A little personal history before we begin:
I graduated high school in 2008. I didn't really quite know what I wanted to do, but my counsellor at the school told me to "not bother" applying to colleges because I didn't have the math requirement and didn't "seem like I had the aptitude for it (the classes) anyway." Needless to say, being 18 and having no idea what to do was/is an unenviable position, so I went to the JC with no plan and took classes that sounded interesting. I had acted a bit before in my life, and when I was 20 I took an acting class at the JC because, hey, it sounded fun.
I fell in love with acting. I loved it so much that I even decided to leave school (I had to do my math general education courses soon anyway) and move to San Francisco to start an acting career. The school I enrolled in was a two-year studio that trained its students in a style of acting called "The Meisner Technique," and it was a hard-core school: Be prepared, don't come late, know your stuff, verbal and emotional abuse was expected from the teachers daily, and the "most important person in the world is your scene partner"... basically, it was a boot camp for those who wanted to act professionally.
For various reasons, after four years of living that lifestyle, I decided to leave it and return to school. I'm sure that I'll talk more about this studio and the methods, leaders and other semi-cultish stuff that went into it, but right now I want to look at an interesting similarity between modern acting studios and the "legitimacy" of following a traditional Buddhist master's pupils.
Modern acting, as we are familiar with it in the West, was first developed in Russia. Anton Chekov, the playwright, was writing new plays that demanded a completely different style of acting that was not only realistic but emotionally truthful to the moment, and an actor named Stanislavsky rose to the challenge. He developed a completely new and systematic method of training the actor for these types of plays, and he called it The System. People loved this style of acting, and so in the 1930s, his Moscow Theatre Company came to New York City to teach a new crop of young actors this new System at a playhouse called the Group Theater.
Stanislavsky was the Buddha of modern acting. His disciples were those who differed on the exact teachings of The System, and from the Group Theater we get the famous teachers of Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner (almost, and this is no exaggeration, every American actor can trace his or her training to one of these three people).
As stated before, Adler, Strasberg and Meisner had differences on what Stanislavsky meant (and I can truly go on and on about these differences), but what is important is that each had their very specific interpretation, followers, exercises and students.
My teacher was taught by Sanford Meisner himself, and was endorsed by him to teach the method. He would often say that he is "one branch removed from the source," and because of that, he was teaching a "purer" system than others who didn't have this dispensation from the "master." Our exercises were completely different than those who followed in the vein of Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg, and the appropriate apostolic succession seems to lend a credibility to these teachings that, in a field like philosophy and its application, can be difficult to achieve.
No teachings are truly written down for these acting studios. Yes, you can get a book called "The Meisner Technique," but it's not truly what we did in classes. Nothing is really written down because many of the exercises had an air of secrecy around them. We had different groups corresponding to different levels of acting, and we were told to never tell the people below us what our exercises or lessons were. There was a level of spirituality in the studio that seemed to almost wobble into the esoteric, especially when people like me, worked up in a "preparation" to the point of being completely out of my mind and ready to kill, would begin a scene... Being so fully present within a moment locked into another human's struggles is difficult to explain without being too "poetic," but much of what Buddhism discusses about mediation finds interesting parallels in Method Acting (perhaps a future paper topic?)
In comparing this experience to the Buddhist teachings we read earlier, I was surprised by the level of dependence to the purity of the "master's" teachings that are found within the Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism traditions, mainly because I had lived four years of my life in that style of reverence for someone who, for all intents and purposes, was deified and whom I never would've, nor would ever, have met; his words were sacrosanct, infallible. This handing down of philosophy by people who are "endorsed" is an interesting riddle for me, because how can a teaching or a philosophy truly remain "pure" forever? Lifestyles change, the world changes, people gain knowledge, and so I understand that in order to preserve the tradition only certain gatekeepers are allowed to pass it, but is not Zen Buddhism in America an example of a series of people taking their philosophies and unofficially sharing them? Whenever I teach a friend, a co-worker or even a class "how to act," even though I was never truly crowned a "Meisner Trained Actor," you can bet I'm using Meisner-like techniques. So, whether they like it or not, that philosophy is out of the bag and being consumed and transformed within the society.
Oh, and long story short, I don't really act anymore. Again, I'll probably explain why in future posts. But it's quite the interesting story...
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