My Teaching Philosophy

 I have over 25 years of eclectic experience working as an actor in theater, film, and television, and I have also achieved recognition as a director, playwright, and producer. My continued professional work across disciplines serves as important inspiration for what I’ve come to believe is my greatest talent and most passionate pursuit: my work as an educator. My objective as a professor of acting is to empower my students with tools that transcend the performing arts. Beyond vital analytical and communication skills, theater allows me to impart lessons in teamwork, curiosity, empathy, and authenticity. My students learn how to listen effectively, collaborate respectfully, and be truly present in the moment. Students leave my class with increased inquisitiveness, sensitivity, and confidence that serves them within and beyond the performing arts.

I cultivate a rigorous yet noncompetitive environment where students can connect to their most authentic, creative selves and play with a sense of joy, freedom, and spontaneity. My teaching philosophy is informed by the fear of failure that constrained me during my years as a student. An academic overachiever and former competitive athlete, I received my undergraduate degree from Yale. My training as an actor, which continues long after I earned an MFA from the University of Washington, centers on granting myself permission to experience process (in which I won’t always know all the answers) and recognizing that failure is often an important part of discovery and growth.

I create a “brave space” in which students take risks and challenge themselves. Emphasizing teamwork and ensemble building, I model working with generosity towards self and other. I encourage students to prioritize process over immediate results, and to recognize that risk— sometimes even failure—is a valuable learning opportunity and a crucial part of the creative process. I challenge my students to develop the ability, as my Alexander technique teacher and mentor Jed Diamond would say, “To tolerate themselves in the discomfort” of the unknown. For example, early in each semester I introduce students to Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” which begins with the line “You do not have to be good...,” a sentiment many anxiety-ridden, over-achieving Tulane students need to hear. Students are asked to work collaboratively to devise a group theatrical presentation of the poem. Far out of their comfort zone, many initially feel fearful or even foolish attempting the task, but I’ve found over and over again that the poet’s message and my encouragement empowers students to overcome these hurdles and allow themselves to be vulnerable and free in service of the success of their group.

I believe in leading by example, inspiring full commitment from my students because that is what I offer them. I participate in warm-ups alongside my students, demanding the same focus, energy, and concentration of myself as I do of them. On the first day of every class, I teach the students a game called “Buh,” which I learned from the great clown and movement teacher Christopher Bayes (Head of Physical Acting at the Yale School of Drama). “Buh” is a very simple game played in a circle with the goal of helping students find the “speed of fun.” Students will often begin the exercise in what Bayes called the “speed of worry”—slowly passing the sound around the circle, allowing time and space for doubt and self-consciousness to enter. Students may then swing to the opposite end of the spectrum and rush to the “speed of panic,” where they are going so fast that they miss truly connecting with the person next to them. The aim, instead, is to find the “speed of fun” where one is existing completely in the moment, feeling a heightened sense of presence and spontaneity, a highly focused and engaged state that is largely absent of judgement and doubt. I will often tell my novice students that one of the most important skills for an actor is a willingness to look silly in front of other people. To that end, many of our warmup games and improvisations encourage playfulness and a spirit of joy (where I am often the person acting most silly in the room). I treat my students as collaborators, and together we seek solutions to creative questions and challenges.

Students – many fresh from high school – often look to me to tell them the “right” answer. But rather than working to impress me, the teacher, or to “get it right,” my students, over the course of a semester, develop the courage to fail and the tenacity to keep refining choices until they can viscerally identify improvement in their work. In my class, students begin to take ownership of their achievements, both artistically and academically, becoming their own best motivator and teacher. In all of my acting classes, I assign character study papers designed to help students develop close reading skills to glean all the clues on character given by the playwright as well as hone their own imagination to fill in crucial details. A Tulane student noted on an evaluation, “I really enjoyed writing the character analyses for each of our roles. It really helped me to find my character motivation and it made portraying these characters so much easier.”

Modeled on Liz Lerman’s critical response process, a four-step process designed to facilitate supportive and collaborative feedback, my students learn how to express aesthetic opinions with confidence and to give constructive (rather than prescriptive) peer-to-peer feedback (https://lizlerman.com/critical-response-process/). While I do not consider myself a strict devotee of any one actor training methodology, my teaching is strongly influenced by my work with Stanislavski-based teachers such as Jon Jory, Ron Van Lieu, Earle Gister, Larry Moss, and Mark Jenkins. My extensive work in movement and physical theater approaches such as Viewpoints training and the Suzuki Method of Acting strongly inform my teaching, as does my study of the Alexander technique and Linklater voice work, enabling me to give my students tools to connect to physical impulses and communicate with enhanced ease and expressivity.

A comment from a Tulane student evaluation succinctly summarizes my goals as a teacher: “Jenny really knows her stuff and communicates it clearly and repeatedly to her students. If you are willing to listen, her instruction sticks. She encourages students to try new things and go outside their comfort zone, and I think students trust her enough to do so. She is also loads of fun and very understanding...Professors as understanding and willing to listen as her are hard to come by.”