TaPRA 2013, Glasgow
Performer Training Working Group
Reconstructed Narratives of Embodiment:
The Meisner Technique through Sanford Meisner on Acting
By James McLaughlin .
Sanford Meisner published only one book during his lifetime that was simply called, Sanford
Meisner on Acting. In the introduction of this book, he hints at two earlier attempts to set
his Technique in print. The first only came to two chapters that he abandoned because he
did not understand them upon rereading. The second was never published, primarily
because it lacked, ‘the drama inherent in our interaction’ (Meisner and Longwell, 1987:
xviii). By way of explanation, he notes that, ‘the confessional mode is impossible to sustain
at length in the theater, which is an arena where human personalities interlock in the reality
of doing’ (ibid). Meisner’s analysis of the failure of his two earlier attempts of writing about
his Technique suggests that the form of Sanford Meisner on Acting, a partly constructed
narrative description of a year in one of his classes, edited and embellished by Dennis
Longwell, is chosen deliberately and is necessary to successfully convey the Technique.
There are of course powerful echoes of Stanislavsky’s choice to describe his System through
a narrative account of a fictional classroom.
However, it should not be assumed that Meisner is simply aping the Russian, to whom he
acknowledges a great debt (Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 137). The failure of the first two
books that Meisner claims to either have not understood upon rereading, or that failed to
make, ‘sufficiently apparent’, how he was able to, ‘uniquely transmit [his] ideas’, points to a
much more powerful imperative for the form the book took. This suggests that the Meisner
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Technique exists not only in the principles that underpin it, but also in the way those
principles are imparted. This suggestion is strengthened by the divergence of the way his
Technique is taught by his successors (Shirley, 2010: 210). From this we can conclude that it
is not just the principles (or the content) of the Technique that is important, but also the
larger situation in which those principles are transmitted.
To capture the broad experiential dimension of the Meisner Technique I will be applying a
selection of phenomenological perspectives to this discussion. These phenomenological
interpretations are not the only way of looking at the Meisner Technique; an interesting
alternative view is offered by Jonathan Pitches in Stanislavsky in America where he argues
that, ‘the Meisner actor seems to be the very embodiment of the Watsonian Behaviourist
project whose central concept … was to: “Avoid mentalistic concepts such as sensation,
perception and emotion, and employ only behaviour concepts such as stimulus and
response”’ (Pitches, 2006: 123). Pitches takes the, ‘action and reaction pattern that is first
experienced in the Repetition Exercise’ (ibid), as the primary evidence of this in Meisner’s
Technique and makes a compelling argument from the scientific perspective that he is
occupying.
Just as in any situation where foreign theory is applied to performance
practices, it is important to remember that Meisner himself was neither a phenomenologist,
nor a behaviourist, but a pragmatic acting teacher. However, these theoretical perspectives
can both help us to understand processes operating at a deep level within the Meisner
Technique.
This paper arose from my PhD research in which I examined the phenomenal dynamic of
Sanford Meisner’s technique of acting and its resonances with postmodern performance. It
occurred to me in the course of this work that the narrative form of Sanford Meisner on
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Acting had a particular power to communicate the spirit of the Meisner Technique as I
learnt it from Michael Saccente, one of Meisner’s students. Once I had completed my
phenomenal analysis of the Technique I felt an urge to return to this book to see if I could
discover how it created this effect. In the course of trying to answer this question I
discovered the work of Richard Gerrig, a cognitive psychologist whose work focuses on the
intersection of art and psychology, and whose arguments and theories are routinely backed
up with experimental data.
Gerrig opens the door to the application of narratives to the transmission of acting
methodologies in his 1993 work, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, where he notes:
In many respects, the task of the reader is much like the task of the actor. Consider
this excerpt from Constantin Stanislavski’s classic volume, An Actor Prepares: “We
need a broad point of view to act the plays of our times and of many peoples. We
are asked to interpret the life of human souls from all over the world. An actor
creates not only the life of his times but that of the past and future as well. That is
why he needs to observe, to conjecture, to experience, to be carried away with
emotion.” Readers are called upon to exercise exactly this same range of skills. They
must use their own experiences of the world to bridge gaps in texts. They must bring
both facts and emotions to bear on the construction of the world of the text. And,
just like actors performing roles, they must give substance to the psychological lives
of characters.
