My acting career was a white-knuckle ride. Whether I was auditioning for a B-movie or acting in a TV guest shot, I felt deep down that I did not belong in the entertainment business. Acting was not my calling. Rather, it was a lifestyle choice that by sheer chance had chosen me. I possessed only modest talent, suffered from a debilitating lack of confidence, and accepted whatever roles came my way. My insecurity and lack of conviction made me jittery, sometimes even panicky on the set. I attempted to ‘take the edge off’ with a variety of substances (well, it was the 80s), but chasing chemical highs and lows only added to my general unsteadiness. Thankfully, friends, family and a sense of humor helped me to weather the storms.
But there were brief moments when I tasted the joy of acting. Those moments came in my acting classes with Harry Mastrogeorge. When I left the entertainment business, became a mom, and then began intensive training with infant expert Magda Gerber, I was often aware of an intangible feeling of familiarity with many of Magda’s theories. I later realized that Magda’s child-rearing ideas felt familiar because they recurrently brought to mind the methods of my favorite acting teacher. The core values these two approaches share struck a chord in me. Two parallel lessons stand out among the many.
The first parallel between Harry’s acting lessons and Magda’s child care philosophy is that they both are gimmick-free approaches that require us to trust simple logic. Harry Mastrogeorge eschewed artificial acting techniques like “substitution”: dwelling on the death of your dog to drum up tears for a scene that has nothing to do with your dog (or any dog); and “repetition exercises,” which involve two actors repeating the same words to each other until they connect emotionally—“How are you? How are you?! How are you?
And Harry had the least patience of all with the idea—encouraged by some acting institutions– that an actor has to have a real-life experience to be able to be immersed in a role. For instance, to play a homeless person, an actor should live on the streets for a week. But there were some obvious limitations to this method; to play a vampire, would you have to bite necks and drink real blood?
Harry was inspired by Einstein’s quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” And Harry would often say, “On the wings of your imagination you can create anything!” He wanted us to approach a scene with “childlike innocence,” to “play make-believe” and he taught us that acting was no different than “Cowboys and Indians.” He instructed us to prepare for a scene by spending hours daydreaming, imagining each detail of the situation from our character’s point of view as prescribed by the writer, until we began to believe our make-believe. Then, when it was time for us to act we would submit to the situation we had spent time imagining. It was a challenging process, but it was simple and uncluttered. Harry’s approach gave the actor independence because it could be used when acting in any scene anywhere, while other techniques I’d been coached in had to be altered and rethought for every role.
Magda Gerber’s approach to child care is also free of gimmicks and quick fixes. A parent is asked to forego most of the equipment that we are told by others we need. Bouncy seats, walkers, jumpers, infant swings, musical mobiles are unnecessary and unproductive at best, and can even be detrimental to our ultimate goals for a child. We are taught to observe our child’s self-initiated activity in a peaceful environment rather than resort to artificial stimulation to entertain, teach, or coax a response. We trust a child’s inborn capabilities to daydream and create play. If imagination is more important than knowledge, isn’t listening to the songs of birds, gazing at clouds, or touching spots of shadow on a wood floor vastly more important than memorizing a word on a flashcard?
Magda gives us a basic strategy: pay full attention to a baby during ‘caring’ rituals like diapering, feeding and bathing, and then allow him to spend the rest of the day playing without interruption. The job is still challenging, but the logic is common sense. We don’t have to start suddenly doing different things for our child and rethinking our role because he is, for example, now six months old and ‘should’ be able to sit up. Trusting a child to develop at her own pace, respecting the child’s inborn abilities and developmental timetable is the overall approach. This basic trust doesn’t alter, regardless of the child’s age.
A second parallel lesson that both Harry and Magda taught me is the importance of self-reliance and intrinsic motivation. Both teachers espouse approaches that rely on inner-direction. Harry never allowed students to applaud each other after a scene. He did not want us to think in terms of performance or product, but to simply focus on our imaginary experience as completely as possible.
