​ABOUT THE COACH

Dominic is an acting coach with over twenty years of experience in theatre and film, specialising in the Meisner Technique, and as a creative consultant, advising writers, actors, and producers on idea development, and dramaturgy. He is also the artistic director of the salon:collective, hosting actors training and producing creative projects for theatre, film, festivals and corporate clients such as British Council for Rio Olympics, Harvey Nicholls, and Wilderness Festival. Dominic teaches Meisner Technique internationally, and has created an online actor training programme. He has assisted top Meisner coaches, Tom Radcliffe (Actors Temple) and Martin Barter (Sanford Meisner Centre).  His focus in actor training is to embolden actors to question fully and rigorously the definition of Meisner’s quote, ‘living truthfully under imaginary circumstances’. His work encourages actors to question their habits and explore the power of their vulnerability. He recently was awarded the Olwen Wymark Award from the Writer’s Guild for his work with emerging playwrights. Dominic's previous clients have appeared in Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, The Avengers: Infinity War, The Avengers: Endgame, Black Panther, Wonder Woman, Crazy Rich Asians, Ex Machine, Peaky Blinders, Black Mirror, I May Destroy You, The Crown, The Witcher, Casualty, Silent Witness, Holby, EastEnders.​​

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ABOUT MEISNER TECHNIQUE

The Meisner technique is an approach to acting which was developed by the American theatre practitioner Sanford Meisner. The focus of the Meisner approach is for the actor to "get out of their head", such that the actor is behaving instinctively to the surrounding environment. To this end, some exercises for the Meisner technique are rooted in repetition so that the words are deemed insignificant compared to the underlying emotion. In the Meisner technique, there is a greater focus on the other actor as opposed to one's internal thoughts or feelings associated to the character.

Meisner Training is an interdependent series of training exercises that build on one another. The more complex work supports a command of dramatic text. Students work on a series of progressively complex exercises to develop an ability to first improvise, then to access an emotional life, and finally to bring the spontaneity of improvisation and the richness of personal response to textual work. The techniques developed the behavioral strand of Stanislavski's. The technique is used to develop improvisation skills as well as "interpreting a script, and creating the specific physical characteristics of each character the actor played”.

Sanford Meisner said that his approach to training “is based on bringing the actor back to his emotional impulses and to acting that is firmly rooted in the instinctive. It is based on the fact that all good acting comes from the heart, as it were, and that there’s no mentality to it.”

Learn to live in the moment as an actor, and let go of any idea of result. Learn what it means to really “do” and to respond truthfully to a given moment based on what you get from your partner. Through improvisation, emotional truth and personal response learn to resonate authenticity within a given circumstance. Only in this way will you begin to understand the definition of real acting, which is “to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances”.

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“If you want to reach every person in the audience, it's not about being bigger, it's about going deeper.”
- Sanford Meisner 

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