Of Mighty Hearts and Leaden Wings: A Review of "Maleficent"

There's a moment three quarters into A Mighty Heart in which Angelina Jolie's character receives confirmation of the death of her husband. It is, in a performance that overall dazzles in its realism, a stand-out moment. It is literally breath-taking. We feel the air sucked from our lungs as we watch Jolie struggle for air and fight against the truth she cannot come to grips with. Both  Jolie and Michael Winterbottom, who directed the film, deserve our gratitude for this exquisite and exquisitely horrible moment.

Much has been made of the "rape" allegory of Maleficent.  Critics have argued over whether the scream the fairy utters when she discovers her wings have been cut off is out of place in the film. Angelina Jolie herself, an actress whose work I often admire greatly, discussed the scream in the issue of Elle whose cover she graced. She spoke of how hard it was to find that place in her gut where inhibition gave way to primal holler. I was stunned. Has she forgotten A Mighty Heart? That scream still echoes in my ears. Has she forgotten the primal scream of loneliness she conjured from the depths of her soul at the end of Girl, Interrupted? The stunning realism of that wail made me forgive her character all her cruelty, such was the pain that drove it.

There has been much fine calibration combined with moments of release in Jolie's previous work. I had not yet seen Maleficent, so I wondered what this other scream might be like. I relished the prospect of seeing a fine actress exploring a new place in cinema: fantasy combined with realism. A fine actress can offer realism in a world of fantasy. Such was my hope, at any rate.

So. I wasn't sure "the scream" was "the scream" when it happened. It was only at the end of the film that I concluded it must be "the scream," as there were no other screams after that. The scream is a whimper, of sorts, a cursory nod to her physical pain and terror when the sleeping Maleficent awakens to discover her body dismembered by her lover. I don't object to a whimper. People are entitled to react to trauma in any number of ways. I don't object to any portrayal of humanity as long as it is...human.

When I was a child, my mother called Disney "fake childhood." Having seen Maleficent, I submit that Disney has branched out and now offers "fake adulthood" as well. I don't think I have ever been less persuaded by a "world" than that which the fairies occupy in the film, except perhaps by the dime-store human kingdom across the way. The man who steals Maleficent's wings becomes king of this creaky cliche-ridden kingdom as a reward for his savagery. Despite this, there is no dramatic force to propel this character to do it. A crown seems a rather dull reward by dramatic standards. It also seems a dramatic problem easily solved.

Couldn't the film have granted his character some back story, say a moment of bullying he has suffered that makes him turn to savagery and a lust for dominating a kingdom?  We are asked to believe that this villain is complex, or at least in possession of a brain. You'd never know it to watch the actor's work on screen. I don't disdain the work of other actors lightly. Too often we are the victims of dreadful, expository dialogue and cheap direction. It is not the actor I am disdaining at all, but his misfortune at having crossed paths with that rapist of actors' souls and dignity, The Disney Corporation.

I think of another director, Peter Jackson, so good at fantasy world-building and character development both, and so caring of actors. Their performances, in his hands, contain as much integrity as his visual conception of Middle Earth. There is CGI, to be sure, but those actors also trudged through a lot of very real snow in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. They also rehearsed.  If Jackson's effort was majestic, noble and utterly human, Robert Stromberg's Maleficent's is pedestrian, uninspired, lacking in regard for human dignity (by never showing one moment of truthful behavior on screen) and, (perhaps its greatest sin) cutesy. I confess that when we are first introduced to the young Maleficent, I  wanted to blow a strong wind to remove the cutesy dust from those magnificent wings. There are two young kids at the start of the film, and both are directed to be unbearably coy. Stromberg is desperate to show us how gentle Maleficent was before her trauma. Oh my goodness, we get it. Children are innocent. Why is "innocent" so frequently mistaken for "cute?" Fake childhood, indeed.

Peter Jackson was accused of "going soft" after he had a child, and turning the violence of The Lovely Bones into a fairy dust mess because he couldn't face the horror of the story. I wonder, perhaps unfairly, if Jolie, who apparently had a lot of creative say in Maleficent, has similarly "gone soft," and was not able to conjure the sufficient dryness of delivery to make you believe that she truly hates children. (She utters this very line, and to her own adorably impish child, who plays Aurora as a tot.) I admit that as a mother I found this moment charming regardless of the flubbed delivery, because the little one was so clearly enamored of her mother and unconcerned with her altered appearance as a wicked fairy. But this was a moment I enjoyed for the surrounding context, not a moment conjured by the film itself.

