Acting techniques: fourteen ways into a truthful performance.

The system asks you to work out the circumstances, decide what the character wants, and do something about it. Read the scene for what is actually true in it, ask what this person wants and what they are doing to the other person to get it, cut the scene into small bits and give each bit one plain task. Then play the task in the circumstances and let the feeling turn up as a consequence rather than chasing it.

The reason nobody agrees what the system is has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with the books. He wrote in Russian; the Russian original of the first volume runs to roughly 575 pages and the English edition came out at 295, in larger type, two years before Russians could read any of it. English-speaking actors built a tradition on the shortened inner half. Jean Benedetti reunited both halves as An Actor’s Work in 2008.

Two pieces of vocabulary are worth correcting before you use them. He cut a scene into bits, not units, and gave each one a task; objective is his translator’s word and beat is nobody’s. And the common claim that he dropped emotion memory does not survive a look at the text: it is chapter nine of the manual he was still correcting when he died. What changed late in his life was how you reach it — through truthful physical action rather than by going after the feeling directly.

Who it suits: anyone who wants foundations. It is not a style but the grammar the other techniques are written in, which is why conservatories teach it first. What it demands: patience with a translation history, and the discipline to stop preparing and play the task.

The Stanislavski system — the full chapter →

Method acting is Lee Strasberg’s taught training system, run at the Actors Studio and at his own institute. It is a sequence, and the order is the part that gets lost. Relaxation comes first — you sit still in a chair. Then sense memory on ordinary things: a cup of tea, sunlight, a piece of fabric. Personal emotional memory arrives late and rests on everything before it. The private moment exercise sits in the same run.

Three different things share the name, and almost every argument about the Method is really an argument about which one is meant: Strasberg’s taught system, the loose American shorthand for psychologically detailed screen acting, and “going method” — the press description of staying in character off set. Only the first is a technique, and staying in character off set is not something Strasberg taught.

The student list is also less reliable than it looks. Marlon Brando trained with Stella Adler and resented the claim; Al Pacino is the clean case, studying with Strasberg and crediting him openly. On the question of psychological risk, our chapter grades the evidence rather than the reputation: there is a real precautionary consensus, and no actual measurement.

Who it suits: actors whose work is precise but bloodless and who want a graded route toward emotional material. What it demands: the sequence in order, and the knowledge that you never have to use your own trauma — declining is not a failure of nerve.

Method acting — the full chapter →

Adler’s technique starts from the script rather than from you. Establish the circumstances in detail, work out what the character is doing and why they are justified in doing it, and use your imagination to make all of it specific enough to affect you. Research is part of the job: she sent actors to books, paintings and history rather than to their own memories. The feeling arrives because the situation is vivid, not because you fetched it — and the character is supposed to be bigger than you are.

Her own contents page is the syllabus, and it runs in six parts: imagination, circumstances, actions, justification, character, text. A fact which has not passed through your imagination, she said, is a lie. Justification is the drill most worth stealing: take an action or a line and build circumstances that make it necessary.

The founding story is documented. She took leave from the Group Theatre, met Stanislavski in Paris on 3 July 1934 and worked with him for about five weeks, having told him his system made her hate acting. What she is constantly quoted as saying — that you must never use your own life — she did not say. She permitted your experience; what she refused was mining a memory for an emotion. Robert De Niro is a properly documented Adler actor.

Who it suits: actors whose imagination is their strongest muscle, or whose work has gone small and apologetic. What it demands: genuine appetite for text and research — and care, because two unaffiliated schools carry her name.

The Stella Adler technique — the full chapter →

Meisner training removes your ability to plan and replaces it with attention on the other person. His definition of acting — living truthfully under imaginary circumstances — is the one the whole craft borrows, and his opening statement to a new class was that the foundation of acting is the reality of doing.

The front door is the repetition exercise: two actors face each other and repeat one plain observation until something real happens between them. With nothing to invent, attention has nowhere to go except the other person. Then comes a genuinely difficult independent activity, then a door, then a script. Emotional preparation exists, but it happens before the scene, it is imagined rather than remembered, and it is dropped the moment your partner does something.

He was one of the twenty-eight original members of the Group Theatre, founded in 1931, joined the Neighborhood Playhouse faculty in 1935 and ran its acting department until he retired in 1990. Unusually, the technique reaches us from the man himself: Sanford Meisner on Acting, published with Dennis Longwell in 1987, is a transcript of fifteen months of his own classes.

Who it suits: actors who live in their head, plan line readings, or feel dead opposite a scene partner. What it demands: a partner, and time — and text work brought from somewhere else.

