The Meisner Technique is a “method” acting technique created by and named after Sanford Meisner. Sanford Meisner was an American actor and acting acting coach who developed the technique after working with the Group Theatre at New York City’s Neighborhood Playhouse and continued its refinement for fifty years. Today the technique is part of a two-year program at the Neighborhood Playhouse and at the school that he founded, The Sanford Meisner Centre for the Arts in North Hollywood, California.
Meisner Training is an interdependent series of exercises that build upon one another. The more complex work supports a command of dramatic text.
Meisner students work on a series of progressively complex exercises to develop an ability to improvise, to access an emotional life, and finally to bring the spontaneity of improvisation and the richness of personal response to text. The technique develops the behavioural strand of Stanislavski’s ‘system’, via its articulation in an American idiom as Method acting. The technique asserts that by emphasizing “moment-to-moment” spontaneity through communion with other actors, behaviour that is truthful under imaginary circumstances may be generated.
There are many teachers and acting coaches across the United States who teach The Meisner Technique.