Dialogue. What is it good for? A lot. In cinema,  it is often at its best when it is unspoken. The best moment of the film is when it turns out that it is not a prince's but Maleficent's kiss that is the one of true love and thus frees Aurora from her coma. You see the moment coming a mile away, and all the better for it. I relished watching the young prince fail to stir the sleeping beauty and waited eagerly for a hopeless Maleficent to do the honors, unaware of the power of her own kiss. And it's lovely. And then Stromberg trashes the moment by having Maleficent's trusty sidekick whisper, "True love's kiss,"  in wonderment. In case, Disney felt, we weren't in awe of the moment, we had damned better be schooled in its magic.

 I had no quarrel with the theoretical "humanizing" of Maleficent. I know many critics found it distasteful and wanted her to remain evil in the tradition of Iago: evil for its own sake. I myself don't find that interesting. The desire, particularly of female film-goers, to keep her as evil as she was in Disney's original Sleeping Beauty may be a well-earned revenge fantasy for women. (I loved the movie Teeth.) But I think the story they chose to tell was a worthy one. It's the story's execution-- achieved with the bluntest of hammering instead of with the delicacy of a fine sculptor--that I take issue with.

I didn't need to see Maleficent turn into a dragon, although I respect that many people feel robbed of this potentially glorious moment and were infuriated that it was turned over to a proxy, and a male one at that. Perhaps that the C.G.I. was painfully clunky might lessen their despair ? It wasn't much of a dragon.

As a dancer who has suffered much soft tissue damage and had it laboriously repaired, who has felt the aching pain of the road back to using that ruptured tissue, I felt cheated when Maleficent regains her wings, courtesy of Aurora, and immediately fuses with her torn-off body parts. I felt robbed of that beat of reconnecting to your wings. When my labrum finally healed, I could soar again. But there is a horrible pain and ache in the repair process and I would have liked a moment in which Maleficent feels the pain of reuniting with that old damaged tissue and further, is called upon to use it immediately. I'll never forget being asked to walk (with crutches) less than 12 hours after a surgeon trimmed and removed  hundreds of tiny tendon fibers from my angry, red-as-raw-steak inflamed tendons. But Maleficent rejoins with her wings and poof! She's flying as if she'd never suffered an ounce of pain --which betrays the one bit of dramatic tension on which the film is so flimsily based.

 Poor Elle Fanning. She is confined to laughing "merrily" as she falls in piles of autumn leaves more artificial-looking than those that adorn  Back-to-School displays in store windows come September. She smiles emptily and throws mud in order to achieve a badge of honor as a  creature of the Earth, so winning in her "tomboyishness" that even cranky old Maleficent can't help but fall hard for her. Watching this display reminded me of the word "feisty" and how often it is attributed to young girls, denigrating them rather than recognizing their strength. I didn't care for the gender politics in the piece. I was fine with Maleficent's journey, but not Aurora's barely sketched character.

Lastly, don't replace Tchaikovsky unless you have something more daring, dramatic and spellbinding to replace his music with. I promise, you don't. The original score of Sleeping Beauty , which I believe used  several melodies from Tchaikovsy's score for the ballet version of Cinderella, is gorgeous and haunting, bestowing both gravitas and terror.

I could go on, but I will try not to follow Disney's lesson. I'll let some things go unsaid so that implications may hover, like wings, in the air.

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An Alert Artist: Gelsey Kirkland's "The Shape of Love"

As I never made any separation between steps and story, I was amazed by those who were able to put them into different compartments, as if mind and body could somehow work apart from each other. Unless I had a reason to move, I was totally paralyzed." -Gelsey Kirkland, The Shape of Love

An alert mind is an actor's prerequisite. It must be exercised as continuously and with the same discipline as the body. Another major flaw of the untrained actor is to attempt to separate thoughts from actions. -Uta Hagen, A Challenge for the Actor

A Challenge for the Actor has long been my desert island book. But I just came across Gelsey Kirkland's "sequel" to her  penetrating and brutal first book, Dancing on My Grave. It's called The Shape of Love, and it records her "come-back" after drug addiction and eating disorders that dragged her from being a prima ballerina with New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre to the brink of death. I haven't read it in many years, but I remember underlining furiously as her quest for the truth always struck a deep chord in me as a performer.

