Prague Playhouse

Meisner Acting Class Blog on “Meaning”

May 13th, 2009 at 11:12pm boris

Hi everyone!

I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.

On Wednesday, May 13th, our teacher Brian Caspe had us think about meaning in Meisner exercises.

Click on the “ACTING CLASS” button above to read more about the class itself and where we meet!

Click the “(more…)”-button below to read about tonight’s class’s resemblance to aliens having just found a new home here on Earth!

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Imagine you met someone, who thought, life was a Meisner exercise – say, an alien, who looks like a human being, but really isn’t human at all and sees this plane of existence as an option rather than the real thing.

If he ran over your beloved poodle with the stupid wheel-barrel, he tends to walk around with, crushed Fido dead and then shrugged it off with a laugh, you’d be really offended, would you not?

He’d be lacking meaning in the things that he did. Running around with a wheel-barrel has no meaning, unless you transport something with it. And even if you did transport something, you as a human, would consider other modes of transport, depending on what exactly it was, that you are transporting.

Crushing a poodle with a wheel-barrel is really hard to do. Or you would have to be using it like people used ramrods in the dark ages. Our alien would certainly look awkward, doing the barrel-crush: goofy and too forceful at the same time. It would lack any sense. It would lack meaning.

Now, laughing about leaving a bloody mess of your beloved pet tops it. The alien would look totally nice and friendly. But he would lack any type of sympathy for the creature he just thrust over the threshold of this world. It wouldn’t mean anything to him: life and death, love, passion, pain, loss…

This is, how a Meisner exercise can look and feel like, if the door or activity you’re doing, is lacking meaning.

I juggled balls today. I literally did. And I fumbled in more than one way…

I had come up with this activity within ten minutes, because I somehow sensed I would need one. The door I had, was stronger, had more meaning.

Besides I had been posting stuff onto this site, instead of preparing well for class.

So in Meisner world I wheel-barreled around, bounding funnily, recklessly up and down. I failed to crush a poodle this time. But I wouldn’t have cared much, if I had. My partner was in a similar mood. Following the analogy of the alien, he probably had neon-pink curlers in his three-meter-long hair, trying to unroll his outrageous locks while keeping his eyes closed.

Is there any meaning in that? Would we have been this strange to one another outside of Meisner world? No!

Lesson: Take your time coming up with a door or activity that actually means something to you. Doing it twice a week – or more, if you also rehearse outside of class with doors and activities, is hard, though.

You need to believe in the circumstances you created. It has to be something quite specific, you are going to be striving for. You need to get all upset, happy, concerned, sad, mad or angry about the thing you came up with. It should hit you in the stomach. At the same time it needs at least a kernel of truth, because it has to be that good, so that smart you is going to believe in it, while in the exercise.

In short, coming up with a good activity is hard work. The same goes to a teeny-weenily lesser extent for doors.

Funny though, that it is you yourself you’re fooling, when you try to circumvent the working and time-consuming aspect of finding meaning! And that goes for real life outside of the Meisner world as well.

By trying to fool others you end up fooling yourself.

It might take longer to stick, but once you got it, you got it.

I love this aspect of the Meisner world. In a nutshell it represents the real world. It helps me understand myself interacting with reality really well. It helps me become a better person.

And if I could tell Meisner that, I know, he’d be happy.

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General stuff:

Our acting class consists of some ten active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 8.30. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!

If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us!

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About the author:

I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague. I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work, that befits a laddish, tall 40-year-old, please leave a note!

Acting,Classes,General