Interview with Michael Fields, managing artistic director

By Mark McKenna

Mark McKenna: Can you tell me a little bit about how you guys make decisions as a Hub? I saw three different stages at least: The stage with you now as a managing artistic director – it seems like you have a little bit more authority than, say, in the system that might have been four or five years ago, and then maybe 10 years before that. How has that evolved?

Michael Fields: I think it is still evolving. It started to evolve when the Hub was at a certain point in its development where everything was equal. Equal pay, equal authority over everything. That unfortunately didn’t work when people didn’t have the authority to carry out the responsibility that they were given. There was almost a micro-management that was happening at the Hub level. There was no acknowledgement of the disparity between work being done and compensation being paid. So, we brought in a consultant that had worked with us 10 years before that. She reflected back to us what she saw. Because of that there was a slight reordering, a restructuring of things. That gave more authority in the areas of the school, and oversight of the whole. The Hub would still hold the decisions over who is employed here, what direction the organization goes, anything we call major policy decisions. Within that we are trying to give more day-to-day responsibility and authority to individuals, so that they are not hamstrung by a body of people and can’t act. That process is still going through an evolution and a refinement. As the organization has gotten bigger it is impossible to know what is going on all the time, which used to be the case. There needs to be another refinement, seems to me, coming. I’m not sure quite yet what that is, but there needs to be another step taken.

MM: The operation of an equal-pay, equal-power ensemble – about how long did that operate?

MF: Probably at least 10, 15 years.

MM: Then a consultant came in and you started going in this new direction. How long ago was that?

MF: That was probably about three years ago. It was a refinement of a direction that was already there. She called it "organizational myths." I think in ensemble theater, in particular, it is easy to get stuck in both individual patterns of relating to each other and holding on to history and letting that determine current practice. Both of those things are dangerous. Because the organization has gotten larger there has been also an influx of new people working here who naturally don’t understand the history and the jargon of those who carried it around. So, we needed to make the structure more transparent, more clear to people. How things work. I don’t think we’ve fully succeeded to do that.

MM: Tell me how your structures for decision -making organizationally might compare and contrast to when you are all working together collaboratively , as you might on an artistic project or a program?

MF: There is a lot of t; development director who is responsible to me. Those kinds of lines are drawn. It is still a kind of flat-line hierarchy in terms of the way the organization is run and the artistic process is done. Even if it is determined that Joan is going to do a project, she is going to write it, she is going to direct it, she is going to do all that and doesn’t want any of us in the room – even to determine that is a collaborative decision. Then, basically, she’s empowered to do that. If the organization says that’s it, then that’s it. But we try not to hamstring the artist and make them conform to a collaborative model if their choice is not to do that for a particular project.

Part of that comes out of what I see as the diverging maturity of the artists who work here. If we keep working and we keep doing things, we aren’t going to want to keep doing things all the same. We probably never did, but it was more expedient to do that 10 years ago. Now you can really see a divergence of voices. Some of that divergence is causing friction, and some of that divergence is just normal and healthy. The administration knows exactly what to do to take things further, but can’t quite yet, because there are too many creative differences. Part of this is a product of getting larger and needing longer timelines.

MM: Define how the work of Dell’Arte grows out of the community, how it effects the community, how the community effects your work?

MF: Well, every couple of years you invent new jargon to describe yourself. Many people want to put you in a box. They want to say you are a physical, movement, Lecoq-based company– And actually we’ve never been able to be boxed like that. "Paradise Lost," the work that we just did, was highly experimental, and a lot of our community didn’t like it. And frankly, that’s okay. Then we do a piece like "Pirates," which you saw, or a family theater work. That just had a killer tour. People love that. The Living Biographies Project, which is based on the interviews with the elders of this community, which was the show we did, "The Rag and Bone Shop," people loved that. That kind of connection.

Then there is what I would call the "theater of place." That is the third component of it. That is the whole "Korbel" series. We are doing a Goldoni [adaptation] now, "La Bodega de Café," which is all about coffee. We are setting it in Venice, but there are obvious allusions to this community, in terms of the work and what it is. Something like the festival, and the pageant in the festival, and the mobile mask-making – all of that is engaged to give the community participation in the art that happens here in a sensible atmosphere. As you know, it is more than just the show, it is the event of it and the ability to have that kind of dialogue, not always about the art, but about the rest of it.