(Gerrig, 1993: 17)
It is clear from this excerpt that Gerrig’s argument draws on the activity of acting to
illustrate certain features of the experience of narratives. My intention with this paper is
oriented in the opposite direction; I will draw on the processes of narrative experience to
show how they might be applicable to the transmission of the Meisner Technique of acting.
It should be noted that Gerrig is activating a particular paradigm of acting, as exemplified by
An Actor Prepares, and what we might describe as modern, realistic drama, but as my point
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of departure this does not determine the more specific arguments I will be setting forth
here.
From Gerrig’s analyses, there are three features of narrative experience that show it to be a
particularly effective means of transmitting acting methodologies such as the Meisner
Technique. The first is the very active nature of the experience of narratives, requiring the
participation of the reader and therefore their virtual embodiment of the processes
involved in an acting methodology contained within it. Secondly, narrative experience
activates the perspective of the individual reader, a process that is also vital to the actor
according to the Meisner Technique. Thirdly, Gerrig’s experiments show that narrative
experience has measurable effects on real-world judgements and actions at a pre-conscious
level, the dimension on which the Meisner Technique focuses. As this list makes clear, my
focus here is on the Meisner Technique in particular, and I will explore the possibilities and
difficulties of extending this to other methodologies once I have laid this argument out.
Gerrig was intrigued by the recurrent reports of readers that they had been ‘transported’ by
narratives and therefore set out to delineate the cognitive processes involved in this
experience.
The first important discovery that Gerrig makes is that the process of
experiencing narratives is an active one.
Therefore, rather than simply receiving the
meaning intended by an author and passively being ‘transported’ into an imaginary world of
someone else’s construction, the reader actively constructs this world and ‘transports’
themselves into it. Such a perspective picks up on a strong current within reader response
theory, but is original in the extent to which it analyses the detail of the reader’s activity
through the application of theory, and through experimental means.
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Further to Gerrig’s invocation of Stanislavski, he claims that when they experience narrative
worlds, ‘readers perform narratives’ (Gerrig, 1993: 12). When performing a narrative, a
reader is called upon to actively engage with it, to be responsible for their own experience.
Therefore, in Sanford Meisner on Acting, a reader is called upon to imaginatively construct
the room in which the class is taking place, to endow the teacher and students with a
semblance of life, and to live through the events of the narrative with them. Rather than
passively absorbing information, Gerrig’s theory demonstrates that the reader actively
participates in the narrative. Given this, the reader is going one step further than the claim,
common to reader response theory, that the reader creates the meaning out of the text. In
the terms of Gerrig’s discussion, readers do not create a body of objective knowledge,
somehow separate from themselves, but instead establish a new set of relationships
between themselves and the world that now includes elements that they have created out
of the text. This distinction is important because rather than simply increasing their
knowledge, they are forging new involvements.
Gerrig proves that the reader participates in narratives by identifying ‘Participatory
Responses’ in them. These p-responses, ‘refer to the non-inferential responses that … arise
as a consequence of the readers’ active participation’ (Gerrig, 1993: 66).
Gerrig
distinguishes p-responses from inferential responses because they ‘do not fill gaps in the
text’ (ibid), meaning that they are not strictly necessary in order to make sense out of the
narrative. He notes that p-responses vary in the extent to which they arise unconsciously,
or as the result of ‘more effortful problem solving’ (Gerrig, 1993: 68). In all cases along this
continuum however, p-responses enable, ‘readers [to] draw themselves solidly into the
narrative world’ (Gerrig, 1993 : 96).
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For those who come to Sanford Meisner on Acting with the intention of learning or
reinforcing their understanding of the Meisner Technique, the likelihood that they will
exhibit p-responses is increased. This is because their intention is also the apparent
intention of the students within the narrative.
