John Freeman, U.K. 2018
John Freeman is Professor of Theatre, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and member of both the Writers’ and Directors’ Guilds. He holds an Adjunct Professorship at the University of Notre Dame in Western Australia. He has occupied roles at universities in the UK and Australia and teaches on the Acting programme at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in the UK.
Freeman has written more than 80 articles and chapters on actor training, contemporary performance, creative learning and research for international publications; his published books are on the reading lists of universities throughout the world and include New Performance/New Writing; Blood, Sweat & Theory; The Greatest Shows on Earth: World Theatre from Peter Brook to the Sydney Olympics; Remaking Memory: Autoethnography, Memoir and the Ethics of Self; and Approaches to Actor Training.
Freeman has directed productions, run residencies and given keynote papers throughout Europe, Australia, Asia and the US. As an actor he has performed in a wide range of live and mediated contexts, from prisons and cathedrals to major festivals, in collaborative works and solo projects for single spectators.
Meisner Technique for Scene Development
The Meisner Technique is based on the premise that everything an actor needs to play a scene can be found in her or his partner. It is built on listening-and-response exercises designed to get actors in touch with human instinct and impulse. The focus is on the here and now, taking actors’ attention away from themselves and onto their scene partners. In an approach that cuts across genres repetition work insists that actors stay in the moment. The pursuit of spontaneity under imaginary circumstances involves actors putting their focus on a task outside themselves. The Meisner Technique aims to help actors create a bond based on each other’s truth—in short, to respond to one another.
Effectiveness aside, the spontaneity created by the repetition exercise is not always easily brought into scene work. In this workshop participants will gain insight into Meisner's Repetition and Three Moment work, exploring ways of developing scenes and finding liberation from blocks to authenticity.