The Meisner technique — the full chapter →

Meisner classes and studios — where the training is taught →

Hagen’s technique is built on watching your own ordinary behaviour and then reproducing it on purpose. The object exercises are small solo studies — searching a room for something you have lost, waiting for someone, talking to yourself — and the instruction is to make them exact rather than expressive. It is the least mystical technique on this page, and the most usable alone tonight.

Then you ask six plain questions about the part: who am I, what are my circumstances, what are my relationships, what do I want, what is in my way, and what do I do about it. If you have seen nine numbered questions attributed to her, our chapter traces where they came from; six is what her own method runs on. The emotional material comes from your own life, carried across rather than swapped in — substitution, which she later preferred to call transference.

One fact reorganises everything else about her, and it is on the record twice. Respect for Acting came out in 1973 and became the standard American text; roughly a dozen years later she watched a student misapply it and told a journalist to throw it away, calling it superficial and mechanical. If a class hands you a photocopy, it is worth knowing which of her two books it came from.

Who it suits: self-taught actors building a practice alone, and anyone who wants something to do today. What it demands: exactness rather than expression, and the usual care with personal material.

The Uta Hagen technique — the full chapter →

Chekhov’s technique builds a character out of imagination and physical form instead of the actor’s own history. It is the one major psychological system here that never asks you to use your own life, and it is also the best documented: he set it out himself in To the Actor (1953) and On the Technique of Acting (1991), and both are still in print.

The arrow runs the opposite way from most training. Movement comes first and feeling arrives afterwards: the strength of a movement stirs the will, and the quality of that same movement conjures the feelings. The central tool is the psychological gesture, which he defines in seven words — the crystallised will, and therefore the objective. You give the character’s central want one large physical action, work it privately until it lives in you, then play the scene at ordinary size.

Around it sit the imaginary body (picture yourself taller, heavier, older — he is after what the body is made of as much as its dimensions), imaginary centres given a shape, colour and texture, atmosphere treated as a playable force, and radiating. He ran the Moscow Art Theatre’s First Studio, and in Hollywood was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Spellbound in 1945. Marilyn Monroe took private lessons with him and gave him a chapter of her own memoir.

Who it suits: physical and imaginative actors, character actors, and anyone for whom analysis deadens the work. What it demands: a responsive body, and tolerance for a vocabulary that our chapter traces to a specific source rather than leaving mysterious.

The Michael Chekhov technique — the full chapter →

Viewpoints is improvising in a group while attending to one named element at a time. Tempo. Then duration. Then the shape your body makes, or where the walls are, or how far you are from another person. There is no character and no story to carry you, which is why beginners think nothing is happening. Nothing is supposed to happen.

The name is literal: they are points of view — separable parts of what a performance is made of, which you can look at one at a time instead of treating as one undivided lump. Mary Overlie forged the original Six Viewpoints; Anne Bogart and Tina Landau expanded them into the nine that most training uses, set out in their 2005 book. The book also subdivides three of them, and that is where the useful detail lives. Overlie published her own account in 1998, and said she felt someone was taking her life away.

It is the odd one out in this family because every other technique here trains an individual and this one trains a group. Kinesthetic response and spatial relationship do not exist inside one person; they happen between people. It is the least usable alone of anything on this site.

Who it suits: over-cerebral actors, and anyone whose work lacks physical presence. What it demands: a group and a bare floor. It is not a complete technique and does not claim to be — no text analysis, no character method.

Viewpoints — the full chapter →

Suzuki training is a rigorous physical discipline built on the feet and the lower body. You stamp, hard and rhythmically, to music, until the energy has nowhere to go but down into the floor; you hold demanding positions; you move with the centre of gravity very low. The purpose is a body that can hold and direct energy without it escaping upwards into a tense neck and a pushed voice. It is theatre training, made for a stage and an audience, and it is more like a martial art than anything else on this site.

We can start from the founder’s own book. The Way of Acting was translated by J. Thomas Rimer and published in 1986, and its opening chapter is called The Grammar of the Feet — his title, not a commentator’s. The value of the training, he writes, can be said to begin and end with the feet. The stamping ends with actors using the last of their energy and falling flat to the floor, lying in a hush as though they were dead, before getting up again.

One correction worth carrying: almost every guide defines his “animal energy” as a force between actor and audience. He meant living bodies. His company has been based at Toga in Toyama Prefecture since 1976, and he co-founded the SITI Company with Anne Bogart in 1992 — which is why Suzuki work and Viewpoints are so often taught as a pair. SITI stopped producing and training as an ensemble at the end of 2022.