In this "sequel" Kirkland tells the story of her return to the stage, this time with The Royal Ballet, with whom she felt the sort of camaraderie she could never find in New York. The Royal Ballet is evidently steeped in theatrical tradition, whereas, as English dancers apparently put it, "In America, they dance from the waist down."

As I read Ms. Kirkland's book, I wondered if she had ever read Uta Hagen's books on acting, or if Ms. Hagen had ever read of Kirkland's search as a ballet dancer for meaning for her movements on stage. The two are such kindred spirits that it's hard to imagine they don't know of each other much less that they are the best of friends. (Although, alas, Uta Hagen is no longer with us.)

The Shape of Love, like A Challenge for the Actor, is for performers who are determined to knock down any impediment to the truth.  Why does a person do something when she does it? How is the way in which she does it completely determined by her circumstance (her previous location, with whom she was keeping company, what letter she just read, the weather, her need to get somewhere else, etc...) Previous moments shape all our destinations, like the thousands of points in a Seurat canvas, our movements are links in a chain but appear fluid because of the lightning speed of the brain and heart. When we stand back, we see one picture or story, but an actor must break apart each moment and see how it connects to the last and the next. The audience can watch a fluid story, but it is also watching beats, those precious moments in which a turn in the road is made. We make thousands of such turns every day. Just watch yourself make a cup of coffee. Where is the sugar bowl? Should I use the little spoon that's dirty on the counter or get a fresh one? Is that the phone ringing? It might be that date I had from last week finally calling! It might be the doctor with test results. Should I take it? Ignore it? What happened to that spoon? You see? Thousands of turning points.

Gelsey Kirkland arrived, miraculously, at this understanding of acting without having any formal training, other than mime work, which she did on the side in her years at ABT. In The Shape of Love she dives into the specifics with a tenacity and earnestness matched only by Uta Hagen's. A ballet, particularly a classical one, is a story with dialogue and destination just as is a stage play. But the dialogue is told in the hands, in the arms, in the particular placement of the feet and back that serve to embody the character's point of view, desires and relationships to her partners.

An actor will (and should) contemplate, consider, agonize if necessary, over why she is doing anything on stage. Art is not life, it is distilled life, so that it takes on a reality not more heightened, as is so frequently thought, but more clear. Extraneous movements happen from distraction throughout all of our days. An artist must pare those away and keep only what is essential to the story and the character. Then the moving painting, the fluid line, the story, the humanity rise to the surface and the mundane vanishes.

"I imagine that once you start thinking as an actress, it must be pretty difficult to accept working any other way." So says a young dancer Kirkland is coaching for the role of Giselle.

I began my years of performing as a ballet dancer. My first role, however, was mostly mime. I lucked into a group of visionary choreographers who sought to bring Antoine de St. Exupery's "The Little Prince" to life in ballet form. At ten years old, I was being asked to take one moment to think about a drawing given to me (the prince) by the aviator and the next moment to reject it. In that first moment I needed to see the painting, in the second moment I needed a reason for rejecting it, so that the act of rejecting it made sense in my body. A ballet is made up of thousands of moments. And nearly all of them, at least according to Gelsey Kirkland, and I am inclined to agree, must be thought through in this way.

And so when I began my life as an actor, at 12, I always felt that ballet was what gave me the key to acting. It was fascinating to read that Kirkland had this experience in reverse. You cannot get into an arabesque pique without rolling through the extending foot and passing through a paradoxically infinite number of points in space. So it felt with scene work in acting. Each moment depended on the last until a chain was formed, and rehearsals allowed for both the strengthening of the chain and its flexibility. (This may be one point where ballet and acting diverge dramatically: in acting, when we rehearse, we do so precisely to create the ability to be spontaneous, as paradoxical as that seems. In ballet, these finely tuned rehearsed moments might be more set in stone, as the body must move itself physically through space in the same pattern for every performance. Spontaneity in performance seems to run counter to the needs of ballet.)

Ballet of course has its technical feats. I don't know that the powerful fouettes of final acts are primarily motivated by story, but having been boosted by one's own conception of her place in the story, her reasons for every small gesture and delicate placement of her leg, a ballerina has given herself the wings to fly through the superhuman technical feats now required of dancers.

There is an infinite amount to say about both these fine artists and their books. If you are hungry for meaning in art, if you are fascinated by the techniques, if you simply love ballet or acting, find these books and read them.