Gerrig notes that such, ‘identification
promotes an investment of resources toward p-responding’ (Gerrig, 1993: 82). In other
words, because the specially interested reader shares an intention with the characters
within the narrative, they are more likely to participate imaginatively within it. Along with
the p-responses that arise unconsciously during the experience of the narrative, a narrative
in which characters with who the reader identifies are set tasks to complete towards the
attainment of their shared intentions also calls into play the ‘more effortful’ p-responses
associated with problem solving. Thus as Meisner sets his class the task of finding an
Independent Activity that is difficult, urgent, and that they must complete for a compelling
personal reason (Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 39), the reader who is trying to grasp the
material is encouraged to think of tasks that might fulfil those criteria for themselves. Such
moments of activity draw the reader into the narrative world, increasing the investment
they have in it and in turn increasing the degree of identification they are able to experience
with the students it portrays. In the start of a positive feedback loop, this identification
further ‘promotes an investment of resources toward p-responding’ and so cycles back
through the process again.
Gerrig identifies a particularly productive form of p-response that arises as events in the
narrative are revealed. He notes that, ‘once readers are made privy to particular outcomes,
they mentally begin to comment on them, often engaging in an activity I call replotting …
[through] which readers consider alternatives to the real events’ (Gerrig, 1993: 90-91). He
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later specifies that replotting is, ‘often a specific, directed use of readers’ power to carry out
simulations’ (Gerrig, 1993: 93). If the reader of Sanford Meisner on Acting has been presponding sufficiently to the narrative, when Meisner discusses the reason for an exercise
failing (Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 42-3), they might simulate an iteration of the exercise
in which the same mistakes were not made. Such simulations that require the creation of
moments that are not necessary to make sense of the narrative, but provide a fuller grasp of
the methodology which is its subject, are one way that narratives have a particular power to
transmit acting methodologies such as the Meisner Technique.
These simulations are reminiscent of the second stage of Husserl’s transcendental
phenomenological reduction, that he calls, ‘criticism of the transcendental experience’, or
the ‘eideitic reduction’ (Husserl, 1995: §13). This process involves the phenomenological
investigator freely imagining variations of their direct perceptual experience in order to
come to an understanding of the necessary and sufficient conditions that define that type of
experience. It is this step in Husserl’s phenomenology that allows the analysis of the
phenomenologist to move beyond the particularities of their experience and to establish a
more universal description of experience. This analogy is relevant to us here because the
simulations that the reader runs in their replotting activity function in a similar way by
allowing them to move beyond the particular events conveyed in the narrative to a broader
and deeper understanding of the type of experience is describes. Therefore, just as Husserl
moves from his own perceptual experience of listening to a melody (for instance), to a
theory of listening to melodies in general through his eidetic reduction (Husserl, 1991: §11),
the replotting that the reader engages in allows them to move from an experience of the
particular events of Sanford Meisner on Acting to a broader grasp of the Technique.
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By invoking the intentions of the reader to illustrate how p-responses can be reinforced by
identification with characters within the narrative world, we have already seen how the
individual perspective of the reader can have an effect on the extent to which the narrative
might affect them. However, in the case of the Meisner Technique the activation of the
individual’s perspective has a much greater resonance. Meisner’s programme, from the
observation exercises, through Repetition and Independent Activities, stresses that what
matters in the student’s work is not the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ answer, but what they perceive of
the world around them (Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 19). Meisner repeatedly makes it
clear to his students that their acting should spring from what matters to them, what gives
them the impulse to act (Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 157). Every observation they make of
their environment, or their fellow performer in the advanced Repetition exercise, is couched
in terms of how they see it (Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 21). This stress on the impulses
and feelings of the individual actors might easily be interpreted as a reification of the
‘essential self’ of the actor, but might just as legitimately be seen as an awakening of
perspective that shifts the focus away from the actor’s self as a centre of meaning and
disperses it into the relationships the actor has with their environment and their fellow
performers.
