Interview with Joan Schirle, co-artistic director, and Bobbie Ricca, administrative director

By Mark McKenna

Joan Schirle: [Blue Lake] is a desirable community to live in. It still retains some working-class character. There are a lot of people who live here still that drive trucks for a living or go to work in what’s left in the timber industry. To me, that has always been an interesting flavor of living in this town. I’ve never really liked the Arcata character. I like going to Arcata. I’m glad it has a theater that I can see independent movies in, a lot of cafes and that. It is very homogeneous in a sense, and I don’t like that. Its prejudices are different than the prejudices of Blue Lake, but they are there, nonetheless. I’ve always felt more freedom here. Being odd here means that everybody just thinks you are odd.

Bobbie Ricca: Now it means that is probably just a Dell’Arte person.

JS: I wanted to say this in terms of trying to understand ensembles and what they are, what models there might be for people interested in creating them. We are 25 years down the line as pretty much this group of people. If you took a cross-section of this organization now, it would look completely different than it did five years ago, and then 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 25 years ago. I think it is important. Our achievement coach is trying to get each of us who are in power positions to understand our role in the organization now. Some of us, like myself, are having a great deal of difficulty trying to figure out how to fit into the organization at this time.

The entrepreneurial phase is something that we did 25 years ago. Bobbie says she used to know where all the administrative was, when I started here I knew where all the artistic, administrative and financial was, because I was the only one doing it. That was pretty much the first seven years of the organization. Not that I did it all, but I was managing it, doing our booking, taking care of our finances. Carlo was still here, and it was basically like two partners. Gradually, the organization started to change. We acquired an administrative director. About our seventh year is when I felt like I couldn’t deal with the load, and Michael started doing the booking. Obviously managerially he had a gift. Then I just passed it to him and he became the managing director. We went on to another period and Bobbie came in.

Then there was a period where we completely altered our board structure. We became a membership organization. That was fairly early on. And then there was the point when we decided to do a capital campaign. That was a point where all of us made a commitment that was really long-term. Up until then, we were going year-to-year, but – the decision to be the institution that was going to be something semi-permanent here.

A few years after that, we went through another kind of big soul searching and altered the lines of authority in the organization, so that Michael has a tremendous amount more of power-organizational thing. We hired some more middle people. We had always had a problem of being chief-heavy and not enough Indians to do the stuff. As Bobbie says, a lot of overqualified chiefs did all our own xerox-ing. Still do. That has been kind of a problem – to get qualified people to do the middle-level and lower-level tasks.

None of us are the same people or the same artists we were 25 years ago. Having invested that many years into your own self as a product, at this point you want to say, "I’ve got to put this out there. I can’t just be sitting here all the time cranking out documents. I have to be doing this." And we always did that, both things. But I certainly wouldn’t expect some group of young people looking at us now to say, "Well, how can I step into this river that you are and do what you are doing, because I am inspired by what you do." The times have changed, so obviously they wouldn’t have the same access to programs like CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act], which allowed us to exist. The Carter era, we wouldn’t be here without that program. What is your CETA of now? What are the things you can find that allow you to get a leg up? ’Cause that is what you’ve gotta find, you’ve gotta get a leg up. If you don’t stay around long enough, nothing happens. How do you find that commitment in people? That is the big question. Our students ask that. How do I find people that I want to work with for five years or ten years? You don’t know for sure, but be very careful who you jump into bed with.

Mark McKenna: When you solve the transmission issue, 10, 15 years down the line, what do you hope theater will be like? Or is it what Blue Lake will be like? Or is it your different communities; your international community – Who is most important to impact? And what is most important to change and to keep happening when the torch is passed? What will be happening that is not happening?

JS: Well, let’s see– There are a lot of circles in that question, one is what is happening to us, what is happening to here. I don’t think we will be remembered for our theatrical vision. I don’t think we have had a particularly original or break-through theatrical vision. I think a lot of this other stuff has been equally important to us. That is maybe just fine.

But I do think that we are a part of this river of tradition that goes all the way back into the earliest times. In my course, "The History of the Performer in the Non-Literary Theatre," I think we are of that tradition, and I think we are doing our part to reproduce the species. We are fulfilling that basic function of humans to reproduce their kind. We are doing that. We are in that river and we are pushing it along. We are trying to keep the channel open. We have already planted the seeds in a lot of people that have come through our school of a way of working that is ensemble-based. It is what I would call the "organic approach," which I think was Lecoq’s approach, which was Carlo’s approach. Say, a humanistic approach. The impact of what we have done on that will probably never be visible to us because it will unfold over time.

