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Today's mini check in episode is a trip through my brain about all the things I'm unlearning, reflecting on my new anarchist feelings to dismantle all the things, and how devised theatre is the best way to describe family. I'll examine some things jumping around my brain these days about theater, the performing arts, mental health education, and parenting.
Go down the rabbit hole with me for a moment to see what I'm unlearning, relearning questioning and how it will impact this podcast.
Maybe you're going down your own rabbit hole of self discovery and mental, spiritual re-invigoration or reinvention. If you are welcome and let's jump in together.
https://www.instagram.com/mfaparentingedition
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/mfa-the-parenting-edition-1370329
Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mfaparenting)
____________________
Full Transcript
EPISODE 35A DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Taisha: [00:00:00] Angelica. Can you say hello?
[00:00:04] Angelica: [00:00:04] Heyo! Heyo?
[00:00:06] Taisha: [00:00:06] How are you today?
[00:00:07]Angelica: [00:00:07] I doing well.
[00:00:12] Taisha: [00:00:12] You asked me how are you?
[00:00:14] Angelica: [00:00:14] How are you?
[00:00:15] Taisha: [00:00:15] Well, I'm doing well also.
[00:00:30] Welcome to MFA the parenting edition. I'm Taisha Cameron. These lessons from the theater for raising ourselves and our kids, came about when I realized my MFA in acting trained me for life as a mommy, better than life as a full-time actor. In today's episode, I'm just checking in with y'all. I really just wanted to take a moment and go over the things that are jumping around in my head right now and where I feel it's going to take the direction of this podcast. So without further ado, Is MFA.
[00:00:59] Episode 35 Down the Rabbit Hole.
[00:01:04] Hello. Hello. lovelies and welcome back to MFA. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. I just wanted to take a moment today and check in. I wanted to see how you're doing.
[00:01:22] How are you?
[00:01:25] I hope you're well, I really do. I have been going through a mental revolution. Battles going off in my head.
[00:01:35] It's been a journey of unlearning or in .The homeschool community. It would have be called unschooling. So please take a moment, take a deep breath.
[00:01:53] That was a dramatic breath. Go down the rabbit hole with me for a moment to see what I'm unlearning, relearning questioning and how it will impact this podcast. Maybe you're going down your own rabbit hole of self discovery and mental, spiritual re-invigoration or reinvention. If you are welcome and let's jump in together.
[00:02:25] The play we've all found ourselves in as parents.
[00:02:38] So we're all gathered here today cause we've been cast in the new family drama or comedy pick your poison. And our role is the parent. The first thing to do is to read the play... shit, it's a device theater piece. Dammit. It's going to be created by you and the ensemble. You'll be improvising and creating the piece together around a theme or idea that you all love.
[00:03:06] Now the question is where do you start? How do you create this piece with this ensemble? The collaborative piece, being your life and the ensemble, being your family. The starting place for any creative work is with yourself. What do you believe? What are your values? How do you communicate? What inspires you and lights up your soul? That's what you're bringing to the table? Then you have to be open to listening to the other company members, the ensemble, which is your family. If you're not down to listen and truly hear what the cast does to contribute, no play will never get off the ground or it'll take a very, very long time with a lot of fighting, arguing, disagreeing and people wanting to jump ship constantly.
[00:03:54] Now, what does it take to step into your new role in this new work?
[00:04:01] Did you love the drama behind that? I did. It was quite fun. So to answer this question, what does it take to step into this new role? Let me tell you where I'm at in my life right now. So quick backstory.
[00:04:14] I am that person society loves. These are the rules, follow them, stay in line because we've had so, so that's just the way things are. The problem is all people not following the rules and going against the grain. We must maintain order. This is how things are run because they've always been run this way. My personality is one that has bought into this my entire life.
[00:04:36] Don't question authority. Just accept that this is the information that's being given to you and just go with it.
[00:04:42] At 40, at the tail end of a more than year long pandemic, with an almost four year old in my home, working on this podcast that has been feeding my soul and sucking it dry, I've stepped into my newly ignited passion to dismantle all the things.
[00:04:59] Here's some things jumping around my brain. These days about theater, the performing arts, mental health education, and parenting.