Because Sanford Meisner on Acting transmits the Meisner Technique via a narrative, the
reader’s individual perspective is activated by both the general processes of narrative
cognition and the processes of the Meisner Technique that it describes. In this way Sanford
Meisner on Acting is encouraging a pre-conscious sympathy with the nature of the Meisner
Technique and helping readers to grasp it before they consciously and objectively
understand it.
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This distinction between grasping the Meisner Technique subjectively and objectively
understanding it is fundamental to this discussion. Sanford Meisner is at pains to stress that
he is, ‘a very non-intellectual teacher of acting. [His] approach is based on bringing the
actor back to his [sic] emotional impulses and to acting that is firmly rooted in the
instinctive’ (Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 37). This principle is ingrained in every stage of
Meisner’s training, from the earliest observation exercises through Repetition and
Independent Activities, and into scene work. Accordingly, the Meisner Technique is based
in a holistic, phenomenological engagement with the world rather than a more logical,
rational approach of the sort that objective knowledge might generate. I would argue that
rather than applying a rational formula to the craft of acting, Meisner is training his actors to
interact with their environment in a way that is compatible to Merleau-Ponty’s theories of
worldly engagement such as ‘the intentional arc’. Merleau-Ponty describes the power of
this concept in the following passage from Phenomenology of Perception:
...the life of consciousness–cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life–is
subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects round about us our past, our
future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather
which results in our being situated in all these respects. It is this intentional arc
which brings about the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility.
(Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 157)
This makes it clear that it is the intentions of the subject that determine their perception of
the world they inhabit and therefore their, ‘physical, ideological and moral situation’, as well
as, ‘the unity of the senses, of intelligence and motility’ (ibid). Therefore, according to
Merleau-Ponty, when Meisner bases his acting methodology in the subjective realm of
instinct and impulse, he is empowering the intentional arc to alter that student’s perception
of reality – to literally shift their perception of their physical, ideological and moral situation
through a manipulation of their intentions. When we draw into this picture the fact that the
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readers’ intentions, arising from their subjective perspective, are able to draw them into the
narrative world through the instruments of identification and p-response, we can see that
the narrative form allows Meisner to activate his readers’ subjective perception of the world
in order to instinctually grasp his methodology, just as his training process does in his
classroom.
It might initially seem counterintuitive that an inanimate book might hold the power to alter
reader perceptions to the extent that they are able to virtually embody the Meisner
Technique of acting. It is more in line with common sense that by reading a book we are
able to gain abstract knowledge, to add to the store of facts we have of a given subject.
According to such an account, the idea that one might practically grasp the significant
elements of a craft such as acting, that involves the whole body and mind in its practice,
from a book is absurd. If a narrative was simply a list of facts and information that the
reader acquires and retains in abstract storage until it can be applied through the body, this
might be the case. However, as Gerrig has shown, narratives allow readers to ‘transport’
themselves into narrative worlds by harnessing their intentions to enhance identification
and the production of p-responses. Because the Meisner Technique is deliberately nonintellectual, and works on the instinctual dimension of the actors’ subjectivity, the
imaginative embodiment of the Technique through participation within the narrative is an
ideal way to approach the Technique. This leads to the question of whether grasping the
Meisner Technique through the experience of narrative could ever be as effective as studiobased learning at the hands of a good teacher. Of course there are many facets of training
where actual psychophysical practice cannot be rivalled. For instance, there is a huge
difference between how we may believe we are behaving and how others interpret our
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behaviour. Much of the text of Sanford Meisner on Acting, and much of the footage from
the Masterclass DVD, involves Meisner clarifying and correcting the intentions and
behaviour of his students when they believe that they had been performing appropriately.
As Nick Moseley recognises, ‘the process is endlessly diagnostic, and each actor engaging in
it has to be side-coached and nurtured through each stage, otherwise the work can result in
little more than confusion and frustration’ (Moseley, 2012: 8). The psycho-physical doing
and the objective judgement of these attempts is one feature of studio work that could
never be replaced by the experience of narrative worlds.