Who it suits: actors told they read as small or disconnected from the body, and anyone drawn to heightened material. What it demands: a qualified teacher and a body cleared for strenuous work. It teaches no text or character process.

The Suzuki method — the full chapter →

Laban Movement Analysis describes how a movement is done rather than what it is. The part actors use is Effort: four factors, each running between two opposites — Space direct or flexible, Time quick or sustained, Weight strong or light, Flow bound or free. Change one and the body stops behaving like yours. Laban’s own word for the resisting end of each scale was fighting, and for the yielding end indulging.

Combining three of them gives the eight named actions everybody memorises — punch, slash, press, wring, dab, flick, glide, float — and those names matter far less than the dials do. Use the technique to generate physical choices, not to decide what a movement means. It is developed further by students including Irmgard Bartenieff.

Our chapter does not oversell it. Certified analysts agree on Space far more than they agree on Effort; so do machines, and so do untrained viewers. The numbers are on that page, along with his documented position in 1930s Germany, which most summaries tell in a shorter version than the record supports.

Who it suits: character actors and anyone stuck playing themselves. The four dials can be drilled alone, on camera, tonight. What it demands: a psychological partner technique, because it describes how you move, not why.

Laban Movement Analysis — the full chapter →

Classical acting is the same acting with a harder instrument. Work out what the character is arguing, put it into your own words until you could win the argument without the text, then let the verse tell you where the energy goes. The line is a unit of thought, the end of it usually carries a small lift, and the caesura is where the thought turns.

Learn those as constraints that force interesting choices rather than as instructions recovered from the First Folio — because the evidence that they were Shakespeare’s instructions does not hold up. The line-ending rule, the caesura and “trust the verse” are a coherent, effective house style invented in the twentieth century. That is a reason to use them, not a reason to revere them.

Two facts about the material change how you approach a part. A great deal of Shakespeare is not verse at all, and the proportion swings enormously: The Merry Wives of Windsor is roughly nine-tenths prose, Hamlet about a third, Richard II none. Knowing which world your speech comes from matters more than any rule about line endings. Our chapter also takes the word “accredited” apart, because on a drama-school website it is often doing no work at all.

Who it suits: actors heading for theatre or period drama, and anyone whose work has gone small and breath-starved. What it demands: a coach, because scansion is easy to learn wrong alone.

Classical acting — the full chapter →

Linklater training works on the assumption that your voice is already capable and that habit is in the way. You lie down, watch your breath without managing it, find the smallest possible sound, then build resonance, range and articulation before you touch a line of text. It takes considerably longer than a workshop.

The touch of sound is not a minor step — it is the title of the whole first part of her book and a chapter of its own: the smallest possible vibration, arriving on the breath rather than being pushed out of you. For camera work that reverses the usual instinct. If your warm-up is loud, you are training the wrong thing; pitch that moves with the thought is what reads, not volume.

She was born in Edinburgh in 1936 and died in Orkney in 2020. She trained at LAMDA, where the voice teacher was Iris Warren, and was unusually honest about where the work came from: the founding principle that the voice comes from the inside out was Warren’s, and she said so. Several exercises now labelled Linklater were developed later and with others, including jaw work with Fran Bennett.

Who it suits: actors whose voice is the bottleneck — thin, pushed, monotone — and anyone heading toward classical text. What it demands: months rather than a warm-up trick, and ideally a teacher, because the releases can be surprisingly affecting.

The Linklater voice technique — the full chapter →

Fitzmaurice Voicework is two stages with opposite jobs. Destructuring puts your body into held positions until the muscles shake by themselves, so that you cannot manage your own breathing. Restructuring then teaches a specific, repeatable way to breathe for speech. The first needs a teacher. The second you can learn from a page.

In her own words, destructuring is a deep exploration into the autonomic nervous system functions — the spontaneous, organic impulses every actor wants in their acting. Not a warm-up. The tremor copies the body’s tendency to vibrate involuntarily as a healing response in fight-or-flight: shivering with cold or fear, trembling with grief, anger, fatigue or excitement. Restructuring brings rib and belly breath management into speech and harmonises it with what you actually need moment to moment — a structure that still breathes with you.

She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London on a three-year scholarship, studying alongside Cicely Berry, and went back to teach voice there in 1965 before moving to Michigan in 1968. She wrote the method down in an essay called Breathing is Meaning, first published in 1997 — which almost every online guide describes without quoting a line of it. Our chapter quotes it.

Who it suits: over-controllers whose work is airtight and airless, and actors carrying chronic breath-holding. What it demands: a teacher for the destructuring half; the tremor work is powerful and occasionally intense.

Fitzmaurice Voicework — the full chapter →