Scene4-Robert Epstein-Terms Of Art-Part 11-January 2001

rt is a form of creation. It takes a vision, something that occurs to the imagination, or a way of working that creates things in time and space, and makes something out of nothing. The painter’s blank canvas, the writer’s blank page, the bare rehearsal studio that dancers and choreographer work in, an empty stage with actors and director, all have ‘nothing’ in common. Art begins with that common nothingness, and because it starts with nothing, there is, in a certain sense, unlimited freedom to create. In another sense, there are all sorts of formal constraints, which come with the tradition that every artist is situated within. The principles of art create freedom, and the principles of craft constrain that freedom to create specific art forms.

Art partakes of some of the qualities of Divine Creation in a more limited sphere. It is as if, in order to emulate or experience the reality of God, artists constructed a little mini-universe whose laws and population is decreed by the artist. The artist, however, to be coherent, has to be true to his own laws. If he is working with perspective, the perspective has to be consistent. All lines have to lead to the vanishing point. Perhaps this is true for God as well, and he is constrained by the terms of the creation for as long as it lasts. In any case, the artist creates a possible universe and makes it real through the terms of his creation.

In music, there are patterns of notes. In art there are figures, shapes and colors. In dance, there are movements. In theatre, there are responses, gestures and actions. The pattern of these components make up the work. Each discipline has its own terms of creation, and its own craft. And each period, each school, has its own way of approaching and creating its work. But every form of theatre, whether it is abstract, highly stylized or realistic, uses the same basic elements to create its reality: responses, gestures and actions.

Stanislavski merely wanted these elements -- responses, gestures, actions -- to be authentic expressions of the real person who was acting, filtered through the imaginary life. His vehicle for creating this expression was the reality of the play and its circumstances, something which was shocking in his day, a time of high style and showmanship. But his ultimate gift to art was not the style of his work, but its integrity and detail, something that is common to all art at all times. While styles of theatre, including the realism that Stanislavski created on stage, have changed and developed, his theatre’s artistic principles have become the standards by which our serious dramatic work is judged.

A generation later, Meisner took those principles of theatrical art and systematized a way of instilling them in actors, a way of teaching actors how to apply those principles to every stage of their work. Meisner created a technique that would teach actors step by step a craft that would support artistic creation and make it possible, a platform upon which the creative impulses could flourish and create and maintain specific forms, theatrical details that would flesh out in the most specific way the vision of the director and playwright. The actor would take an active role, finding the creative behavioral solutions to the dramatic problem through responsive work and behavioral improvisation.

How is the technique structured to achieve this? First, every thing that is taught in the technique and the way it is taught must be true to the principles of the technique. In other words the work must be learned through creative impulses as well as teach the student how to use them. So the practice of finding and using creative unanticipated impulses (making something out of nothing) to fashion the actor’s work would be present throughout the technique. The terms of the work would never change, only the form in which it was applied would grow increasingly complex and fully realized.

Second, each step in the learning process would increase the ability to find and use creative impulses to solve its peculiar problem, and each step of learning would also be a useful technique itself in some aspect of the craft of acting.

So there would be no wasted step.

Plies and releves in dance are first practiced by themselves, then become parts of combinations, and also get employed in more complex choreography that uses the basic elements of rising and falling but combine them with more complex elements. In the same way, Meisner’s technique would start with the most basic unit of acting, according to his philosophy of creative improvisational work, and build that basic element into myriad steps for handling the two most critical areas of the actors’ work: rehearsal processand building a character.

Here is the basic outline of how it worked:

