Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances (Blaise Kirschner and David Panos, 2011)
HD, 33min, sound
Three young actors are engaged in improvisation exercises devised by the influential American acting coach Sanford Meisner. Their acting lesson is juxtaposed with excerpts from a late interview with Meisner and silent clips of famous Meisner-trained movie stars. Meisner, whose formative years in
the Group Theatre coincided with the Great Depression, famously defined acting as "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances." Meisner's techniques paradoxically deploy a training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback to stimulate 'authentic' emotion and ‘spontaneity’ in performance. His method left a distinct mark on American cinema and remains a testimony to the seduction of authentic emotional performance.
Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances interrogates the meaning of 'emotional truthfulness' in naturalistic performance and its blurring of the distinction between dramatic artifice and so-called 'primal', 'human' impulses, whilst simultaneously foregrounding the hypnotic, open-ended, and affective force of Meisner's method.
One (Cinema)
Two people face each other. One speaks a line to the other: ‘I love you’, for example. The person opposite repeats it, inverted from the first to the second person:
‘You love me.’
One: ‘I love you.’
Two: ‘You love me’ and so on.
Each time the person speaking inflects the phrase with a different emotional nuance: tenderness, defiance, desperation, horror, declaration, surprise, rhetoric, disbelief, question, accusation and so on. A linguistic face off until one person cracks or changes tack, what seems like a game is actually a popular training exercise for actors devised by Sanford Meisner. It is also an accumulation of incremental known responses or an absolutely, repetitively constructed and incrementally evacuated present for the sake of portraying an emotional truth, or Truth itself: what Meisner might call the means for Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, by which he means acting defined as a re-action rather than agency, and proposed as a very free suspended state of happiness, which is also the title of a 2011 video installation by Blaise Kirschner and David Panos. The artwork mops such exercises and contextualises them with documentary material and a showreel of actors in Hollywood feature films deploying their learning. Emanating from two experiences of loss - the death of his brother and the economic crash of the 1930s that led to World War II – Meisner’s technique is proposed as both the product of and a palliative for the moment in which it was conceived. We framed in this work it becomes a metaphor for the artist's own reading of a state of contemporary crisis. The dividing lines (is/is not, have/have not) usually marked by the difference between spectator and representation, the self and other and between subject and object are collapsed, embodied here as both a practise and a theory of acting.
IAN WHITE
LIVING TRUTHFULLY UNDER IMAGINARY CIRCUMSTANCES - exhibition text (Kirschner, 2011)