It was extremely annoying to a people-pleasing, validation-hooked person like me when he would say, “Janet, tell me about your experience,” rather than, “That was good,” “You were fantastic,” or “That sucked.” But those stamp-of-approval kinds of responses only reinforced and perpetuated my dependence on feedback from others to function as an actor.
Playing to an audience is bad acting, and Harry wanted us to intuit for ourselves when we were truly involved in a scene, when we were not, and when we were “in-and-out.” One of his mantras was, “If you believe it, the audience knows it.” Harry believed that when an artist of any kind works to please an audience, it’s the kiss of death for his creation. Masterpieces are made when an intrinsically motivated artist expresses himself and creates to his own satisfaction.
Children are born intrinsically motivated, but can be conditioned to be outer-directed by our responses. Magda Gerber taught me the value of preserving inner-directness in a child, and this resonated, because it was an attribute I struggled to regain for myself. Gerber believed in the importance of acknowledgement and encouragement, while urging caution with respect to praise. In Gerber’s book Dear Parent, Caring For Infants With Respect she suggests that, rather than praise, we act as a “broadcaster” and describe the child’s actions. When an infant rolls from his back to his stomach for the first time after days of struggle we want to yell, “Hip-hip hooray! Good job!” But when we look into a child’s eyes with a joyful smile and simply say, “You rolled over!” we see in the child a glimmer of self-satisfaction and he keeps ownership of his accomplishment.
Children naturally wish to please us; indeed, pleasing an adult caregiver is vital to an infant’s basic survival. Tempering our responses is sometimes necessary if we believe in the value of inner-direction. It is important to protect our children from becoming “performers,” hooked on praise and external rewards. Being told we’re great doesn’t ever make us believe we are great; it only conditions us to look to others for approval. We grow in self-confidence when we stay in tune with our capabilities, when we overcome struggle and adversity to finally accomplish a goal, and when we survive failure. And, after all, aren’t self-reliance and self-confidence one and the same?
My acting career was a white-knuckle ride. Whether I was auditioning for a B-movie or acting in a TV guest shot, I felt deep down that I did not belong in the entertainment business. Acting was not my calling. Rather, it was a lifestyle choice that by sheer chance had chosen me.
I possessed only modest talent, suffered from a debilitating lack of confidence, and accepted whatever roles came my way. My insecurity and lack of conviction made me jittery, sometimes even panicky on the set. I attempted to ‘take the edge off’ with a variety of substances (well, it was the 80s), but chasing chemical highs and lows only added to my general unsteadiness. Thankfully, friends, family and a sense of humor helped me to weather the storms.
But there were brief moments when I tasted the joy of acting. Those moments came in my acting classes with Harry Mastrogeorge. When I left the entertainment business, became a mom, and then began intensive training with infant expert Magda Gerber, I was often aware of an intangible feeling of familiarity with many of Magda’s theories. I later realized that Magda’s child-rearing ideas felt familiar because they recurrently brought to mind the methods of my favorite acting teacher. The core values these two approaches share struck a chord in me. Two parallel lessons stand out among the many…
The first parallel between Harry’s acting lessons and Magda’s child care philosophy is that they both are gimmick-free approaches that require us to trust simple logic. Harry Mastrogeorge eschewed artificial acting techniques like “substitution”: dwelling on the death of your dog to drum up tears for a scene that has nothing to do with your dog (or any dog); and “repetition exercises,” which involve two actors repeating the same words to each other until they connect emotionally—“How are you? How are you? How are you?!
And Harry had the least patience of all with the idea—encouraged by some venerable acting institutions– that an actor has to have a real-life experience to be able to be immersed in a role. For instance, to play a homeless person, an actor should live on the streets for a week. But there were some obvious limitations to this method; to play a vampire (as so many do these days!), would you have to bite necks and drink real blood? Harry was inspired by Einstein’s quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” And Harry would often say, “On the wings of your imagination you can create anything!” He wanted us to approach a scene with “childlike innocence,” to “play make-believe” and he taught us that acting was no different than “Cowboys and Indians.”