[00:05:07] One, I'm considering homeschooling Angelica and by homeschooling, I mean, unschooling. For anyone who doesn't know, unschooling is totally child led, whatever the child wants to learn. That's what they do. There's no set curriculum. You just live your lives and let the child explore with their heart leads to them. You allow them to stick with their interest and go deep down a rabbit hole to see where that topic guides them. And then whenever they want to move on to the next thing, they move onto the next thing.
[00:05:38] It requires so much trust? Trust that humans have learned what they needed to know for centuries, because that is what we do. We just learn. I mean, we don't walk and talk until we're ready. Right? No matter how much help we give our kids to encourage them to do these things, it's not going to happen until they're ready.
[00:06:03] The same with reading, writing math, we won't master these skills until our brain feels motivated to do so. So as a mom who knows my child better than a school board, who's never met her, I'm wondering why I would choose to put the pressure on Angelica to learn things within a school system that may not be beneficial for her love of learning and her wellbeing.
[00:06:27] I don't want her to force herself to fit into some sort of mold because that's what other people who don't know her have said she needs to learn. This is what she needs to do. This is what she needs to achieve to be successful. This is not sitting right with me now, which leads me to number two.
[00:06:47] As I continue down this parenting journey, I'm realizing there is an inner anarchist in me that is starting to scream.
[00:06:54] Fuck the system. To a lot of the indoctrination humans go through to keep society running the way that benefits those at the top and in power. Yeah. Let's just sit with that one for a minute.
[00:07:15] Number three,
[00:07:18] does my MFA in acting actually provide me the tools I need to be the best mom I can for my daughter? Why am I asking this now? I've already created an entire podcast trying to argue that it does. So what are the issues that I'm having as a parent?
[00:07:39] Lack of balance.
[00:07:41] Some days I have patients that the Dalai Lama would be proud of. Most days I go from zero to 500 in the span of a nanosecond. Should my acting training have cured that? Is that too much to ask? Sometimes I don't want to play, but shouldn't I always want to play because that is quite literally the job I've been trained for?
[00:08:05]In my last interview my guest, Chrissy Perrotta Ziese, brought up that we joked in grad school, that an MFA is a master of feeling arts.
[00:08:12] So is being trained to identify, observe, experience, manipulate, and manifest all my emotions and create an emotional response in another human being helpful or healthy as a mom? I'll say a hundred percent. Yes. But does it mean I can do it successfully all the time, even like 80% of the time?
[00:08:34] Hell, no.
[00:08:39] So, healthy. Speaking of health brings me to number four.
[00:08:44] May is mental health awareness month. And I've been thinking so much about this and there were a few thoughts that have been circulating through my head. One, is the work of an actor, of mining your own emotions for the benefit of making other people feel, healthy. Is that the work of an actor? My dear boy. Why don't you try acting it's much easier.
[00:09:08] May have roughly been the words. Laurence Olivier told Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man but is he right? Was Stella Adler right when she told Stanislavski he killed acting for her with all the emotional memory work? The easiest way an actor makes the illusion feel real to the audience is by pulling on their life experience, to aid them in the crafting of a character.
[00:09:29] And that's the secret. The art is in the crafting, the choices. Every time an actor takes on a new role, they're considering how they enter into this new life. They shape how the character moves and sounds based on their imagination. But since we are the instrument and actor's personal life and experiences will become one with this character.
[00:09:52] And that's what makes each Juliet different from all the other Juliets that have been played for over 400 years. An actor's life becomes entwined with the role that they're playing. Can you ever fully separate yourself from the character? Can you ever fully just act? What does that even mean? I have no answers right now.
[00:10:13] Just more questions to come really separate would mean you were essentially a robot programmed to deliver performances in a predesigned way without any glitches, glitches meaning showing of the actors reality. Now, early 20th century director and puppeteer Edward Gordon. Craig's idea of an Uber marionette, but finally come true, but is that what we want?
[00:10:35] And then two, how do you not let things like critics and casting directors and directors and other people's negative Nellie nonsense bring you down. And then, three, actors and theater artists have gotten treated like the scum of the earth for centuries. No respect. People today still look at a life in the arts as a waste of time, nothing serious. Non-essential. Lacking value. We are the joke, the court gestures, dancing monkeys, the fools, but the fools are usually the wisest characters in the play. How damaging is it to take your negative notion of the arts and impose them on your children? Because saying that to an adult means that you're also saying the same thing to children.