1. Simple repetition exercise – In this exercise, the basis of the entire technique, actors learn to respond to the other’s behavior through specific behavior of their own. The device used to train this is the ‘repetition’; an actor will say a descriptive phrase about what the other actor is doing, and then both actors will continue to respond to each other through a repetition of that phrase. The meaning of the phrase changes as new points of view, gestures, tone of voice accompany the same repeated words, and the meaning of the words themselves thus changes each time the phrase is repeated.
This teaches actors not to settle on line readings, but to find new behavior at every moment, based on what the other person is giving them; in other words it teaches them to work off of the other actor. It also provides a vehicle that allows the actor to respond immediately without having to stop to think of what to say. This promotes spontaneous action and response, making the actor a more effective improviser.
2. Repetition with changes – In this version of the repetition, if the actor sees new behavior, he can change the repetition phrase to reflect that change. The new phrase then becomes the repeating phrase, until it is again changed. The exercise begins to sound a bit more like a conversation, but a very direct and behaviorally based one.
3. Work with activities - Here the actor learns to work truthfully with an activity to a physical object. It creates an ability to handle props with a sense of reality, but more importantly, gives the actor the experience of being alone on stage and, rather than waiting for someone’s entrance to start a scene, creating the basic reality of that scene through his own truthful action.
4. Repetition + activity - One actor does an activity, the other tries to get their attention, both dealing with each other through the repetition exercise. This creates the basic reality of a scene.
5. Repetition + activity within imaginary circumstances - The exercise starts to include a more and more complete set of imaginary elements which influence the actors in what they are doing. At the end of this development they have a complete improvisational scene using the repetition exercise as a tool for dealing with each other.

All of the repetition work is like scale and exercise work in music.

6. Emotional preparation – The actor learns to stimulate emotion needed to enter the exercise fully through imagination and fantasy.
7. First scenes – The actor learns to improvise behaviorally through the human situation of the scene, while using the words of the text with situationally derived meanings and emphases; eg, the actor doesn’t decide how to say a line, rather he finds its meaning through the improvisational interaction and lets this color his vocal behavior.

These are the equivalent of etudes.

8. The “O’Neill’s” – Meisner used Eugene O’Neill scenes to fully explore the emotional life of a scene, while teaching basic rehearsal steps. These included behavioral improvisation to find behavior and activities for the scene; breaking down the text through paraphrasing; finding the Beats of the scene and what intentional action was being done in each Beat; specific active images that gave specificity to the behavior of Beats and moments.

These are first interpretive pieces.

9. Restoration Scenes – Meisner used Restoration Plays to teach actors how to construct broad and physically specific characters while maintaining truthful responses.
These are more complex interpretive pieces.
10. Final scenes – In the final scenes, Meisner asked actors to make independent use of their full technique, utilizing behavioral work, emotional work, imaginative work and character work, while developing each stage of rehearsal to develop a finished product.

This is like a fully phrased, fully interpreted and detailed sonata.

The work incorporates new layers of intention and action with each step, and in each step the principles of the technique are adhered to. Paraphrasing the text to make it more personal and emotionally specific cannot be done intellectually. It must be done improvisationally and instinctively. The actor must feel what to say as much as think it. Finding the Beat Actions is done through active behavior, not through intellectual analysis of the text. By making these discoveries in active rehearsal, the choices made are true to the living reality of what is unfolding. The choices can then be taken out of real time to be enhanced and refined, but they are based on an active foundation. The artistic terms of the Meisner Technique are not terms of Realism or any other style, but of improvisational discovery, an active developmental process, and a refined level of behavioral detail in both basic actions and in the creation of a character’s physicality. These aesthetic principles of creation can be used to create a vibrant discovery and creation in any style or type of theatre. But they are of course derived from the continuous adaptation and dealing of everyday life.

Rather than stopping the flow of time, as so much art does in order to inspect it more closely, this type of work emulates and imitates that flow in order to create an intense and compelling rendition. It is as real as life itself, but with all the dead space cut out. It creates an essentialized vision of living and a heightened sense of what is most telling in the given situation.

These terms of art, in other words, could be applied to the craft of many different forms of creative work. Imagine a ballet developed with this type of intense living, an opera done with full commitment to the imaginary life of the story, a pianist who has understood the deep emotional structure and force of the piece. If you did that, you would have, perhaps, Nureyev or Barishnikov, Marilyn Horne or Joan Sutherland, Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein. These principles are not confined to Stanislavski or Meisner. They are not confined to theatre. They are the terms of a compelling version of art, which is, to paraphrase Helen Keller, fired point blank at the audience, and which fully employs the artist’s creative capacities.

Robert Epstein is the Program Director
and Instructor of The Complete
Meisner-Based Actor's Training in
Washington, D.C

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