Meisner is The Man

Just for the sake of saying it, when Jason called us 'Meisner trained actors' it just made me beam like the sun. As much as I respect Strasberg's approach and don't know a lot about Adler, i really feel like iv'e been doing what Meisner has broken down for us, all my life. Iv'e always memorized lines by rote, sometimes it was great and all those other times i can look back on now and say,"I get to learn how to make those times great". With Meisner's approach it's really important to know you're lines, not because the lines are important, but because it should be text that you can rely on, that you don't have to go to your logical brain for. At first, the Repetiton exercise was hard for me to get and do, but now I completely understand working purely off of your partner's behavior and as it goes back and forth; a scene is like a ping pong match, you have to receive the ball your partner is sending for you to be able to send it back across the table, your stage(observed circumstance). This is really going to help a lot with scene work because as much as we can experience a scene where your having an argument with your best friend, it's nothing like having a real argument with your best friend. In a real argument it's all about the words, a person's behavior is instantly accepted and then cast aside. In a Meisner influenced scene the actors are fully aware of each others behavior and can't be shocked by the text but by the way they say it in their body. With conditioning like this i hope to be able to catch onto a person's behavior instantly, even in the heat of the moment, and get to the root of the real argument. That's what the repetition exercise is, dealing with the problem and moving on, no buffering.