As Giselle.

Life at a barre.

A complicated Juliet.

Once a dancer...

Related: Tutu Much, Tutu Soon

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A Challenge for the Parent

This post is dedicated to Uta Hagen, who, in teaching the art of acting also taught the art of empathy.

I am not a religious person, but as an actor, I do have a bible. It's called A Challenge For the Actor, by Uta Hagen. It's a meticulous guide to uncovering why humans do the things we do, when we do them, how we do them, how events that precede the things we do affect the way in which we do them.

Recently my Facebook feed has carried a steady stream of articles about children and the way adults view them. I've read dozens of articles about how often "discipline" is misguided because at the root, the parent fails to see what the child is experiencing and the "discipline" only confuses the issue and creates further conflict and pain down the road. Parents too often confuse behavior that is a nonverbal attempt at communication with being "naughty." They resort to punitive measures when empathy could uncover the mystery of the behavior if we could only tune into the right frequency -- that of our child's. (My god, what a hippy I've become!)

Eleanor Roosevelt said that the basis of all etiquette, of good manners, is kindness, and if you remember this you will never be too far off in your manners, regardless of the fork you choose at the dinner table. I believe that empathy is the basis of much of parenting, and if you remember this you will never be too far off in ensuring a happy childhood for and a good relationship with your offspring, regardless of whether you err occasionally with too many toys or too much TV or the reverse. Further, you will guide a small person toward being a loving, useful and fulfilled individual and thus be a success as a parent.

"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood."

-Agatha Christie

 There's a consistent chatter that surrounds you as you walk the streets of the city, as you stare at museum exhibits with your toddler climbing over the railing to try to touch the elk or the grizzly bear, among friends at mothers' groups, in the nine thousand books you read or articles you google about milestones and child development. 

"Two years old is the age of bossiness. Two years old is the age of everything having to be in just the right place, of telling people where things should go. My little boy has obsessive compulsive disorder! Ah, she's your boss, isn't she? Oh, he's the one running the show, huh? If you don't establish a firm bedtime, you're sunk. If you miss the window for nap time, you're toast. If you let them sleep in your bed, they'll be dependent and whiny their whole childhoods and possibly their whole lives. They'll grow up to rob banks and threaten kittens if you don't get them in a crib by three months. If a child is allowed to manipulate you by requesting something different to eat, where will it stop? A firm hand in all matters pays off later." 

There is a group on Facebook called "The Dangers of Baby Training." Its mission is mostly to catalog outdated and cruel ideas about how to raise your child, and to offer alternatives. This site finds fault with many methods of "discipline" because at root, the methods lack empathy. (And therefore also fail to assist a child in her path toward enlightenment and happy co-citizenship with her fellow man or woman.)  I think our society suffers from a decline in empathy in general. Or perhaps we've never had enough and there's no time like the present to change that.

What is empathy? There are many dictionary definitions, but here's one from Merriam-Webster that I find most fitting for the argument I'd like to make:

the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts and experiences of another of either the past or the present without having the feelings, thoughts and experiences fully communicated in an explicit manner.

Without the feelings being communicated in an explicit manner. This phrase is the central axis around which empathy with a child is based. Children do not have the complex verbal centers (nor do most adults, for that matter) to translate their feelings and thoughts into words. Thoughts and feelings result from a multitude of incoming data both internal and external and the brain processes this data at lightning speed and reacts.

Back to Uta Hagen, who championed the art of self-observation for the purpose of uncovering the reasons behind our actions and reactions. The great actor and teacher believed we had to empathize with ourselves in order to build the technique an actor needed to re-create behavior realistically. What was useful to her was what she recognized in others as something she herself did, but she didn't observe only others to find the truthful reasons behind behavior.  She first observed herself. She did this through meticulous rehearsal and repetition of basic activities. I'll outline two of her exercises to give an idea of how she did her detective work.

Destination is the first exercise. In it, you must choose a destination, be it a funeral, a wedding or a trip to the grocery store for paper towels. You must then rehearse with all the necessary objects of your daily life the two minutes leading up to your departure for this destination. In this rehearsal, you will uncover things and when you present it to the class, you will uncover more still. For example, the way one buttons one's coat is entirely different depending on one's destination. Destination shapes our speed, our accuracy, what we are distracted by around the room: where is my purse? Did I pack my glasses? Do I have my best man's speech in my pocket? Let me straighten my hair one last time as I button up, that man I flirted with last week is supposed to be at the reception. I'll let you fill in the two minutes of coat buttoning and purse packing before the funeral of a beloved uncle and how it differs from the coat buttoning and briefcase packing that occurs in the two minutes before leaving for a job interview.