[00:11:19] What does it teach them to de-value another human beings, passion and love? To devalue a group of people. To dismiss an interest and the desire they may have. How do you keep balance and perspective to not believe you are better or above anyone else for being able to see the world through the lens of an artist, and how do you keep from feeling shame, rejection and depleted by the perspective that what you do is a waste to the world.
[00:11:49] And also final question. Do people still buy into the whole starving artist bullshit? I always had a difficulty with that one because I like to eat. So let me know.
[00:12:00] All right. So let's pause. That's a lot. I just threw out there. Let me touch back on my unlearning.
[00:12:13] This dismantling doesn't have to be about burning down buildings, although that has been effective in history.
[00:12:20] It's saying I'm going to find my tribe of people out there talking about alternative ways of living loving and nurturing myself, my family and the planet so we can make our revolution one that changes the next generation of humans. No one that says, yes, we need change now, but we need humans that will recognize when change is necessary again, 40, 50, and more years from now. That will only happen if we encourage our children. To think for themselves, by not imposing our ideas and beliefs and training by society, but encouraging them to create their own thoughts, their own connections, their own ideas, and to continue to challenge those all the time. Encouraging them to think for themselves to know who they are and to have the conviction in what is right for all humans and the planet at large and break away from the brainwashing being indoctrinated into society does to you.
[00:13:20] What theater does is say, here's the shit that's going on now change. Or, here's what the world could look like now change. It makes us hope and dream for the future while mirroring our present lives. It wakes you up. And once you have felt something and experienced a shift and what a better world could be, you can't unsee or unfeel it. That's what parenting has done for me. I look at Angelica every day and I am,
[00:13:54] I am like,
[00:13:56] what can I do differently?
[00:13:58] What can I learn? How can I grow to be a better person? So I can show you that it's possible to continue to grow that who you are at one point in your life does not dictate who you're going to be later. That you can change your mind that you can evolve in your thinking.
[00:14:16] This season's theme is change. I've changed the podcast episode lineup I originally came out with for this season episodes haven't aired when they were supposed to, I switched up the reason glass series last episode. I mean, if something's not working, change it, fix it. I'm an ignore an avoider. So I'm saying all this stuff about change and fixing things, because I am very much aware that I am someone who will say, let me turn a blind eye on this. Let me ignore this and avoid this and pray it'll go away. Like just magically disappear. Another perfect example of what society wants in a human, right? Those that avoid and ignore won't change the problem until they stop ignoring and avoiding. And so the problem hits them personally until the problem becomes so engulfed in their face, they feel like they must do something.
[00:15:12] They cannot turn a blind eye anymore. Until they realize the problem is in what we think.
[00:15:21] Thinking thoughts, ideas, those are all things that we create. If we created it, we can fix it too. So let's start fixing shit and we can start immediately this very second with our selves and our relationships, particularly with our children.
[00:15:46] All of this has me feeling like maybe that's where this acting parenting show needs to focus on the devised theater aspect of our lives.
[00:15:59] Devise theater, experimental theater, physical theater, they're all collaborative theater. Collaboration is the essence of family. We devise theater in our family every day. Exploring on the show all the ways that our family is a work of experimental theater and how that starts reshaping the world excites me.
[00:16:18] That's immediate. That's what I know. That's when my body says by the sensations that have been triggered in it right now with the rush of sparkles, that wash over the insides of me and the water in my eyes. And that is what is right. If all the world is a stage and we are all really players, then what is the play you are creating? What is the exploration for this season, this chapter of your life? What performance are you putting on publicly and privately? What is the world you're trying to create? Or are you still in dreamland? Are you still looking at this life? Like, it's fine for you and everyone else needs to figure it out because it's not your problem.
[00:17:06] And all you need to do is the same old thing you've been doing so you can reach old age and if you're lucky, pass away quietly, while you sleep.
[00:17:16] If that's where you're at, good luck to you. I hope your story turns out that way. For me, my life is too on fire right now to continue sitting back quietly in my sheltered privileged life.
[00:17:30] So I'm going to keep on unlearning and unschooling myself because in a world where you can be anything. I am choosing to be a free thinking, curious, evolving, artistic, revolutionary.
