2005© Photograph by Tony Arpante
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Creative Business
By Tova Navarra (Press Staff Writer) Asbury Park Press, Thursday, June 15, 1989 The recesses of your mind are strange places. Your fantasies, your visions, your playfulness and your passions can snuggle into those alcoves and get very comfortable in the shadows. They can exist on shallow breaths and meager nourishment while sentries protect them. But the truth is, the best of you often feels trapped and you’ve done a great job denying it, perhaps for years. Despite that denial, however, you’ve been a competent, if not excellent worker. Things seemed all right. OK, you have ideas about how you’d like to improve yourself, but you tell yourself you’ll eventually work it out. Then your boss hears about The Actors Institute “Corporate Mastery of Self Expression” workshop, and you are chosen to participate. More companies nowadays acknowledge their employees’ individuality and need for professional as well as emotional support. They pay the $350 tuition in the hope that you’ll learn how to increase your productivity. “The Actors Institute started in 1977, started when a New York actor named Dan Fauci was asked by an actor named Ted Danson to give a workshop of some sort to actors in Los Angeles,” said Allen Schoer, executive director. “Fauci had a special, powerful something, and he told Danson, ‘If you can get 50 people in a room for a weekend, I’ll come out and do a three-day workshop.” Fifty people or five people – the number didn’t matter. What started as a “Mastery of Acting” workshop gave birth to The Actors Institute. Schoer said, “Initially for the purposes of helping actors over the hurdles of what to do between actors jobs, the workshop was so successful that people not involved in theatre began to ask, “How about us?” Expanded from show business to every business, the Mastery course and other relations courses – “Presentation,” “Vision and Will” and “Leadership and Creativity” among them – are now conducted throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. “The Mastery is a three-day workshop,” he said. “We begin Friday and run all day Saturday and Sunday. The weekend includes a variety of exercises, theatre games which involve emotional expression, a prepared presentation and critiques. In all of these exercises, we emphasize creativity and self-expression.” Last Friday night at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, Middletown Township, financial planner George F. Tobin of Englishtown, new MBA graduate Mark Griggs of Manasquan, accountant Clarise Costello-Bell and advertising supervisor Beatrice Kachelriess, both of Eatontown, business executive James Maroukis of Jersey City and entrepreneur Deborah DiMicelli of Little Silver joined Schoer and Edward C. Ryterband, a Rumson career counselor and teacher at Monmouth College in West Long Branch. A first-name basis was established. Each participant introduced himself or herself and expressed goals for the weekend. Right from the start, the obstacles along the course began to unfold. Some found it nerve-racking to talk about personal desires, to expound on the images they have for the weekend. Schoer and Ryterband coached each person to a point of self-revelation. Their devices? An intensive – to be honest grueling – series of physical and mental exercises based on love, anger, need, fear, and lo and behold, success. Writer Craig Lambert described the workshop in the EastWest Journal, a Massachusetts lifestyle magazine, as an “explosive, extraordinary three-day experience which has given thousands of actors, performers, writers, teachers, nurses, carpenters, and secretaries a renewed awareness of their own creative and expressive capacities.” Fauci believed most people are naturally creative, but vaguely aware that they are detached from that unique part of themselves. “When they hare that there’s a space in which to express this uniqueness,” Fauci once said, “it means a chance to fulfill a deep, long-held wish. “The difference in our technique is we don’t put a system on top of their abilities. We don’t give them rules. We want them to create the rules. We’re more in a ‘discovery’ mode than a ‘tell-me’ mode.” Schoer delved into the concept of discovery by way of risk-taking. “Any form of risk-taking can promote creativity by its very nature, because risks tend to stir things up,” he said. “They make you look outside your present way of seeing things, beyond your beliefs about yourself, such as ‘I can’t do that’ and ‘It’s impossible.’ “Risks also involved danger,” Schoer said. “To some people, talking in front of a group can be as terrifying as sky-diving or log-rolling. Yet each barrier, successfully overcome, brings about the same moment of clarity. Among the thousands of workshop participants we’ve encountered (including the US Naval Academy), they all consistently agreed – at the moment of breath-through, they saw things differently.” “And it’s a lot more fun to play than taking yourself to seriously. I miss everyone already.” Griggs, who called himself a rebel with a playful little boy inside him, finally touched the side of himself that had been aching to come out. “Thank you for supporting me through this,” he told the group as his eyes shone. “I learned to see people, to really get into someone else’s psyche, to appreciate others for who they are.” said Tobin. “And I see that opportunities don’t wait, and that it’s important to unlock some of the roadblocks – or just to see what the roadblocks are – to my creativity.” “I want to take better care of me, take time for myself and giggle more,” said Ms. DiMicelli, who has started a business called “Bright Baskets and Balloons.” Maroukis said, “The whole weekend gave me pause to rethink everything I do in a different light now. In short it was one of those life-changing experiences.” Ms. Costello-Bell emerged from her private barriers the way a butterfly comes out of it’s cocoon. “I love you all,” she said in a marvelously candid moment at the end of the course. Schoer called all the participants heroes and left them with the wisdom that whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it, for boldness has genius and power and magic in it.” 
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