Endowment is the next exercise. Essentially, an actor must learn how to endow objects (and other physical things such as weather or the height from which they view a scene) with the properties one would perceive them to have in real life. For example, you can't safely use a genuinely burning hot iron on stage, so an actor must learn to endow a cool iron with burning heat to recreate the behavior of being burned when accidentally touching it in a scene. (As for creating the behavior of surprise, that is a whole other exercise. I told you Uta Hagen was thorough.) Sometimes an actor must behave as though she were madly attracted to another actor on stage. Once a student asked Ms. Hagen what to do if she found her on stage partner unpalatable. She answered thus: "endow, endow, endow." Crude jokes aside, I believe she left it to the individual actor to decide which characteristics to endow her partner with.

There are many other exercises, and they are all building blocks toward understanding the effect our perceptions of reality have on our behavior.

This is a most useful skill when raising a child. Behavior that is mysterious to a parent who lacks this skill will be easily understood by one who hones it. Most parents are loving and want very much to see mostly good in their children, but the specifics interfere. For example, when I was a nanny and now as a mother, I hear the generic "She's just tired" excuse for a child who has thrown her crayons on the floor or announced her dislike of a person she was hugging five minutes ago with no intervening event. Lord knows I have seen the "tired" effect in my own child: when their batteries run low, there is no rational center to withhold the well of emotion that rises in an exhausted brain. But often there are more specific reasons to uncover.

Just the other night my daughter threw her crayons on the floor. It was nearing 10 pm and even though I tend to be nonchalant about bedtimes and sleep arrangements, that night I was worn out. I shook my head and retreated from her room. I knew enough to keep silent; I knew there was of course a reason but I was just too tired to unearth it. I felt a smidgen of anger too. All of her art supplies were so nicely lined up, I was so proud of myself for giving her this lovely work space and for a moment I lost that she was two and perceived instead the ingratitude of a grown person in the act of dismantling the little studio. All my years of training as an actor have made me intimately aware of and comfortable with my many character flaws, those both momentary and those more stubbornly recurrent. I did not judge myself for being angry, I knew that simply seeing her throw her art supplies activated something in my primal center. I did not judge myself for my lack of generosity but I also did not judge my daughter's act, because with lightning speed my brain relayed the message that she was hurting over something and her behavior had a reason.

Fortunately, my husband was less tired and more generous that night. He dug in and pulled out the insight. Apparently, two minutes before the great crayon throwing event, I had casually mentioned that it was getting to be time for going to sleep. I had not made any steps toward preparing for her bedtime, no toothbrushes were offered, no books lined up, I had merely mentioned it was getting late. But this was more than enough to induce panic in my tiny child.

Imagine if you were an insomniac and someone much taller and stronger than you made a decision that you had to close your eyes and fight every impulse in your body to read, to paint, to wander the apartment, to snack, to be simply awake. And in imagining that, suddenly the throwing of some crayons seems like a very mild reaction to such a prison sentence. Imagine that everyone bigger and stronger kept telling you to smile after you had just lost your girlfriend. A child who has just lost her favorite toy is often in just such a position. Imagine that your destination is a fine clothing store where you have a certificate for a free beautiful dress, but someone tells you that instead you must go to the grocery store and forego the dress. Now you can feel how your child feels when his destination is his box of blocks but he is being forced to have his coat buttoned for a mundane trip out, or any trip other than one to his box of blocks. His destination shapes his behavior with regard to that coat. (Ask any parent who is in a desperate hurry about the physical impossibility of compliance in coat-buttoning when a child is at play. The very hurry only exacerbates the panic the child feels.) Imagine that you are on a planet where everyone finds burnt three day old pizza crusts a delicacy and begs you to eat just one bite and just see if you don't agree. You know you are surrounded by madmen, as you know it smells awful and the mere sight is distasteful. A toddler feels this way when confronted with any number of foods we consider delicious. (So do adults, by the way.)

Can a parent endow a succulent roast carrot or a broiled salmon fillet with the odor of a three day old burnt pizza crust? If she can, she can empathize with her child. And suddenly it will become easy to put out a bowl of applesauce in its place, to give up on trying to persuade and instead to respect the space that every person on the planet needs, it will be easy to grant a toddler self-determination.

