3 kinds of Acting: Faking it; For an Audience; and Autotelic

Observing Sahil pretending to be the birds in Angry Birds 2, I wondered how widespread this kind of acting is in children — and wanted to run a quick poll; and then realized I have to disambiguate what I meant by Acting (especially in the context of Children), and realized there’s (at least) 3 kinds of acting

1. Faking it

This is done for personal gain (for oneself, or for the benefit of someone we care about) — for example, pretending to be sleeping to avoid having to brush teeth. This has a weird status in society where we don’t want to openly acknowledge that this is an essential skill, and so we diss it instead. I wonder how that influences children when they start learning it? BTW all children learn it, the extent of which is perhaps a function of both natural aptitude and the quality of the learning experiences they are subject to —both intentional (i.e. someone, the learner and/or an adult, curated the experience, although this doesn’t mean that the expected learning was realized (e.g. in the case of corporal punishment)) and unintentional (like an accident).

The other 2 types are different — here acting is an example of a Performing Art, where we could experience a state of Flow; there is joy for the actor in the mastery of the art and for the audience (when there is one, the performer can experience joy even when alone) to revel in awe.

2. Acting for an Audience

This is an area that few children seem to excel in, or maybe there’s only limited demand for Child Actors. This can be improvised (Improv’) or scripted. This is often commercial acting (in which case there’s a good chance of the acting being to a given script that you don’t have much say over, except to decline the role) but it could be amateur — and perhaps amateur theatre is actually a case of combining types 2 and 3.

It’s a similar story for other performing arts like Singing and Dancing although perhaps reality shows have created more opportunities for them.

3. Autotelic acting

Autotelic, from Greek αὐτοτελής (autotelēs), formed from αὐτός (autos, “self”) and τέλος (telos, “end” or “goal”), which Mihalyi describes as the state of being internally driven, maybe with a sense of purpose or curiosity; to which I would add playfulness.

This can be things like mimicry (like what Sahil was doing with Angry Birds) or Role Play (like the various adaptations we act out of the Evil Queen getting at Snow White and how various characters either help her escape or revive her from poison or even bring her back from the dead). This also could be improvised (e.g. suddenly shifting to speaking a fake language) or scripted (like how we negotiate the Snow White games before role playing them).

There is no distinct audience here — any observers are participants; either genuinely participating or by faking engagement to “humour the children”. The performer (a child, if my hypothesis is correct) experiences joy even when performing alone — although adults can either enhance it by participating genuinely (and co-creating the script) and validating the experience or diminish it by faking it, or even worse, demeaning and discouraging the acts.

BTW, just to be clear, commercial actors (part of Type 2) can find flow — in fact, I think the best ones do. They may often find it more enjoyable (although sometimes the stress of being in the limelight contributes to mental health issues) than a chore. But I doubt adults engage in Autotelic Acting, except perhaps in Amateur Theater.

My hypothesis is that kids like to Autotelic Acting because

1. You can enjoy it acting (and signing and dancing) regardless of your level of talent or competence — because there’s always room to grow, and there’s no need to perform to meet someone else’s expectations (provided you haven’t been traumatised by having to perform for an audience, like what happens at pre-school concerts) which makes it accessible to more children. For adult amateur performances (theatre, choirs, etc), the audience expectation limits access to those with a minimum level of competence.
2. In acting, your choices are hardly constrained by available resources (like they are in many other creative/artistic pursuits like drawing and painting (material), music (instruments), and even dancing (shoes) and singing (background music))—even props can be totally made-up, which gives you more freedom of choice
3. Your choices are self-directed (or in a participatory manner if there are other actors, whether children or adults… and the forms of collective participation are richer in acting than in singing and dancing), rather than externally imposed, which also gives you more freedom of choice — subject to the extent to which adults discourage/prohibit certain choices (e.g. gender stereotypes and/or homophobic concerns regarding boys acting as girls or vice versa; restrictions on role plays that cause hurt to others)

In summary, I have a hunch that many children pursue and enjoy Autotelic Acting (and on the same reasoning, also autotelic singing and dancing, but possibly a lesser number of children) so much more than adults do because they experience a degree of freedom not experienced in any other childhood pursuit, whereas adults, even when participating genuinely with their children, have other domains which give them greater freedom of choice.