One Response to “What is the difference between the various method acting techniques?”

1. Answers1 on April 25, 2010 @ 10:34 am

   Some consider Method acting difficult to teach. Partially this is because of a common misconception that there is a single “method. ” “The Method” (versus “the method” with a lower-case m) usually refers to Lee Strasberg’s teachings but really no one method has been laid down. Stanislavski himself changed his method constantly and dramatically over the course of his career. This plurality and ambiguity can make it hard to teach a single method. It is also partially because sometimes method acting is characterized by outsiders as lacking in any specific or technical approach to acting, while the abundance of training schools, syllabi and years spent learning contradict this. In general, however, method acting combines a careful consideration of the psychological motives of the character and some sort of personal identification with and possibly the reproduction of the character’s emotional state in a realistic way. It usually forms an antithesis to clichéd, unrealistic, and so-called rubber-stamp or indicated acting. Mostly, however, the surmising done about the character and the elusive, capricious or sensitive nature of emotions combine to make method acting difficult to teach.

   Depending on the exact version taught by the numerous directors and teachers who claim to propagate the fundamentals of this technique, the process can include various ideologies and practices such as “as if”, “substitution,” “emotional memory” and “preparation”.

   Sanford Meisner, another Group Theatre pioneer, championed a separate, though closely related, school of acting which came to be called the Meisner technique. Meisner broke from Strasberg on the subject of “sense memory” or “emotion memory”, one of the basic tenets of the American Method at the time. Those trained by Strasberg often tried to experience all sensations as the character would and often used personal experience on stage to identify with the emotional life of the character and portray it. Meisner found that too cerebral and advocated fully immersing oneself in the moment of a character and gaining spontaniety through an understanding of the character’s objectives and through exercises he designed to help the actor gain emotional investment in the scene and then free him or her to react as the character.

   Stella Adler, the coach whose fame was cemented by the success of her students Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro, as well as the only teacher from the Group Theatre to have studied Acting Technique with Stanislavski himself, also broke with Strasberg and developed yet another form of acting. Her technique is founded in the idea that one must not use memories from their own past to conjure up emotion, but rather using the Given Circumstances. Stella Adler’s technique relies on the carrying through of tasks, wants, needs, and objectives. It also seeks to stimulate the actor’s imagination with the use of As-If’s. As she often preached, “We are what we do, not what we say. “