Following our last article, we at Conquest Management bring you 4 more techniques and methods you can try out in order to become a better actress or actor.
- Meisner’s Technique
Sanford Meisner looked to expand on the teachings of Stanislavski in progressing how the character thought. His technique focuses on the overarching emotion of the character, as opposed to the playwright’s words that run in parallel.
Here at Conquest Management, we explain what the exercises include, they consist of a dynamic training system that focuses on your improvisational ability, bringing out your emotional reactions, reading the script, and eventually combining them all together in a life-like way to bring out the characteristics of the characters through your own work-breaking experiences.
Meisner’s approach is to compel the actor to get out of his own mind, to stop conceptualizing and to start reacting to pure instinct. The purpose of the approach is to get rid of any patterns or
affectations of the actor and to make him or her accessible and sensitive.
- Classical Method
Classical acting is a term that covers the collective use of a variety of acting techniques. Its emphasis is on every aspect of the actor’s instrument such as the voice, the imagination, the body, and the capacity of the actor to interpret the script and embody their character.
We at Conquest Management also recommend you to try exercises and processes that increase body awareness and flexibility are popular features of classical acting training. The understanding of vocal range, quality, and expressiveness is another cornerstone of classical training.
- Method Acting Technique
It is a set of training and rehearsal strategies that, as developed by a variety of different theater practitioners, aim to promote genuine and emotionally expressive performances.
All of these elements are designed to emotionally make the performance of the actor as realistic as possible. Actors are encouraged in performance to use their own experiences. This effective technique of memory involves remembering from your past a particularly strong emotion, resulting in actual, unaffected emotion.
.4. Practical Aesthetics Method
The last method we at Conquest Management bring you is the Practical Aesthetics method. Some key features of this method include a particular method of script analysis, adaptability, and repetition exercises similar to those in the Meisner technique. It follows 4 essential elements which are:
- The literal: The essential and most basic, uninterpreted, description of what is taking place.
- The want: What does one character ultimately want the other character to say or do.
- The essential action: A universal human desire that relates to the specific and essential nature of what your character wants within the scene. In this step, you must distill the given circumstances and the actions of your character, given to you by the playwright, to a universal human desire that underlies the text.
- The “as if.”: This is something that could feasibly happen in your life, that has not yet happened, that produces a galvanized response within you; a spark to involve the actor in the scene.