[00:17:45] But hey, I'll see you on the other side.
Go down the rabbit hole with me for a moment to see what I'm unlearning, relearning questioning and how it will impact this podcast.
Maybe you're going down your own rabbit hole of self discovery and mental, spiritual re-invigoration or reinvention. If you are welcome and let's jump in together.
https://www.instagram.com/mfaparentingedition
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/mfa-the-parenting-edition-1370329
Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mfaparenting)
____________________
Full Transcript
EPISODE 35A DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Taisha: [00:00:00] Angelica. Can you say hello?
[00:00:04] Angelica: [00:00:04] Heyo! Heyo?
[00:00:06] Taisha: [00:00:06] How are you today?
[00:00:07]Angelica: [00:00:07] I doing well.
[00:00:12] Taisha: [00:00:12] You asked me how are you?
[00:00:14] Angelica: [00:00:14] How are you?
[00:00:15] Taisha: [00:00:15] Well, I'm doing well also.
[00:00:30] Welcome to MFA the parenting edition. I'm Taisha Cameron. These lessons from the theater for raising ourselves and our kids, came about when I realized my MFA in acting trained me for life as a mommy, better than life as a full-time actor. In today's episode, I'm just checking in with y'all. I really just wanted to take a moment and go over the things that are jumping around in my head right now and where I feel it's going to take the direction of this podcast. So without further ado, Is MFA.
[00:00:59] Episode 35 Down the Rabbit Hole.
[00:01:04] Hello. Hello. lovelies and welcome back to MFA. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. I just wanted to take a moment today and check in. I wanted to see how you're doing.
[00:01:22] How are you?
[00:01:25] I hope you're well, I really do. I have been going through a mental revolution. Battles going off in my head.
[00:01:35] It's been a journey of unlearning or in .The homeschool community. It would have be called unschooling. So please take a moment, take a deep breath.
[00:01:53] That was a dramatic breath. Go down the rabbit hole with me for a moment to see what I'm unlearning, relearning questioning and how it will impact this podcast. Maybe you're going down your own rabbit hole of self discovery and mental, spiritual re-invigoration or reinvention. If you are welcome and let's jump in together.
[00:02:25] The play we've all found ourselves in as parents.
[00:02:38] So we're all gathered here today cause we've been cast in the new family drama or comedy pick your poison. And our role is the parent. The first thing to do is to read the play... shit, it's a device theater piece. Dammit. It's going to be created by you and the ensemble. You'll be improvising and creating the piece together around a theme or idea that you all love.
[00:03:06] Now the question is where do you start? How do you create this piece with this ensemble? The collaborative piece, being your life and the ensemble, being your family. The starting place for any creative work is with yourself. What do you believe? What are your values? How do you communicate? What inspires you and lights up your soul? That's what you're bringing to the table? Then you have to be open to listening to the other company members, the ensemble, which is your family. If you're not down to listen and truly hear what the cast does to contribute, no play will never get off the ground or it'll take a very, very long time with a lot of fighting, arguing, disagreeing and people wanting to jump ship constantly.
[00:03:54] Now, what does it take to step into your new role in this new work?
[00:04:01] Did you love the drama behind that? I did. It was quite fun. So to answer this question, what does it take to step into this new role? Let me tell you where I'm at in my life right now. So quick backstory.
[00:04:14] I am that person society loves. These are the rules, follow them, stay in line because we've had so, so that's just the way things are. The problem is all people not following the rules and going against the grain. We must maintain order. This is how things are run because they've always been run this way. My personality is one that has bought into this my entire life.
[00:04:36] Don't question authority. Just accept that this is the information that's being given to you and just go with it.
[00:04:42] At 40, at the tail end of a more than year long pandemic, with an almost four year old in my home, working on this podcast that has been feeding my soul and sucking it dry, I've stepped into my newly ignited passion to dismantle all the things.
[00:04:59] Here's some things jumping around my brain. These days about theater, the performing arts, mental health education, and parenting.