To change a town like this, whether we are all around to see what Blue Lake is like in another 20 or 30 years, I don’t know. I’m not a visionary in the sense of saying that I want Blue Lake to be "x." We created with the community of this town, there was a visioning. There was a grant put out to do visioning for a number of communities up here. There were town meetings, three or four of them, where people got together and said, "Here is what we would like to see." A lot of people said they liked seeing clowns on the streets. They like it and they would like to continue it somehow. I would love to close this street. For there to be a park up here, a European kind of feeling to this little town. The kind of thing where you drive into a town and you’re in France and there is a big square and everybody is sitting in it. There are cafes. And it isn’t a big town, it is not a big urban scene, but it is a livelier scene of people being together. That seems to be one of the harder things to do in America, and we aren’t the only ones thinking about it. I don’t know how to do that unless there is public space where people can be free to hang out. Either without fear of traffic, or fear of police harassment, or fear of assholes. You know, how do you make safe public places that are attractive to come to. We talk about that a lot. But it is one of those large-scale things.

Personally, I just hope that I realize my potential as an artist before I die. That is my ground-level personal goal. And that I find the personal form that allows me to do that. I’ve been on a search for that all my life. Is it directing? That has mutated over time. What was I reading the other day, or hearing on the radio? Some famous person was saying that a lot of people die without ever putting their music out there, and that to him was the most important thing to do. To try and find a way to not hold back. The greatest thing is that it is given to artists, that expectation. For a lot of people it is harder to find that in a nonartistic life. We have it sort of handed to us cause that is the choice we made to become artists. It is only disappointing if you don’t.

As an ensemble, for me it has always been an improvisation. It has always been intuiting that we need to move away from this, or we need to strongly hold to this, or why don’t we try "x." Right now we are engaged in this process with a planner who is trying to get us to articulate goals, to move towards them. A part of me resists that, but a part of me says, "Yes we do need to do that. "We need to organize longer-range plans. We are very good at organizing short-term plans. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to complete all the projects that we have done. We do that. I don’t know if we will ever solve the internal contradictions that exist within our ensemble, of which I won’t speak, but which have effected our development and continue to effect our processes. It is like always accommodating around a burl. A tree puts out a burl because there is something there it has to grow around, it effects the shape of that tree. Sometimes it makes it very beautiful, but sometimes–

MM: How do you find the person you are going to work with?

BR: It is like a marriage, very much.

JS: And I think we are all very successful compromisers in a positive way. I think that is an ensemble quality that anyone who wants to be part of an ensemble must have. It is difficult, the education of an ensemble, because the dominant mode is to strengthen your own ego to not compromise. There is a truth to that, too. You’ve got to not compromise an essential vision thing, but there have to be places where you do. Otherwise you’d better work alone. I think what we have done smartly is to allow members of the ensemble a certain amount of leeway to exercise full control over their visions at various times, so that you aren’t always having to compromise when you want to do something. Our experience with this group Lume, from Brazil, who are an ensemble: A couple of them have been together for 15 years, the younger members have been there for six, really strongly connected to each other with a very clear idea that it is possible for members to leave and come back. They know that they are not exploiting each other by doing that. They aren’t fooling around. They really are connected to each other, and when you go do something it is because you are going to bring it back. It is going to help everybody. It is very strange, very unusual to talk to them. Like us, they are very insular. You can’t hold on to that attitude and be a lot in the world. That again is part of the balancing act. How do you be in and of the world, and of your time and of your field, and still hold to these ideals that are practically monastic in a way? If you take them that seriously, they are. They are the orders of people who usually band together around religious ideas or strong political movements. I don’t think we take ourselves that seriously, but if you look at things, there is that.

MM: There are lots more questions I have.

JS: [To Ricca] Do you have anything to say about the future?

BR: I think one of the things we are looking at now is this whole second-generation question. How do we bring in close enough the ones who may be the ones to take up the torch at the appropriate time, so they can? It seems possible that the school could go on. I think we would all like it to go on in the same direction instead of skewing over into another. Look at Ashland for instance. Ashland was a long time in coming, and that is a possible way that this organization could be moving.

MM: Ashland?

BR: Ashland, Oregon. Shakespeare Festival. A theatrical economic center for a town, that is a possibility for this town. There is a problem here that there is no economic center, that you have to out to Arcata for that. Things could develop. There is maybe going to be a cafe across the street. That would be lovely. It would be nice if there were a couple of bed-and-breakfasts in town, maybe another restaurant, another bar, maybe another theater. Certainly that has been part of my vision for a number of years. I am uncomfortable with the city government right now, and I don’t feel that I work smoothly with it, but for a number of years I felt that there was a united spirit in the community and I felt the city government and the people seeing a way for this community to develop certainly included us as the central part of that. City governments change, people get re-elected and that may really emerge. It can happen. I don’t think it is our major thrust, but if we see that energy building we would certainly want to facilitate it. Right now, the idea is to free the artists at the core to do more artistic work. That is what all this time in has been, to get to them.

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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