However, there are aspects of the Technique that might be transmitted more effectively by
the experience of narrative worlds than by direct studio-based work. These arise because
narratives are inherently distillations of reality; moments are selected for representation
and others are omitted, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps with inferences and presponses. In this way, narratives direct the perception of the reader to what the author
wants them to perceive. However, as we have argued in this paper, how the reader
perceives those events, how they bridge these episodes to construct a coherent account,
what replotting they engage in – in short the whole narrative world that forms around these
selected moments – are determined by the reader’s unique perspective. The reality of the
studio on the other hand is constituted by a much denser milieu of perceptions, time flows
more evenly rather than collecting around significant moments, and attention is much less
forcibly directed. The actor in the studio is therefore forced to sort through, distil, and
construct their own interpretation of the Meisner Technique from a confusing collection of
perceptions. Of course, this is exactly where the role of the teacher in the studio is vital. If
the teacher is able to ‘side-coach’ and ‘nurture’ the student through the confusing and
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potentially frustrating phases of the Technique, they are able to accomplish just what the
narrative does when it directs the readers’ focus to particular moments and offers potential
ways of understanding them. The added benefit, as I mention above, is that in the studio
the psycho-physical doing and interactive judgement and analysis provide an even stronger
basis for inhabiting and knowing the Technique. However, even when undertaking studio
training with a very good teacher, by complementing this with the experience of another
classroom and further iterations of scenarios and the ‘interlocking’ of different personalities
in the ‘reality of doing’, the student’s grasp of the Technique has the potential to be
enhanced. Studio work and narrative experience might therefore be seen to constitute two
valuable tools for the training of Meisner actors. By alternating between the two routes to
learning the Technique, the student might broaden and strengthen their grasp of it.
My suggestion that the experience of the narrative of Sanford Meisner on Acting might have
an effect on the reader’s real world grasp of the Meisner Technique is reinforced and taken
one step further by Gerrig’s discovery that narratives can affect the real world judgements
of readers at a pre-conscious level. His arguments for this conclude that, ‘persuasion by
fiction is the default position’ (Gerrig, 1993: 227, original emphasis). He draws on Gilbert’s
Spinozian concept of belief fixation when he claims that, ‘acceptance of belief is an
automatic concomitant of comprehension. “Unacceptance” may follow later, but the initial
product of cognitive processing is a belief in the understood propositions’ (ibid). Gerrig
sums up his position by saying that, ‘the account I am advocating, therefore, replaces a
“willing suspension of disbelief” with a “willing construction of disbelief.” The net difference
is that we cannot possibly be surprised that information from fictional narratives has a real
world effect’ (Gerrig, 1993: 231).
Although Gerrig is talking about blatantly fictional
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narratives here, his argument applies to all narratives, fictional and non-fictional, but
specifies fiction in this instance because it is the type of narrative most commonly accused
of having no real world effects.
Gerrig’s discussion here is especially relevant to transmitting the Meisner Technique
because of Meisner’s preference for what he calls, ‘actor’s faith’. Meisner’s wonder and
admiration are easy to detect when he tells his class of an instance when Eleanor Duse
began to blush in the middle of a scene as the character she was playing was embarrassed.
Meisner tells his class that this reaction, ‘came from living truthfully under imaginary
circumstances. Preparation could never have induced that. It came from her genius, her
completeness in living truthfully under imaginary circumstances’ (Meisner and Longwell,
1987: 87). On another occasion he explains why he considers Maureen Stapleton, who
premiered the lead role in Tenesse Williams’, The Rose Tattoo, and won an academy award
for her performance as Emma Goldman in Reds, to be an exemplary actress:
“She has great actor’s faith,” Meisner says. “What is actor’s faith?”
“She believes that the imaginary circumstances are truer than true,” Joseph says.
“Let’s just say that she believes they are true. What else? Ralph?”
“You’re willing to believe it even though you may doubt that it’s true.”
“A real actor finds a way of eliminating the doubt.”