[00:05:07] One, I'm considering homeschooling Angelica and by homeschooling, I mean, unschooling. For anyone who doesn't know, unschooling is totally child led, whatever the child wants to learn. That's what they do. There's no set curriculum. You just live your lives and let the child explore with their heart leads to them. You allow them to stick with their interest and go deep down a rabbit hole to see where that topic guides them. And then whenever they want to move on to the next thing, they move onto the next thing.
[00:05:38] It requires so much trust? Trust that humans have learned what they needed to know for centuries, because that is what we do. We just learn. I mean, we don't walk and talk until we're ready. Right? No matter how much help we give our kids to encourage them to do these things, it's not going to happen until they're ready.
[00:06:03] The same with reading, writing math, we won't master these skills until our brain feels motivated to do so. So as a mom who knows my child better than a school board, who's never met her, I'm wondering why I would choose to put the pressure on Angelica to learn things within a school system that may not be beneficial for her love of learning and her wellbeing.
[00:06:27] I don't want her to force herself to fit into some sort of mold because that's what other people who don't know her have said she needs to learn. This is what she needs to do. This is what she needs to achieve to be successful. This is not sitting right with me now, which leads me to number two.
[00:06:47] As I continue down this parenting journey, I'm realizing there is an inner anarchist in me that is starting to scream.
[00:06:54] Fuck the system. To a lot of the indoctrination humans go through to keep society running the way that benefits those at the top and in power. Yeah. Let's just sit with that one for a minute.
[00:07:15] Number three,
[00:07:18] does my MFA in acting actually provide me the tools I need to be the best mom I can for my daughter? Why am I asking this now? I've already created an entire podcast trying to argue that it does. So what are the issues that I'm having as a parent?
[00:07:39] Lack of balance.
[00:07:41] Some days I have patients that the Dalai Lama would be proud of. Most days I go from zero to 500 in the span of a nanosecond. Should my acting training have cured that? Is that too much to ask? Sometimes I don't want to play, but shouldn't I always want to play because that is quite literally the job I've been trained for?
[00:08:05]In my last interview my guest, Chrissy Perrotta Ziese, brought up that we joked in grad school, that an MFA is a master of feeling arts.
[00:08:12] So is being trained to identify, observe, experience, manipulate, and manifest all my emotions and create an emotional response in another human being helpful or healthy as a mom? I'll say a hundred percent. Yes. But does it mean I can do it successfully all the time, even like 80% of the time?
[00:08:34] Hell, no.
[00:08:39] So, healthy. Speaking of health brings me to number four.
[00:08:44] May is mental health awareness month. And I've been thinking so much about this and there were a few thoughts that have been circulating through my head. One, is the work of an actor, of mining your own emotions for the benefit of making other people feel, healthy. Is that the work of an actor? My dear boy. Why don't you try acting it's much easier.
[00:09:08] May have roughly been the words. Laurence Olivier told Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man but is he right? Was Stella Adler right when she told Stanislavski he killed acting for her with all the emotional memory work? The easiest way an actor makes the illusion feel real to the audience is by pulling on their life experience, to aid them in the crafting of a character.
[00:09:29] And that's the secret. The art is in the crafting, the choices. Every time an actor takes on a new role, they're considering how they enter into this new life. They shape how the character moves and sounds based on their imagination. But since we are the instrument and actor's personal life and experiences will become one with this character.
[00:09:52] And that's what makes each Juliet different from all the other Juliets that have been played for over 400 years. An actor's life becomes entwined with the role that they're playing. Can you ever fully separate yourself from the character? Can you ever fully just act? What does that even mean? I have no answers right now.
[00:10:13] Just more questions to come really separate would mean you were essentially a robot programmed to deliver performances in a predesigned way without any glitches, glitches meaning showing of the actors reality. Now, early 20th century director and puppeteer Edward Gordon. Craig's idea of an Uber marionette, but finally come true, but is that what we want?
[00:10:35] And then two, how do you not let things like critics and casting directors and directors and other people's negative Nellie nonsense bring you down. And then, three, actors and theater artists have gotten treated like the scum of the earth for centuries. No respect. People today still look at a life in the arts as a waste of time, nothing serious. Non-essential. Lacking value. We are the joke, the court gestures, dancing monkeys, the fools, but the fools are usually the wisest characters in the play. How damaging is it to take your negative notion of the arts and impose them on your children? Because saying that to an adult means that you're also saying the same thing to children.
