Interview with Joan Schirle, co-artistic director, director of training

By Mark McKenna

Mark McKenna: How do you incorporate the community into your decision making.

Joan Schirle: It is completely situational. The community is not involved in decision making on any kind of day-to-day basis. It is involved a lot in decisions of what we are going to do, if it will be something our community is interested in seeing. That is like a consideration. But we don’t go the community and say, "Well we are going to do a Goldoni this summer, what do you think?" We say we are going to do this, we think people would really like this in our community. We have a very supportive community and we kind of know what kind of things they want to see. We know that they want to see the core company on a regular basis.

MM: How do you know that?

JS: Because they have told us. "I was disappointed that Don, Michael and Joan were not in this piece." We know now that when we advertise that a show will feature us more people come. As far as actual involvement of the community we do have community forums, for example. We do invite people to come and tell us what they like about the Mad River Festival, input into the fact that we close the street in front of Dell’Arte, input into how late is it okay to do music outside in the amphitheater? Who will that bother? Where are there places in the streets adjacent to our amphitheater where people do not want anyone parking? A lot of it is about trying to be good neighbors here.

At another level there is community input where a project warrants it. For example, Michael may have told you that we’ve applied for funding to do this project that deals with Indian gaming. That will have a lot of community input, starting with the tribe who is building the casino and moving into the community that is impacted by that. We have another level, we are doing this second fragment of "Paradise Lost," for which we would like to do a site-specific thing. It was a matter of going to the city of Arcata, who owns this redwood forest, and dealing with their requirements. We are not allowed to put nails of any kind into the trees. So, that show is being designed around the community’s guidelines for the use of that public space. Obviously our work in the Education Through Art program with the local school has evolved to be a combination of what meets that school’s needs and what we do. A lot of that has been worked out in dialogue with the school. Our curriculum-based work is now based very largely on community input.

MM: How do you reflect the way your work has evolved out of the community, out of your interaction?

JS: Since we adopted a philosophy, and I believe invented the term theater of place, we’ve had a commitment to that – to doing pieces that reflect the issues, the themes, the characters, the life of around here. It is not the only work we do.

MM: What is the nature of that commitment?

JS: We know that each year the students are going to tour to the local schools around here. We’ve been in the schools for at least 15 years. Say that their final touring project is going to play for a general family audience and it is going to play in eight or ten of the really small rural areas around here. Therefore, that show must be suitable for that audience, meaning that the themes, and so on are appropriate.

MM: Do they create that show?

JS: They do. They create it under the guidance of the artists. The format of that show varies every year. This year it is in the nature of a vaudeville. Sometimes it is more in the nature of a play, a review, a cabaret. It depends. Our clown show last year was circus. But the commitment is to follow up a very long-term relationship with specific communities. We know that, during the summer festival, at least some of the work we are going to present that is created by Dell’Arte itself, or some of the outside touring work, is going to reflect that idea of theater of place.

This year the piece we are doing about the coffee house, even though it is set in Venice, is dealing with gambling – which is becoming a thing here. It takes place in a coffee house that is next to a casino, and it is also dealing with the idea of coffee as this sort of world force and how that relates to us here – we’ve always been something of a colony, rural America. In our particular case, the resource that is harvested here and exported elsewhere has been wood and fish when there is some. A lot of our work has reflected that.

I’m sure somebody has told you about the "Korbel" series. That is another instance of how that involvement with our community has reflected. And then the holiday show. Traditionally it has been based on a part of local history or regional interest. Last year, the piece they did was more about preserving elements of the past in the rush to develop everything. Things that are old, including people, have value. That came out of a local project called Living Biographies, which is funded by a local foundation. Oral histories of local people, elderly people, were taken. We became a part of that by using those oral histories and creating a new fictional work. None of those people’s stories are verbatim in this, but it is a reflection on the need of society to value those people and collect those stories before they are gone.

MM: Many, many people talked with me about "Korbel" when I was there. It seems to be that a lot of characters in "Korbel" are based on characters in and around Blue Lake. The relationship between Dell’Arte and Blue Lake, how do they feed each other in "Korbel" more specifically?

JS: It is basically a mirror image of this little town that we live in. The piece we did last year included a very thinly veiled set of characters based on the Blue Lake City Council. That was made with some input from individuals, asking them to actually contribute pieces of their own dialogue, which was incorporated into the play. It was also based on what has been a dominant issue here for many years, which is the results of the use of this land over a long period of time, and what the generation now has to face, both in terms of the loss of resource and the fight over the last remaining resource, which in our community is a fight between environmentalists and the people who have had jobs in the logging sector. Our position has not been to side with one or the other, but to reveal the kind of complex human web that underlies that. Fear. In the "Korbel" series fear is at the heart of a lot of it. Fear of change. The change is inevitable. It is how a community can work together. The "Korbel" series, each year that it was done, reflected an issue that perhaps threw additional light on that. One year it brought in the idea of militias, which was a big thing in the United States that particular year. Another year brought in the idea of prejudice within the community of transgendered people, of foreign people. Then the last one we did dealt with kind of the relationship of the citizens in town to the city council. It didn’t have a particular issue, it was more of an exploration of local types of people.

In the show that I am doing now, my solo show which is meant to do international touring and not just play here, some of the twelve characters that I play in it are based on people that I’ve met here. People in the Logger Bar, the types from here. People seeing this outside will probably not know that, but hopefully the characters will have a truth that is visible. When I did this in Iowa, people came up and said, "Gee, I feel like I know that person." That is a recognition that certain kinds of people are existing more than just here. That is a base for that. I didn’t go to people and say "May I use you." I call it donors.

MM: How does your decision to be a physical theater company – however you might more eloquently describe your aesthetic – how has that decision enabled you to have a significant relationship with your community?

JS: One is that the physical theater – the roots of Commedia Dell’Arte, the work with mask and mime – has always lent itself to a populist forum. A work that speaks directly to the people of a place. Obviously, someone would say that the popular forms right now are television and video games. They are not theater, but there is no contradiction between doing the work that is of an artistically high excellence and great aesthetic value, and having it be accessible to the people in the places that you live. We continue to operate by that, so that we are not lowering our standards as artists in order to make works that are populist and accessible to a large part of our community. Nor are we seeking to limit our development as artists by doing only work that is generally accessible. There is a strong interest within the organization for creating work that is experimental, that is not going to be popular. Populist work by its very nature tends to be something with which your audience feels comfortable. We have built an audience. I will say this about our community, they have affected us, but we have also affected them, in that we have fostered a sophistication, so that they are more open to a variety of forms. They know that we are not easily categorizable here.

MM: Why do you think it is important for an audience to be open to various forms?

JS: Then I think it is much more of a real relationship with the community. It is not just the artist saying they will bow to the market forces. The community recognizing also this group of artists because of what they are giving to our community, and at the same time we will remain supportive or at least open to their experimentation, their mistakes even, in watching them develop in tandem with the community itself.

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.

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