(Meisner and Longwell, 1987: 61)
These examples might allow us to summarise Meisner’s definition of ‘actor’s faith’, as a
quality that allows the actor to believe the imaginary circumstances to be true and to live
through those circumstances truthfully. What is striking about such a definition is that there
is apparently no pretence involved. Instead the actor has a pre-conscious acceptance – a
belief without doubt – that the circumstances that govern their character apply to them
personally. Many of the exercises in Meisner’s training programme are explicitly designed
to train and nurture this quality, and it is therefore a crucial element of the Technique that
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any method of transmission must find a way to inculcate. The ‘belief fixation’ that makes
belief in the truth of a narrative the ‘default position’ of cognitive processing is particularly
well-suited to achieve this as it trains the reader to accept the truth of the narrative without
doubt, an acceptance that is mirrored in the processes that the actors within the narrative
are trying to learn.
The Spinozian assertion that, ‘acceptance of belief is an automatic
concomitant of comprehension’, would also apply to non-narrative tracts that present facts
in a more objective manner, but the instruments of identification and p-response that draw
the reader into the world of the narrative reinforce this ‘acceptance of belief’. Again we can
see that a narrative medium facilitates the subjective orientation of the reader in just such a
way as the exercises within Meisner’s class do for his students. This is a further reason that
the experience of narrative worlds is a fitting method of transmitting acting methodologies
such as the Meisner Technique.
As I mention above, a non-narrative book may be able to participate in some of the
processes that I am discussing here, but only to a limited extent. This is not to say that such
a book is inferior, only that it takes a different route to the transmission of the Technique
and has a different set of strengths that a narrative book does not possess. An excellent
case in point is Nick Moseley’s 2012 book, Meisner in Practice. This volume is subtitled, ‘A
Guide for Actors, Directors and Teachers’, and as such it is without peer in the cluster of
works published about the Meisner Technique. The only account that comes close to the
style of Moseley’s work is the brief chapter in Mel Gordon’s, Stanislavsky in America, where
he provides a brief contextualisation of Meisner’s work and a short instruction of how to
execute the Repetition exercise (Gordon, 2010: 176-180). Meisner in Practice takes this to
significantly greater depths by working through the different stages of the training and
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providing at each, ‘description, analysis and practical example’ (Moseley, 2012: viii), of the
processes under discussion. As a guide for actors, directors and teachers, it is an invaluable
tool as it allows the various practitioners objective insight into the purpose, operation, and
effects of the various parts of the training. This is of tremendous worth for those seeking to
solve particular acting dilemmas, communicate effectively and practically with actors, and
plan dynamic workshops. What it does not do, that a more narrative medium such as
Sanford Meisner on Acting does, is to subjectively orient the reader to the processes
involved in the Technique. Moseley’s guide is an excellent example of a book that provides
a store of objective knowledge that must then be translated into embodied knowledge
through direct application in the studio. Where Sanford Meisner on Acting is different is
that it bridges the gap between theory and practice from the outset, allowing the reader to
virtually embody the processes of the Meisner Technique purely through an investment in
the narrative world it presents. As I note above, this knowledge must also be actualised in
the studio, but I would argue that it orients the student more effectively to a pre-conscious
sympathy for the approach Meisner advocates.
Another example that highlights the processes I am discussing by its contrast to them is the
2006 DVD, Masterclass, released by The Sanford Meisner Centre. This DVD centres around
eight hours of footage of Meisner’s teaching intercut with an interview with Martin Barter, a
senior teacher at The Sanford Meisner Centre. The resulting work has an effect similar to
Moseley’s Meisner in Practice, in that it presents practical examples, descriptions and brief
analyses of the major aspects of Meisner’s training.
However, because the practical
examples are not embedded within a narrative frame the viewer is prevented from
investing in them to the extent that they are able to when reading Sanford Meisner on
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Acting. The DVD allows the viewer to objectively understand the various exercises and to
see how they are applied in the studio, but does not encourage them to subjectively grasp
the exercises as the narrative does. However, just as Nick Moseley’s book is especially
useful for certain purposes, this DVD is the most detailed record of Meisner’s pedagogical
techniques and would be a perfect resource for a prospective teacher who is attempting to
grasp the ‘nurturing’ and ‘side-coaching’ that Moseley identifies as essential for the teaching
of the Technique. As a second contra-example, Masterclass demonstrates exactly where
the experience of narrative worlds might be useful in the transmission of acting
methodologies.
