12th April 2010

Bill Esper is coming to Berlin! From June 21st to 26th, he and his wife Suzanne will teach a full six day workshop, taking actors through the fundamentals of the Meisner Technique, and into Scenework...

Bill runs one of the most highly regarded acting schools in the United States, and prior to that, spent 17 years working alongside Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

Following my visit to his studio in New York last December, we have been working to find a time when he could come. His confirmation is a wonderful conclusion to our correspondence and comes at a crucial moment in the development of the studio here too.

As an event in its own right, this is an important opportunity for actors throughout Europe, who have not yet experienced the benefits of this approach to acting. 

But it also gives actors who have explored the work a chance to compare their experience with the plumbline of a master teacher. Already, in five short years, interest in the Meisner Technique has grown here INCREDIBLY fast - so much that every school, studio or coach claims to offer some form of introduction to his exercises. 

It will be fascinating to have Bill here and watch how he lays out the landscape of this wornderful work, and hope that more of our actors catch a glimpse of the potential it holds for their acting...

20th December 2009

Reflecting on our work together, following a fabulously productive year (and a fantastic Christmas Party!) it's clear things are now becoming really exciting. 

2009 saw us move into the Actors Space Studio at the Aqua Carré, where we have been able to create a home for the work at last. This fabulous open space gives us the flexibility to offer more classes, so that actors can work on a broader range of core skills. And we have just been offered a longer term rental agreement, so that we can plan further in advance, a great relief! 

For the Meisner Technique itself, in February 2009 we commenced the first ten week intensive foundation class, a new training programme for twelve actors, which continued throughout the year and will be a feature again of 2010.

And for those actors, and others who have been working with us regularly, we find ourselves entering a second-year training programme: four regular scene study groups are ready to get working on scenes, emotional preparation, relationships, impediments and particularisations, and leading towards a fully organic view of how to build a character...

This is part of a shift away from the system of drop-in classes which helped us to establish the value of the Meisner Technique here in Germany. It has taken this long to make it clear that this approach is not an additional set of tools for the "Actor's Toolkit", but a radically different way of thinking about acting.

For myself, I just returned from a fact-finding mission in New York, where I was a guest at the William Esper Studios. For ten days, I watched a range of classes, with first year and second year students training exactly as we do here, and with the same excitement at each development. I spoke with the studio manager, Laith, and his assistants about how the school functions, and felt utterly welcomed there, like coming home. William Esper is probably the most widely respected Meisner teacher in the world - a german translation of his book "The Art and Craft of Acting" will be published here in 2010. I am honoured to develop an ongoing relationship with his studio in New York, and personally it represents a fabulous opportunity to enrich my own experience of the work I've been dedicated to for over twenty years now.

Relationships here in Berlin have deepened too, with respected tutors in other disciplines becoming aware of how their work intersects organically with our own. I never wanted to form another school with a formal curriculum where each teacher was independent of all the others. It has taken a while to find the right partners, but in areas of movement, of voice, of accent, and specific work like the Chekhov Technique and Jens Roth's Sourcetuning, we are ready to offer a much broader programme of training, both for professionals and beginners.

I want to leave this entry with a segment of an email I received from an actor yesterday, following her absence from class because she was filming:

"...shooting last week, I had some pretty heavy scenes. But I used our emotional preparation work and I nailed it. All of the scenes. The director was so worried and the camera man cried (!) So thank you so much for prepping me up and giving the space and secure environment to work on that.."

I hope this blog finds you well, and ready to enjoy the Christmas Break. Keep checking in over the start of the New Year to keep up to date with what's changing at the Actors Space.  Thank you for your continuing passion and (if the Christmas Party was anything to go by) for the growing feeling of Community among our members.

Mike, Berlin 

25th October 2009

Last night I was in Neukölln, attending what I sincerely hope was the first of many presentations called “Scene Bites”. Eighteen professional actors, drawn together by one simple idea, presented an evening of scenes to an audience of over 400 at the Saalbau in Karl-Marx Straße.

Led by Gabriel Merz and his co-organisers, these actors chose their partners, found the scenes, rehearsed alone, organised set and costumes and worked as the onstage crew to support each other's presentations. Scenes included Chekhov, Marber, Reza and Neil Simon; scenes extracted from a wide variety of plays and films, both in English and German.

And what was the simple idea which galvanised all this effort? That actors should at all times be working on their art, and that the only real test of that work comes when you put it in front of an audience.

This takes ENORMOUS courage. The biggest single achievement of the evening is that it happened at all. With no director to guide them, and with nothing to support them except their own belief in their work, these self-motivated actors took a huge risk in exposing themselves to public opinion.

To many onlookers last night, this might have appeared foolhardy, and perhaps it even is foolhardy, if we measure everything in the scales of 'concrete results'. Was everything onstage of the best quality? No. Was everything even the best work those eighteen actors were capable of? I sincerely doubt it, though much of it was entertaining enough. Will it be better next time around? Certainly, if the group takes proper encouragement from their experience and learns quickly what works and what doesn't.

Talking to Gabriel before the show began, he said the galvanising impulse came from participation in Larry Moss' classes here earlier this year. What Larry said during his open seminar and then reiterated throughout his workshop, is that actors CANNOT allow themselves a day without working on their art. Musicians constantly practice, dancers do, even athletes spend more time training than competing. But actors have always had a poor track record in sustaining their development. It was one of the things Stanislavsky complained about bitterly, a hundred years ago. But for German actors, last night's event represents the promise of change, if its lessons are embraced in the right spirit.

