Meisner in Music: Merging Beautiful Singing with Emotional Acting

As vocalists, we’re often taught one set of tools in voice lessons and another in acting classes but left on our own to put the two together. It can feel like we have to choose between beautiful singing and emotional acting, sacrificing the integrity of one to focus on the other.

Sanford Meisner, internationally-acclaimed acting teacher (and concert pianist!), spent over 60 years developing a technique that was simplifying, grounding, step-by-step, and allowed artists to stay present, trust themselves, and find freedom in performance. Meisner-trained actors include Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins, Kathy Bates, Viola Davis and Sam Rockwell.

Even as the highly-effective technique proved to produce some of theatre and film’s finest performances, after Meisner’s death in 1997, the question still remained: 'How do we take this freeing technique that emphasises spoken text and working off a partner and apply it to music and often performing with no partner?'

20 years later, Meisner in Music began to seek to bridge this gap.

While Founder Jillian Paige originally created Meisner in Music to be an acting class technique specifically for singers, over its years of existence we found that it can help musicians with so much more, including performance anxiety, trust in technique, artistic agency, and presence and embodiment both on stage and in life.

In our workshop with the Voice Study Centre, participants will learn the foundational tool of the Meisner technique, 'repetition', and gain insight into additional aspects of the technique that are particularly useful for singers such as emotional preparation and 'the physical impediment'. Attendees can expect to leave with tools to apply to their own artistry and their students to help them get out of their heads, trust in their voices, and, most importantly, trust in themselves.