He instructed us to prepare for a scene by spending hours daydreaming, imagining each detail of the situation from our character’s point of view as prescribed by the writer, until we began to believe our make-believe. Then, when it was time for us to act we would submit to the situation we had spent time imagining. It was a challenging process, but it was simple and uncluttered. Harry’s approach gave the actor independence because it could be used when acting in any scene anywhere, while other techniques I’d been coached in had to be altered and rethought for every role.
Magda Gerber’s approach to child care is also free of gimmicks and quick fixes. A parent is asked to forego most of the equipment that we are told by others we need. Bouncy seats, walkers, jumpers, infant swings, musical mobiles are unnecessary and unproductive at best, and can even be detrimental to our ultimate goals for a child. We are taught to observe our baby’s self-initiated activity in a peaceful environment rather than resort to artificial stimulation to entertain, teach, or coax a response. We trust a baby’s inborn capabilities to daydream and create play. If imagination is more important than knowledge, isn’t listening to the songs of birds, gazing at clouds, or touching spots of shadow on a wood floor vastly more important than memorizing a word on a flashcard?
Magda gives us a basic strategy: pay full attention to a baby during ‘caring’ rituals like diapering, feeding and bathing, and then allow him to spend the rest of the day playing without interruption. The job is still challenging, but the logic is common sense. We don’t have to start suddenly doing different things for our child and rethinking our role because he is, for example, now six months old and ‘should’ be able to sit up. Trusting a child to develop at her own pace, respecting the child’s inborn abilities and developmental timetable is the overall approach. This basic trust doesn’t alter, regardless of the child’s age.
A second parallel lesson that both Harry and Magda taught me is the importance of self-reliance and intrinsic motivation. Both teachers espouse approaches that rely on inner-direction. Harry never allowed students to applaud each other after a scene. He did not want us to think in terms of performance or product, but to simply focus on our imaginary experience as completely as possible. It was extremely annoying to a people-pleasing, validation-hooked person like me when he would say, “Janet, tell me about your experience,” rather than, “That was good,” “You were fantastic,” or “That sucked.” But those stamp-of-approval kinds of responses only reinforced and perpetuated my dependence on feedback from others to function as an actor.
Playing to an audience is bad acting, and Harry wanted us to intuit for ourselves when we were truly involved in a scene, when we were not, and when we were “in-and-out.” One of his mantras was, “If you believe it, the audience knows it.” Harry believed that when an artist of any kind works to please an audience, it’s the kiss of death for his creation. Masterpieces are made when an intrinsically motivated artist expresses himself and creates to his own satisfaction.
Children are born intrinsically motivated, but can be conditioned to be outer-directed by our responses. Magda Gerber taught me the value of preserving inner-directness in a child, and this resonated, because it was an attribute I struggled to regain for myself. Magda believed in the importance of acknowledgement and encouragement, while urging caution with respect to praise.
In Magda’s book Dear Parent, Caring For Infants With Respect she suggests that, rather than praise, we act as a “sportscaster” and describe the child’s actions. When an infant rolls from his back to his stomach for the first time after days of struggle we want to yell, “Hip-hip hooray! Good job!” But when we look into a child’s eyes with a joyful smile and simply say, “You rolled over!” we see in the child a glimmer of self-satisfaction and he keeps ownership of his accomplishment.
Children naturally wish to please us; indeed, pleasing an adult caregiver is vital to an infant’s basic survival. Tempering our responses is sometimes necessary if we believe in the value of inner-direction.
It is important to protect our children from becoming “performers,” hooked on praise and external rewards. Being told we’re great doesn’t ever make us believe we are great; it only conditions us to look to others for approval. We grow in self-confidence when we stay in tune with our capabilities, when we overcome struggle and adversity to finally accomplish a goal, and when we survive failure. And, after all, aren’t self-reliance and self-confidence one and the same?
Originally published by Janet Lansbury on September 12, 2009
Thanks, Janet. I’m thinking about having children and wondering whether I really want to, or want to do it to somehow assure myself that I am a legitimate American adult.
