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This workshop will help you to cultivate your craft and access your most truthful impulses based on your partners behaviour, through explorations of different Meisner Technique based exercises. Teaching will be adjusted by student’s level of Meisner technique and other experience. For the more advanced students the course puts the repetition exercise into practice through the use of improvisations, emotional preparation, independent activities and relationships. The course will challenge and warm-up your acting muscles and deepen your ability to connect to your partner as well as the imaginary circumstance. You will be paired up with someone working at a similar level as you, and those who want to try working with text, will get a short scene to work with on the second day of the workshop. Beginners in the Technique are welcome.

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TO WHOM THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR?

For actors (advanced and beginners), performers, directors, writers, artists, coaches and anyone wanting to understand their emotional life and the authentic human connections deeper.

 

WHAT DO YOU GET?

Through this workshop you will:

• be introduced to all core exercises in Meisner Technique

• explore and deepen your capacity to work with all core exercises in Meisner Technique

• strengthen your capacity to really listen and connect with your partner

• deepen your emotional expression and understanding

• enhance your capacity to drop down masks and live in your authenticity

• strengthen your sensitivity and awareness of your partner’s emotional life and expression

• strengthen your instincts and capacity to take risks 

• find healthy and organic ways to let go of fear and pressure with other people and on stage

• create more freedom to be present and live in the moment

• get many useful tools to finding authentic emotional expression to any performing platform

• as a director get highly applicable tools and approches on how to gently help actors connect to their authentic emotional life

 

INFO

• Price: 285€ 

• Class times: 1 - 2 May 2024 from 16:30 to 21:30
• Location: Actors Academy Studio, Pursimiehenkatu 26H, 00150 Helsinki

• Place is limited and will be filled on 'first-come first-serve basis'.

• The booking for all events and workshops is binding. You can cancel 30 days prior the event and receive a 50% return of your payment or you can pass on your spot to another person without an extra fee.

• Teaching language is English (Please keep in mind that you do not need to have perfect English skills, and you do not need to worry about accent and pronunciation).

• All rights to changes reserved.

• You can find the event on Facebook in this link here.

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ABOUT DOMINIC KELLY

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 recently 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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TESTIMONIALS

“Dominic Kelly's classes capture the same unique spirit and essence I received whilst studying at the Neighbourhood Playhouse, the birthplace and home of the Meisner technique.” 

- Neil Allen

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“Dominic teaches in a very relaxed yet focused way. With great honesty, respect, humour and sensitivity, he is able to tap into whatever it is you need as an actor to be the very best that you can be.”  Will Kemp, Doom Patrol, Van Helsing

“I have done Meisner training in Los Angeles and London, and this is the best class I’ve ever found.” 

- Robbie Jarvis, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

 

“Dom is amazing. He really is. His insight. And he doesn’t miss a thing, even on Zoom – there is no chance of hiding. It’s almost like online and over Zoom it’s like a magnifying glass. He sees every individual where they are at and he works with each person and he is able to cut through everything and move the person on to their next level. I do find it amazing watching him working with the other people in the class. He’s so perceptive.” 

- Elle DeBurgh, current student

 

“Dom is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. I feel like he really does take that time to invest in you and learn how you work and what’s the best way to train you individually.”  - Michael Lavin, current student

 

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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”.

 

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

- Sanford Meisner