Interview with Daniel Stein, school director

By Mark McKenna

Daniel Stein: I am the school director for the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre.

Mark McKenna: How long have you been here?

DS: I’ve actually been teaching here since 1993. I used to come here for a week or two. In ’96 they hired me full-time as the dean of students, and in ’97 as the school director.

MM: What is it that drew you to working with an ensemble in Blue Lake?

DS: This is a rather extraordinary place. I came because of the whole idea of having an artistic home. When I was touring as a solo artist it was 280 days a year on the road. It is financially very nice, but it is morally and physically wearing. So, they offered me an artistic home here in the school. I’m not doing less creative work. I find teaching is a marvelously creative outlet. Training the next generation is a big focus of mine now. We have students from all over the world, literally. Last year, of our 40 students, we had 17 of them from outside of the country. We had people from Chile, from Honduras, from Mexico, from Scandinavia, from Japan, from Australia, Germany, France. It gives a synergy to the classwork to have that kind of multiplicity of cultures. That is why I was willing to stop touring and come here full-time.

MM: How is Dell’Arte a reflection of Blue Lake’s culture?

DS: It is not like Dell’Arte transferred here at any certain point in its life. It was a seedling here and it grew up here. Pretty much everything about Dell’Arte is a reflection of Blue Lake, in some ways. And in other ways, it is no more a reflection of Blue Lake any more than another theater would be a reflection of the world. That is the nice thing about theater. It is a macrocosm/microcosm kind of thing. You obviously source from the riches of where you live, but if you don’t create the kind of reference that makes it more accessible to people who are not from the area, then you are not doing your job either. What these folks do very, very well is to be able to take the characters of Blue Lake and make them – certainly not universal, but very recognizable in terms of the rest of the world. Dell’Arte has always been committed to a socially active theater as well as a artistically active theater, which is a double-edged sword, in a lot of ways. You find out that some of your sponsors are not always happy with what you have done; you went and talked about an issue that somebody might not be on the same side of the fence as you are.

MM: What do you think the field has to learn from Dell’Arte?

DS: I think the top thing is that we are artist-run. We are not business-run. The Hub now consists of six individuals: three artistic directors, the school director, the school administrator and the financial advisor. Those six people make the decisions for where this place goes. That is very different than corporate theater, or even big repertory theaters ,where the direction of the theater is often chosen by the subscription base or the board of directors. We base our decisions on the work and on how we can train people best.

MM: How does Dell’Arte’s interest in a physical form of make their ability to connect with their community perhaps richer than other theaters that work in communities?

DS: I think physical theater is much more visceral, and audiences are effected much more viscerally than intellectually. The foundation of theater is a live, human experience, which is different than any other form of art that I know of. Painting, writing, music happens in a mostly interpretive way, which is to say that somebody sits down and writes something and then somebody else interprets it, often in front of a camera. Live theater, where real human beings are standing in front of real human beings, is about the fact that we have all set aside this hour the sharing goes in both directions. The fact that it is a very physical, visceral form makes it a very different experience than almost anything else that we partake of in our lives. I don’t think we could do it the same way if we were doing literary-based theater.

MM: What do you think students leaving Dell’Arte takes away with them?

DS: The first thing that we try to give our students is the power to not wait for someone to cast them in productions. You can spend the rest of your life waiting as an artist. We empower our students to create their own theater. We don’t train people to go be waiters in restaurants and bus drivers hoping to get a job in the theater someday.. I have nothing against Shakespeare, but if Shakespeare had been happy with the Greeks we wouldn’t have had Shakespeare. Had Tennessee Williams been happy with Shakespeare we wouldn’t have had him. Somebody has got to be creating the theater for tomorrow. It is important that somebody be training them to do that. I don’t think many places do.

MM: One of the things we are interested in is how the company organizes itself to make decisions and keep the artists at the center of that. What do you see as the major challenges that the company will continue to struggle with?

DS: The real challenge is growth. When anything grows, the people that started it get a flush of cold water when they realize that they are all of a sudden managing something that they really weren’t trained to manage. When the company was just three actors and a director, that was a very manageable thing. Then they started international touring, and none of them had been trained as production managers. We have seen a growth over the past five or six years that has, I believe, more than doubled our budget and class size. When I first got here they were running one class of 23 students. Now we run two concurrent classes of 20 students.

MM: So what are you going to do?

DS: You know we continue to teach ourselves and we continue to learn from others. We brought in a management coach, and he is coaching us in how to better manage both the institution and the people. There is a true, honest effort to communicate so that everybody is on the same page. The excitement is that we are growing – and the challenge is that we are growing. Carlo, our founder, would be nodding right now and saying "paradox," things that are apparently contradictory working perfectly together. I think that we end up doing a better job than people who were trained specifically to be managers, because we come at it from a thinking-outside-the-box point of view. That brings more creative solutions. It is when you are challenged that you truly discover what outside-the-box is. Then we also try and teach our students what outside-the-box is.

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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