[00:11:19] What does it teach them to de-value another human beings, passion and love? To devalue a group of people. To dismiss an interest and the desire they may have. How do you keep balance and perspective to not believe you are better or above anyone else for being able to see the world through the lens of an artist, and how do you keep from feeling shame, rejection and depleted by the perspective that what you do is a waste to the world.
[00:11:49] And also final question. Do people still buy into the whole starving artist bullshit? I always had a difficulty with that one because I like to eat. So let me know.
[00:12:00] All right. So let's pause. That's a lot. I just threw out there. Let me touch back on my unlearning.
[00:12:13] This dismantling doesn't have to be about burning down buildings, although that has been effective in history.
[00:12:20] It's saying I'm going to find my tribe of people out there talking about alternative ways of living loving and nurturing myself, my family and the planet so we can make our revolution one that changes the next generation of humans. No one that says, yes, we need change now, but we need humans that will recognize when change is necessary again, 40, 50, and more years from now. That will only happen if we encourage our children. To think for themselves, by not imposing our ideas and beliefs and training by society, but encouraging them to create their own thoughts, their own connections, their own ideas, and to continue to challenge those all the time. Encouraging them to think for themselves to know who they are and to have the conviction in what is right for all humans and the planet at large and break away from the brainwashing being indoctrinated into society does to you.
[00:13:20] What theater does is say, here's the shit that's going on now change. Or, here's what the world could look like now change. It makes us hope and dream for the future while mirroring our present lives. It wakes you up. And once you have felt something and experienced a shift and what a better world could be, you can't unsee or unfeel it. That's what parenting has done for me. I look at Angelica every day and I am,
[00:13:54] I am like,
[00:13:56] what can I do differently?
[00:13:58] What can I learn? How can I grow to be a better person? So I can show you that it's possible to continue to grow that who you are at one point in your life does not dictate who you're going to be later. That you can change your mind that you can evolve in your thinking.
[00:14:16] This season's theme is change. I've changed the podcast episode lineup I originally came out with for this season episodes haven't aired when they were supposed to, I switched up the reason glass series last episode. I mean, if something's not working, change it, fix it. I'm an ignore an avoider. So I'm saying all this stuff about change and fixing things, because I am very much aware that I am someone who will say, let me turn a blind eye on this. Let me ignore this and avoid this and pray it'll go away. Like just magically disappear. Another perfect example of what society wants in a human, right? Those that avoid and ignore won't change the problem until they stop ignoring and avoiding. And so the problem hits them personally until the problem becomes so engulfed in their face, they feel like they must do something.
[00:15:12] They cannot turn a blind eye anymore. Until they realize the problem is in what we think.
[00:15:21] Thinking thoughts, ideas, those are all things that we create. If we created it, we can fix it too. So let's start fixing shit and we can start immediately this very second with our selves and our relationships, particularly with our children.
[00:15:46] All of this has me feeling like maybe that's where this acting parenting show needs to focus on the devised theater aspect of our lives.
[00:15:59] Devise theater, experimental theater, physical theater, they're all collaborative theater. Collaboration is the essence of family. We devise theater in our family every day. Exploring on the show all the ways that our family is a work of experimental theater and how that starts reshaping the world excites me.
[00:16:18] That's immediate. That's what I know. That's when my body says by the sensations that have been triggered in it right now with the rush of sparkles, that wash over the insides of me and the water in my eyes. And that is what is right. If all the world is a stage and we are all really players, then what is the play you are creating? What is the exploration for this season, this chapter of your life? What performance are you putting on publicly and privately? What is the world you're trying to create? Or are you still in dreamland? Are you still looking at this life? Like, it's fine for you and everyone else needs to figure it out because it's not your problem.
[00:17:06] And all you need to do is the same old thing you've been doing so you can reach old age and if you're lucky, pass away quietly, while you sleep.
[00:17:16] If that's where you're at, good luck to you. I hope your story turns out that way. For me, my life is too on fire right now to continue sitting back quietly in my sheltered privileged life.
[00:17:30] So I'm going to keep on unlearning and unschooling myself because in a world where you can be anything. I am choosing to be a free thinking, curious, evolving, artistic, revolutionary.
[00:17:45] But hey, I'll see you on the other side.