I appreciate your candor about your own self-doubts, your ongoing efforts to regrow your sometimes hidden or trampled intrinsic motivation. Too few adults admit we struggle to find that in ourselves. And I think it’s important for parents to look for their own, if they want to foster it in their children.
Thank you, and I wholeheartedly agree!
And it sounds like you should have children.
Acting is a very good skill for a parent to have or develop, Janet. (Your personal story is quite compelling!) What ‘acting’ for our children means to me is – subduing our own inner desires for the sake of the child. This is very much ‘maturation’. Thinking over reflexive behavior. Ah, well, you really said it better. Nice job.
Thanks, Barbara, you make an excellent point about there being some acting involved in good parenting. I notice that most when I have to say, “No” with total conviction when it would be so much easier to say, “Yes”!
Janet, The articles only get better. Each morning I wake up and take a quick look to see if you have posted anything new. If not, I read the older posts. This particular one is inspirational not only to parents, but to people of every walk of life and age.
I especially liked the statement:
“We grow in self-confidence when we stay in tune with our capabilities, when we overcome struggle and adversity to finally accomplish a goal, and when we survive failure. And, after all, aren’t self-reliance and self-confidence one and the same?”
It is so important to remember these words not only for my children, but for myself as well…I am going to pass this on to all my adult friends who have grown children…RIE truly transcends all age levels…..
I am so grateful for this early morning gift!
Roseann, Thanks so much for the encouragement…and I agree about RIE transcending!
Thanks for being so open about your own life experiences. Your words are both encouraging and inspiring, and it’s comforting to me that you can express things I feel and believe but struggle to say. This way of raising or working with children seems so obvious and right to me, but so foreign to others around me that I sometimes wonder if I’m from another planet. Maybe I am – but at least I have found people from the same planet at last!
Yes, you HAVE! 🙂
Wonderful post, Janet. And what an insightful acting teacher.
I am eternally grateful to my parents for allowing me to develop an imagination and not filling my life with ‘amusements’. Yes, as a performer too I do still like applause- but I am also happy to imagine for the sake of imagining, and do for the sake of doing.
I love the idea of not utilizing “props” like jumpers, walker and swings for infants but unfortunately when you have a child with an intense need for movement this seems unrealistic. my son, who has SPD, was unhappy unless he was moving. he would scream, almost as if in pain, unless he was being bounced or walked and therefore these props were very helpful to his development. in our home these props were not intended to “coax, entertain, or teach” our son but to soothe him. they were a lifesaver for us as i believe they are for many parents whose children are not neuro-typical.
Hi Janet,
Thank you tremendously for this affirmative and inspiring article. I’m considering acting classes as a way of self expression and more importantly to rev my creative energy. I have 2 children and they have been in Waldorf schools since they were born. I truly believe in a childs imagination and love that acting is a way to keep my own imagination alive. This article helped me seal my decision to move forward with acting classes. Thank you!
Janet,
I like your posts and my sister sends them to me often as she is a parent of two young ones. Yet, I have to tell you that your representation of “repetition” is entirely inaccurate.
“… and ‘repetition exercises,’ which involve two actors repeating the same words to each other until they connect emotionally—’How are you? How are you? How are you?!'”
If you said, “how are you?” in a real Meisner class, you would be asked to sit down or kicked out. The whole point of the exercise is to quickly get to strong points of view (“I love you”, “You scare me”, “I need you”), so that when you need strong points of view in acting, you have those in your toolbox. In truth, the more detailed Meisner approach sounds a lot like what you said about:
“… spending hours daydreaming, imagining each detail of the situation from our character’s point of view as prescribed by the writer, until we began to believe our make-believe. Then, when it was time for us to act we would submit to the situation we had spent time imagining.”
I would suggest more research before putting down an entire acting technique, and repetition is a clear reference to Meisner. It’s disrespectful to a man who has brought a lot to the art and whose technique changed my life.