We must empathize with ourselves first. Uta Hagen said it was only when she stopped seeing herself  as a free-spirited artist hippy skipping through the woods picking flowers and came to terms with the other, darker side of her soul that she learned how to act. We need intimate understanding of and comfort with our less attractive needs, motives and feelings to create the full spectrum of human behavior.

When parents talk about a "bossy stage" they truly are failing to see that we all want things the way we want them (see: Sally Albright.) We are not bossy or high-maintenance. We are people. We want our trousers folded in this way and we don't like it when people put backpacks that have been on the subway on our couches and we want people to love the music we recommend. We order our universes with our specific passions and methods. We have wide varieties of passions, but we all share the having of them.

Children are people with passions and a deep need for ordering their universe, arguably even more than adults have because they feel the imbalance of power in their lives.  They are helpless in the face of authoritarian will. Thwarted desires for order result in non-verbal demonstrations because they don't have the words yet and even if they did, they don't have the control, unless we grant it to them. Sometimes words won't do even if we have them; they can't contain our passion either good or bad. Before my daughter's vocabulary grew (seemingly overnight, those brains grow at an astonishingly fast rate) she used to make a motion with her whole body, a kind of shudder while holding out her arms when she saw a beloved playmate or when she was about to kiss you. Her body was a free-flowing vessel of physical communication. Maybe sometimes, to quote an old song, the words get in the way.

Sometimes they do find the words. My husband went into my daughter's room the other night and asked her why she threw the crayons. She said "I'm mad." Why? he asked. "Because I don't want to go to bed." OK, he said. Let's not, then.

I know when I can't sleep I sit on the couch and read a book or the Internet. My daughter wanted to draw until she felt tired. Convention might have it that she needs to be trained to fall asleep or at least lie in her bed by 8 pm. But human need and social convention are unfortunately too often at odds with each other.

Let us parent according to human need, not social convention.

I am not saying a child needs no guidance. Let's save that for another post. (Although I will say that a child, a social creature from birth, is most absorbent of guidance when she is empathized with and given the space to accept that guidance.) I am also not going to go into the many tools that developmental experts have for deducing the reasons for a  child's behavior, because there are so many wonderful web sites and books already dedicated to this very hot topic now.

I want simply to offer my perspective as an actor who is now also a parent. Let those mirror neurons tingle and the road of communication between you and your child will be a generally tranquil and even idyllic route with lovely scenery along the way.

What does it feel like to have an object placed just out of grasp at the moment you are reaching for it and worse, because you are reaching for it? What kind of outrage might that legitimately stir in the breast of a helpless person? Is it fair to call the ensuing tears a "tantrum" or is it more accurate to say that a child has better access to the wellspring of emotion that ought to flow forth from having her right to hold something she covets denied? Perhaps it is the Hope Diamond and you can't let your child play with it. Fine. Empathize with having something shiny snatched away for no reason that you can possibly understand. Have you ever lost a boyfriend to an unworthy replacement? Then you know what it is to feel that something precious has been stolen but remains miserably in view.

Uta Hagen was once asked by a student how to play a murderer when she had never wanted to murder anyone. How could she possibly relate to such an "outsize" desire, so beyond the realm of the "normal" human brain.  Uta Hagen asked the student if anyone had ever with impunity stolen her parking space in a crowded lot. Of course that student had felt murderous. There is a big difference between feeling murderous and being capable of murdering. When a child strikes you in anger out of a feeling of helplessness she may feel murderous. But you are not in any danger, and not just because she is small and weak. She is not a murderer, she is just playing one on the stage of life.

Our struggles all have something in common. They involve a struggle to cope with the event, to understand it, to fight for normalcy, to regain control over the emotions we are having because we do not yet understand the consequence of such events on our lives and souls. 

-Uta Hagen

 Children's souls have the same need for control as those of adults. Deny them this control at society's peril. Grant them this control and they will use it one day for society's good.

Uta Hagen, actor, writer, teacher, humanist. 

Related:

http://hungrylittleanimal.blogspot.com/2014/01/develope-and-development.html

http://hungrylittleanimal.blogspot.com/2013/12/dont-tell-mama.html

http://hungrylittleanimal.blogspot.com/2013/11/tiny-actor.html

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