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3 Tiers of The Gately/Poole Meisner Technique:

Tier 1 of The Gately/Poole Meisner Technique

Repetition

  • Allows students to inhabit shared experience in an unanticipated, authentic interaction.
  • Exercises are advanced through various Changes and Lessons in Points of View, which intensify into heightened experiences.

Activities – Action work

  • Great care and time is given to the study of action work. This work answers the imperatives:
    • What are you doing?
    • Why are you doing it?
    • What do you hope to achieve? (In action, there is always a conflict.)

Dramatic Imagination

  • Lessons that engage each student’s entrance into the world of the dramatic imagination, illuminating pathways unique to each actor.
  • Through dramatic imaginings, create actions, obstacles, and justifications.

Text Work

  • Once the improvisation has advanced, vulnerability, authenticity, and expansive behavior, are woven into a carefully selected scene.
  • The scene work gives students the chance to apply their early acting technique to a script.

Tier 2 of The Gately/Poole Meisner Technique

Heightened Situation

  • Building on TIER 1, the improvisation advances into a whole array of heightened and life-altering circumstances.

Advanced Contact Improvisation

  • Developing advanced contact-interplay, through silence and true provocation, the stage has been set for the moment-to-moment, deeply connected, viscerally experienced work of this technique.

Relationships

  • These situations are built around powerful, dynamic relationships, and are lived-through authentically, compellingly, and theatrically, with actions created through the dramatic imagination.

Text Work

  • Students develop advanced situational scene skills, using dynamic relationships and life-altering circumstances, with a sophisticated array of actions, and live through them experientially, in moment to moment interactions.
  • The scene work gives students a chance to explore heightened circumstances, to live-through, vividly and personally, the highest range of human experiences.

Tier 3 of The Gately/Poole Meisner Technique

Character Study and Poetic Realism

  • Building on the previous level, the imperative is now to learn to live and inhabit characters in a wide variety of human experiences, to transcend the conventional and to create the sublime – A new, profound approach to building a character.

Scene Study (all periods, all genres)

  • Realistic and Period styles by Master playwrights become the focus. Building upon the lessons mastered in Tier 1 – 3, students now learn the essential skills of self-direction, aided by sequential lessons in research, analysis, clarity and character, using realistic or heightened language.

Nursery Rhyme

  • Using nonsense text to teach clarity, connection, and creativity, these texts inspire color, invention, and a wide variety of interpretations, a necessity for vibrant auditions and self-direction.

Text Work

  • Final preparation as students move from the classroom to the workplace.