégé Martin Barter had been groomed as Sandy’s successor at the Meisner/Carville school. When the time came, Barter was well-equipped and took the reigns as the Meisner Center’s Artistic Director and head teacher. He was one of the fifteen trained teachers of the Meisner Technique personally chosen by Mr. Meisner to carry his technique to the next generations, a position he holds to this day.

Originally located on Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood, California, The Sanford Meisner Center was the only school in Los Angeles created by Sanford Meisner himself. While the theatre was closed in 2013, Martin Barter continues to carry on Sandy’s Technique to a new generation of actors.

Guest Speaker Andy Garcia.

Meisner Notes

Sanford Meisner
1905-1997
.Meisner's system is not centred around recollecting emotional truths from some point in your past, like Stanislavsky's method of acting.

.Meisner's technique is about actors really connecting to the truths of a character and about acting those emotional realities through workshopping.

.It is about the imaginative connection between the actor and the given circumstances

.Meisner is about really listening on stage not only to what fellow characters are saying and to react in the moment, but also, in rehearsal to truly listen to what other actors are saying about the choices they are making about their characters, as this helps you to establish you relationship based not only on your internal thoughts, but also on what is being given to you by a fellow actor/character.
.The actions of one actor depend on focusing on and reacting to the other.

.Meisner was very fond of a specific type of workshop which should result in what he called the 'Fight or F**k' instinct. This is where two actors work closely together to determine a rapport with a fellow actor through maintaining eye-contact for long periods of time (a good time is two hours) in which you build from making calls about how one looks (i.e. Clothing, hair colour, eye colour) to physical calls (i.e. You are moving your hand, you winked) to emotional calls (you are happy/sad) all of these calls are repeated within the pairs.

. In the workshop me and Ffion did a scene using the Meisner technique, which went really very well, in fact we had to hug it out at the end, because of how angry we were at each other.

Applying Acting Techniques