Where Masterclass offers a host of principles and examples of their
application, Sanford Meisner on Acting brings together the objective principles and
subjective understanding so that when it comes time to apply the theory in practice the
reader has already integrated elements of the Technique into their perception of the world.
The experience of the narrative world allows the reader to shape their intentional arc in
such a way that makes the practical application of the Technique more natural by
engendering in them a pre-conscious sympathy for its processes.
This paper has been intentionally limited in terms of its application. As I stated in the
introduction, my background and research interest is in the Meisner Technique in particular.
I have argued that it is the phenomenological orientation of this acting methodology that
makes it particularly well-suited to being grasped through narrative experience. So much of
the Meisner Technique is about the imaginative perception of reality and therefore a
medium that brings the student to the Technique in a similar manner undoubtedly has an
advantage over one that functions more objectively. For more systematic approaches, that
access the actors’ rational faculties more than their subjective instinct, this will not be the
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case. Those methodologies that consider themselves more ‘outside-in’, than ‘inside-out’,
that are influenced by Diderot and Brecht, or that prioritise system and logic over feeling
and intuition, are outside of the scope of these arguments.
Constantine Stanislavski provides an interesting case that is most clearly defined in the
debate between the ‘Method of Physical Actions’ and ‘Active Analysis’. Kedrov’s application
of Stanislavski in the ‘Method of Physical Actions’ relies on a mechanistic picture of acting
and ties into interpretations of Stanislavski’s work as a ‘System’. Maria Knebel’s ‘Active
Analysis’ on the other hand, uses the physical score that a role offers, but adds to this the
‘character’s rhythmic energy and trajectory of desire’ (Carnicke, 2009: 191). This approach
allows actors to, ‘draft performances by exploring the dynamics of human interaction
through improvisation’ (Carnicke, 2009: 3). This more subjective, intuitive, and experiential
approach to a role is closer to my interpretation of the Meisner Technique and might
therefore be more susceptible to the arguments I have presented here.
What makes Stanislavski’s case particularly interesting is that out of Creating a Role, An
Actor Prepares, and Building a Character, only the first is presented in a direct, nonnarrative style. This might suggest that Stanislavski came to appreciate the benefits that a
narrative presentation of his acting methodology might offer as his teaching and writing
evolved. This debate, however, is much broader than the parameters of this paper.
What I hope to have laid out here is a solid basis for the suggestion that certain aspects of
particular acting methodologies, such as the Meisner Technique, might be particularly well
transmitted by narratives. The reasons that this is so are embedded in the cognitive
processes involved in experiencing narrative worlds, specifically that this experience is
active, awakens the subjective perspective of the reader, and has measureable effects on
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real-world judgements.
These findings can be interpreted from a selection of
phenomenological perspectives that allow us to connect the cognitive processes of narrative
experience to the phenomenal dynamics involved of the Meisner Technique.
These
arguments suggest that narrative experience is a particularly productive method to transmit
aspects of subjective, intuitive performance methodologies. This might have implications
for the teaching of acting within institutions and studios, suggesting a greater role for
narratives to assist students situate themselves imaginatively within the particular worldly
engagements demanded by particular acting methodologies.
Bibliography
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Gerrig, Richard J. (1991). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading.
London: Yale University Press.
Gordon, Mel. (2010). Stanislavsky in America: An Actor's Workbook. London: Routledge.
Husserl, Edmund. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. J. Brough
(trans.). Dorcrecht: Kluwer.
Husserl, Edmund. (1995). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. D. Cairns
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Meisner, Sanford. (2006). Sanford Meisner: Masterclass, [DVD] The Sanford Meisner Centre, Open
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Meisner, Sanford and Longwell, Dennis. (1987). Sanford Meisner on Acting. New York: Vintage
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). London:
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©James McLaughlin, 2013.