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.