Although I am not an ancient Greek, just ancient, I take the commandment to “know thyself” seriously. It was allegedly one of the three aphorisms on the temple at Delphi and whatever those oracles were smoking, it was obviously giving them some wise highs. Watching my students doing the Meisner exercises, I have come to the realisation that, as in therapy, coming to know oneself is the first step to change. Of course, changing yourself is not the goal of the Meisner technique, but as an actor you have to first know your self in order to change into other selves.
This raises of the question of what your own authentic behaviour is. The Greek word “authentikos“, from which we get “authentic”, means “one acting on one’s own authority”. When we do the repetition exercise, especially when we start, there tends to be a lot of laughter, from the people doing the exercise and also the people watching. In the case of those doing the exercise, the laughter often comes from self-consciousness. For those watching, it is the moments where a person’s body responds without hesitation to the other actor but their words belie* them. So, for example one actor tells the second that they have beautiful eyes; the second actor repeats the sentence and at the same time instinctively takes a step back. When the first actor notices this and says “You took a step back … you’re uncomfortable” the second actor, from their safe distance, says “I’m not uncomfortable” and we all laugh, because we can see the actor’s discomfort at the same time as we hear their denial. This denial is very common and comes from a social instinct to put the other person at ease, even in the midst of our own discomfort. But the body doesn’t lie. Or, as Meisner put it, an ounce of behaviour is worth a ton of words. In fact, research shows that our bodies respond to situations before we have had time to articulate what we are experiencing, before we have had time to “gather our thoughts together”. And it is precisely this gap, between the behaviour of the body (our physical responses) and our rational self (our words) that we seek to explore in the first series of Meisner exercises. We do this in order to discover the many behaviours that we have in our repertoire when we stop masking them, apologising for them and denying them, as our socialisation demands we do in daily life. William Esper, one of the great Meisner teachers, spoke about “turning up the volume” on certain behaviours we have when we play characters that, on the face of it, are a million miles from us. We all have Macbeth, Joan of Arc and even Hannibal Lecter, within us, because we are capable of behaviour that, while hopefully less extreme than Lecter’s, allows us to relate to such extreme characters.
Another aspect of human psychology that I witness frequently in these classes is that the distance between the person we (sometimes desperately) want to be and the person we are is usually much smaller than we think. It’s like in the Wizard of Oz, where the cowardly lion, the heartless tin-man and the brainless scarecrow all find out that they had the qualities they were seeking all along – they just had to find them. In my classes, I frequently find that the students who say they’re too anxious to let go are the bravest people in the room while the ones that claim they aren’t expressive are the ones having the greatest difficulty hiding their feelings (this is of course a Good Thing) and the ones who tell me they aren’t bright enough to understand what we’re doing are so bright they got it on day one and, because of this, keep getting in their own way. My point is that the poles between who we want to be and who we actually are draw closer together as much through self-knowledge as through an active attempt to change ourselves. Once we accept that for every characteristic we have, we also possess its opposite, we can stop worrying about which one is an expression of our authentic self and and just be.
Every major philosophy and religion contains this idea of two aspects and the dance they do with each other, whether it is Zoroastrianism, Platonism, the religions of the book, West African Vodun or yinyang. Perhaps time rubbed the edge off the Delphic proverb and instead of “Know thyself” it originally read “Know thyselves”. Once we discover and give ourselves permission to be our dualities, we will have enough character to play all the parts from Antigone to Zeus and everything between.
This week was the last class of the Tuesday morning foundation course and my first course for Meisner Studio, so it was a big deal. I was feeling under the weather after an exhausting weekend but struggled in anyway, and of course I didn’t regret my decision. I showed them the basics of how we do text the Meisner way by learning the lines neutrally so you can stay open to the other actor and your impulses each time you do the scene. They committed completely to the process and created some beautiful work. I will definitely be seeing some of them again in the intermediate classes and drop-in classes from September. This is a great joy to me as I have learned so much from watching them develop as actors and know there is much, much more to come. There were some real edge-of-the-seat moments, breakthroughs and set-backs, lots of tears and laughter, as well as the odd slammed and re-opened door. They were a warm, generous and willing group. In fact, I frequently felt like some mad scientist who has been given the chance to carry out live experiments on actual human beings. And now they’re all sewn together into one giant Meisner actor, forever repeating each other’s words!
*The word belie comes from Old English meaning “to show to be false”.
Leila Gray 