Prague Playhouse

Meisner Acting Class Blog on failure

October 24th, 2009 at 06:43pm boris

Hi everyone!

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

This entry is about how failure is a necessary albeit not so fun way to improve one’s Meisner technique .

Click on the “CLASSES” button above and then choose “ACTING FOR PROFESSIONALS” to read more about the class itself and where we meet!

Last Monday I had it all planned: An “activity” that would wow my acting teacher Brian and the whole class. I would move on from tedious “doors and activities” to the cool cool cool new “home alones”. I would be king of the group. But instead, when I left the room to prepare myself for my “activity”, the meaning that is so badly needed for it to succeed, left with me, but got lost outside.

Horror of horrors! I reentered without any meaning! Preparing my “activity” at home, I had cried and felt really strongly about it. But in class, everything had evaporated. I felt foolish. I dropped my “activity” to at least pay full attention to my two partners who had come to my door. But everything just felt ridiculous. I could not in the least take them seriously. I failed tremendously…

Why was that?

“Doors and activities” might be something that one comes across early on in Meisner work. But they sure are hard to do well. You need to prepare them thoroughly, i.e. days in advance, and revisit them frequently to see if they still make sense, work for you, are believable and have meaning. Preparing “doors and activities” is much like digging for something or chiseling at a rock to create a statue. You go through a lot of uncertainty and haze, before things take shape and come into focus. You also fish in the dark a lot, before you find that an exercise is good. If you force a “door” or an “activity” into existence in haste, they might work if you are lucky. But usually they deflate before or while doing them in class or during a rehearsal. It is clear, why: Like a city that has a dense center but also more loosely  populated outskirts, a “door” or an “activity” has half-conscious aspects and grey areas which need to be explored beforehand. As a person cannot claim to know a city while having visited only its center, so an acting student won’t be able to be well set for an exercise, if he or she has only looked at its core. The same goes for the opposite: People, who live on the periphery of a town, won’t know it well, until they go to its center frequently. An exercise that one has only a vague idea about, will be vague and frustrating in class.

But only through failure does one learn these things! And it is a fact that long-planned exercises can fail, while ones that were prepared on the fly might work splendidly. Failure is thus part of the game and actually a sign that growth is possible – that there are still voids to be filled. And it’s funny to see the patterns of failure and how they differ from student to student.

I, for my part, am very lazy.

So on Monday Brian told me to dedicate more time to the Meisner technique: “A pianist would never call himself a professional, if he or she didn’t rehearse every day and for hours on end!”, he tells us time and again. And he says: “What you put into it, you will also get out of it.” So he urged me to dedicate at least an hour each day to the Meisner technique.

And that’s what I’ve been doing, be it through rehearsals, writing or coming up with “doors and activities”. The blur that one has to overcome in order to get a hold on a good set-up for an exercise is very uncomfortable. I like things clear. But every good thing takes time. And Brian told me: “Look, you lucky bastard! Who can get away with just one hour of work each day?” He is right. One hour is a ridiculously short amount of time. But it’s a great start. And it makes a difference.

So on Wednesday, after I had spent three hours on preparing a “door” and an “activity”, I fared much better. It was almost as if there were rails I could follow. And those rails had been laid in the hours I spent on Meisner before class.

There is a moral to all this: While failure is discouraging and frustrating, it is a necessary element of “the work”.

It’s good to fail as little as possible, though. And one thing I do to avoid failure now, is, to prepare myself better for class.

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General stuff:

Our acting class consists of some fifteen new and not so new 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! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills!

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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