If we are lucky, next year we will get this Animating Democracy grant [granted 2001]. It will be about the building of the casino here in Blue Lake. We’ll follow it from ground-breaking through to operation, interviewing four or five people on video documentary over the course of the project, having Native American presentations, and then we will develop a play based on it. That is classic theater of place to me. We called it the Detalian Project. "Detalian" means the beads that were used to gamble with in the Native American tradition. The woman at the Blue Lake Rancheria, our partner, the woman who is building the casino, she loves the title. The Karuk guy who is doing the videoing said it was like calling Indians niggers. We are stepping in a lot of shit with this, but I think that is very interesting. That is another aspect of reflecting the community back. Not as "this is the way it should be," but reflecting that conflict back. This is Native American politics. We are just stepping all over it, which is fine.

I’ve lost all my p.c. [political correctness] in the last few years; it has just seems to have washed away! Not to antagonize anyone gratuitously. I think that kind of relationship with the community simply exists in our ability to get things done. And we shape the vision of this town, either as private citizens or as a company. I think we have agendas in that way, too, in terms of shaping this place in a way that we feel would be more conducive to more of that kind of back and forth.

MM: Obviously in a theater-of-place project you are hearing different and conflicting points of view.

MF: You facilitate a community forum for that. We are hiring a facilitator to do that. We don’t know how to do that. We are bringing in a group, a local group called the Cascadia Forum. If we get the grant we will. They will come in and lead that facilitation. Once again, then, we are not in the middle of doing something we don’t know how to do.

MM: How does the community guide you all? How do they become empowered to impact how Dell’Arte decides to do things?

MF: I think they are involved in every discussion of how we choose the work. I think they are involved in every discussion of how we train artists. Our students here all have to put in so many hours of community service. Right now, they are off on tour doing performances for communities out in the rural outback for free. That is part of what we feel is an essential part of their training. This year we have modified that so that they spend a longer time in fewer communities, so that they actually get to know people. Part of what the equation of community relationships is that it is personal. Even in a city, it is personal. And I think whatever that conversation is, it is associated less with a concept and more with a person. Some people know Joan and have known Joan for years. That kind of personal relationship is also what makes the relationship with the audience more than what you would experience in a traditional theatrical setting. And I think, for all of us who do that kind of work, there is that kind of conversation. I really don’t hear it very much at the Missouri Rep. where I was. I watched them go blink and then leave the theater in droves.

MM: In terms of the personal connection with the audience?

MF: Well, yeah. The audience hated the work that was going on stage and wanted to return to the good old days of song-time and musicals. I was just sitting in an audience watching. And the theater, of course, has the arrogance to tell them exactly what is good for them. When we get into this kind of work – even though the work has great artistic ambition and drive behind it – t there is still an aspect of it that is based, even in the most experimental way, in that conversation. And I think that is the difference.

MM: How would you describe being in Blue Lake has changed, instead of Utah or New York City?

MF: It is becoming more clear to me that the vision of this place came out of a much older vision. It is that relationship of a company and a training center not in a city. Now I forget the French guy who started one in France, but you know Carlo came here with even a twist on that vision. What he saw was the lessons of nature as applied to the training. This environment, the physical environment, was to him a key component in an actor’s training. And the native cultures that exist here had, within their cultural stories, something that shouldn’t be copied, but should be learned from. The whole idea of developing work in this kind of a region and then be able to, either through the style of it or the ambition of it, be able to take it into an urban or international setting. All of that wouldn’t have happened outside of this particular setting.

The nature of this place, given the fact that there is a very strong counter culture here, kind of helped incubate Dell’Arte in a way that I don’t think other places would have done. The sense that this really is where the ’60s meet the scene. There is a huge amount of the environmental movement, the whole counter-culture movement, and in some ways Dell’Arte reflects that back as a counter-culture organization. I don’t think our ambition is to be mainstream, so we fit by virtue of who we were as individuals when we came here. I don’t think that was Carlo’s original vision when he came here. I think he wanted very much to be mainstream. But I think in terms of who we are, and where we came out of, and part of it is political, and part of it is point of view that came to us. A community like Blue Lake and surrounding region was very conducive to what we’ve been doing. In a way that I think we never would have kept the company together in a city. It wouldn’t have happened.

Mark McKenna is artistic director and an ensemble member of Touchstone Theatre, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris. He has taught theater classes at Lehigh University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the MFA Theatre Program at Towson State University. McKenna is active in the growth of the Network of Ensemble Theatres. He is a board member of Alliance for Building Communities, a regional community-development corporation.

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
Commentaries