The room is a barn for one thing, much better suited to amplified music than to the spoken word. Some of the actors lacked the stage experience to put their work out beyond the first five rows. Some of the scenes were blocked in such a way as to obscure half the scene from half of the audience. Some scenes apparently were not blocked at all. Some lacked emotional depth, or pace, or occasionally betrayed too slim an understanding of the text. And yet, though some things definitely needed work, overall, in my opinion, last night's event was a huge success.

Why am I so critical if the presentation was such a good thing? Well, it's because it MATTERS. I'm absolutely sure Larry would fully applaud “Scene Bites” as an endeavour, but anyone who knows Larry knows that he would be equally quick and tough with his criticism. It's a question of respect for acting, which Larry learned from Stella Adler; a respect for the craft which takes criticism as meat, not as poison.

So, in the hope that “Scene Bites 2” happens, I would make the following recommendations, to anyone who is interested. Some of these observations will come as no surprise to those involved or who attended, but they're worth stating for the record:

1. If actors do this, they must do it for THEMSELVES and not for “the industry”. It is an actors' project, for their own development as artists. Inviting directors and casting directors is of course understandable, but no good art comes from trying to impress someone. Experience of this kind of project in London has proven that when the work gains consistently good word-of-mouth, the industry starts to come without being invited.

2. There should be an entrance fee. A small one, maybe. Perhaps five Euros. But anyone coming to watch is coming to watch professional actors do their work, and that deserves paying for. At the Berliner Ensemble you pay twenty Euros to watch the Probebühne. Actors working on their own behalf should not undervalue themselves. And they should not have to worry, while they prepare to go on stage, whether the rent will be paid on the room they have hired.

3. The most important foundation of last night's impulse, whether the actors understood this or not, was the RIGHT TO FAIL. And if some of them did fail, in one way or another, they are all to be applauded. And they are all to be encouraged to get back up there and do it again. It can be a humiliating experience, and we try to avoid it whenever possible, but the Freedom to Fail in Public must be protected. Without it we would have no Becket, no Pinter, no Williams, no Shakespeare or Goethe or Moliere. Christopher Walken goes often back to work on the stage between big-budget Hollywood films. Hear him talk about a production of Macbeth in which he was catastrophically panned, and you get some idea of how brave any actor has to be to withstand the winds of criticism to which our job inevitably exposes us.

4. There MUST be a director for the whole project. Not an Auteur, instructing, bullying, insisting that actors bind themselves to his/her concept, but someone who is prepared simply to be the first audience for each piece as it is being rehearsed. The actor's impulse to take responsibility for working on his art is exactly right, EXCEPT that the actor cannot be responsible for directing himself. Actors need directors, not because actors don't know what to do, but because they cannot watch themselves and do their job at the same time. And maybe this idea could also enable actors and directors to come to a new understanding of their relationship.

“Scene Bites” matters. With their acting at last placed Front and Centre of a public presentation, the strengths and weaknesses of all participants become much more apparent. If taken with a healthy attitude, this will make actors take more account of their need to train constantly, and continue to do something about it.

I fully expect this event to happen again. Actors need such an opportunity, and they need to be part of an ensemble, taking mutual responsibility, and enjoying shared hopes. There will be a quick spread of such events in Berlin, so it will become even more important that the quality is raised. 

And then, if Larry Moss' presence here generates nothing more than this event and the events that follow it, he will have achieved more for German actors than all the masterclasses in the world.

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20. Februar 2009

Hi Mike,

I am moving to London in May, and want to study acting, and in particular the Meisner Technique. I would be interested in spending some time in Berlin but I would have to look in to the visa limitations;  we can get 2 year work Visa's for the U.K.  

I have spent hours on the net researching different schools and classes in London but hadn't yet found anything that really stands out, but I will check out some more places. I'm a bit wary of some of these courses, you can look at all the websites but you really need to get an objective opinion to know if they are any good. I think that it is the same in New York, L.A, and Auckland – There are a lot of schools that seem to be more about recruitment and turnover rather than the quality of actors they are turning out. 

There are just two other things I would like to ask you if you have the time. Firstly what's your opinion on the short intensive courses vs. the one or two or even three year degree courses? I am not the sort of person who does things half heartedly and I do want to be a real actor. I know that if I can't become a great actor it will only be because I lack natural ability or X factor, not because of lack of commitment. I love film and I think I always secretly wanted to act but some part of me didn't think it was a realistic/viable career option, "so stupid" (comes from always being told to be a Doctor or Lawyer as I was growing up). It took 10 years and a business degree to realise that I want to follow my dreams, so now I'm chomping at the bit to give it a real go and if I have any talent I know I will fully commit to acting as a career.
 
So after all that my predicament is – I want to do a course that will make me a real actor, The New York play house course is 1 or 2 years long and there is a guy called Michael Succente here in Auckland who runs a 1.5 year course (one night a week) and then a 1 year master course after that (Michael studied with Sanford Meisner in the 80's and I have heard he is an excellent teacher). The Playhouse, Michael, most higher learning institutions and most of the schools connected to the Conference of Drama Schools (who claim to be a sort of "quality control" on drama schools) would suggest that you can't learn to act in short courses and it takes at least a year. Money is an issue too and some of the 6 or 10 week courses cost as much as the year long courses and I would have to work full time while I study. I don't expect that you would learn to be a Master from one 6 of 10 week part time course – but do you believe that you can really develop enough to book jobs and do you think that  might be the best way to start? If I do a 6 or 10 week course and decide that acting is what I really want to do am I going to have to enrol in a 1,2,3 year course to become a proper trained actor?

Second question – What other techniques do you suggest if I can't find a suitable Meisner course? I don't think I want to do the emotional memory style approach and I am unsure about method acting. What about the Adler technique?

I didn't intend to write so much it all just poured out, sorry for taking up so much time. Thanks for your advice.

Cheers,

Alan.