Confronting my anti-business bias.

L - R: Merce Cunningham, my Mom Barbara Dilley, Albert Reid in a PR shot for the European tour of 1966. I was on that tour. I was 3 turning 4.

I was not raised in a “business-centric” family. My Dad had a long career working for nonprofits and my Mom is a dancer, choreographer, teacher. I had a privileged upbringing of private schools, fancy colleges and grad school, and then - the life of the struggling actor/teacher for twenty years. I adopted the identity of the “art warrior”, a kind of rebel super-hero who “fights The Man” and aligns himself with anti-capitalism and progressive political positions. And I retain some - but not all - of those points of view. Because somehow, as the result of my mid-life crisis, I became a businessman.

Sort of . . . I run a nonprofit called Bright Invention which has an entrepreneurial program called Creative Corporate Training. Bright Invention was created from disillusion and hope. I was profoundly disillusioned with the life of the stage actor and the nonprofit ecosystem that “supports” it. And I was filled with hope that if I could somehow direct the transformative power of live performance at specific problems, I could create a new way to support actors.

The nonprofit ecosystem of regional theatres is filled with noble and principled leaders who make a lot of noise about empowering creativity, supporting artists and being an antidote to the materialistic culture we live in. And it is filled with struggling artists of all kinds who routinely can’t pay their bills, sacrifice having families, develop mental illness from the stress and anxiety of the life they have chosen, and see no other options. My lightbulb moment came when I was “successful” within this ecosystem. I was acting in two or three union stage acting jobs per year, and teaching as an adjunct at a college or two (another career path rank with institutional hypocrisy), and trying to raise two kids and stay afloat . . . and failing. My White privilege gave me a safety net many of my creative brothers and sisters don’t have - I could beg my family for assistance, an act of abject humiliation for a man in his middle age.

Meet the Medicis - one of the greatest supporters of the nonprofit ecosystem.

Here is the lightbulb: it’s actually not that the nonprofit leaders are exploiters and oppressors, it’s that the economics of it don’t work, and never have. The world of performing arts nonprofits is an ecosystem based on begging. We know we can’t function as common businesses, because if we did, tickets to our shows would be $400 each and . . . well you can see how that ends. So we make up for the fact that we can’t actually meet our bottom line selling our services in the marketplace by asking for support from donors and foundations. And thank God for them. Bright Invention would not exist but for its donors, especially The Wyncote Foundation. And it’s been this way since Michelangelo bowed before the Medicis and Shakespeare made friends with the Queen.

In order to succeed in the word of fundraising and development, you need to prove to funders that you are fiscally responsible: keeping costs down, raising money from other sources, and working with a clear strategy supported by professionals. Performing arts nonprofits are especially expensive because they rely on human beings. And human beings - at a bare minimum -need to eat and pay their bills. If theatres performed with dancing robots, well, things might be less expensive. So nonprofits are constantly underpaying artists in order to create budgets that are workable to foundations, because if they asked for the money their artists actually need to survive, no one would fund them (especially the small and mid-size theatres which employ most of us.) And the dancing robots? Mark my words: they are coming.

So where did I find my hope? In a form of theatrical performance that needs little to no capital support: no sets, no theatres, no costumes, no scripts. It’s called long form improvisation, and it was invented by a mad genius named Del Close in the 70s. It’s the foundation everything I do now, creatively and professionally. As I began exploring and experimenting with our ensemble, I discovered something else about improvisation: it’s economically nimble, and professionally adaptable. I wanted to develop a program which effectively monetized an actor’s creativity, so I developed a technique I call “scenario-based training”. Our actors perform scenarios for our clients using structured improvisation: a kind of in-between form which has the structure and repeatability of a script, and the flexibility of improvisation. I found out later this work is related to the ground-breaking work of South American theatre artist Augusto Boal.

Del Close during one of his calmer moments.

We a did a couple of pilot workshops and we knew we were on to something. Now - how to sell it? Through fits, starts, consultations and professional development I became . . . an entrepreneur, a business man, and began to think of our work as a dynamic service to sell, as opposed to artistic work to find funding for. I was immediately energized by the proactive and action-based mindset of the entrepreneur: leads, targets, strategies, connections and follow ups. It felt refreshing next to the submissive work of asking for money. Business activates, asking waits.

During the pandemic I knew I needed to up my game if we were to survive. So I invested in online networking groups, hired a business strategy coach and learned how to turbo-charge my LinkedIn activity. It was in the networking groups that I first became aware of my anti-business bias, because I felt myself shedding it. The people I have met in these groups and through the connections they create have been business people like me, trying to grow, refine and nurture their Big Idea. Far from being the competitive, aggressive and obnoxious stereotype I had in my head about “business people”, I have been delighted by the open, curious and mutually supportive people I have met. It’s not a stretch to say that the relationships I have made in the business community over the last nine months have not only supported the growth of my business, they have also been meaningful source of real human connection.

Performing a scenario for Community Associations Institute. Pictured: Caitlin Chin and Josh Kirwin.

And here’s a wrinkle. Into my business meetings I bring with me all my years of creative training, an elaborate understanding of narrative and storytelling, and a hopeful mindset about human relationships profoundly shaped by years in the theatre. I bring with me an essentially artistic point of view. It’s a point of view that loves innovation, nurtures authenticity, dares to be bold - ironically, all high-value traits in the business world. I find the people I meet thrill to this energy and want more of it. Far from being alien to this world, I believe artists are in fact natural entrepreneurs.

There is a lot about capitalism to critique, especially as it is practiced in America. American capitalism makes a fetish out of individualism and winning. It promotes a binary win/lose mindset antithetical to cooperation and community. All too often, managers cast themselves as the winners, which means the workers have to be the losers. I pay my actors between $75 and $200 per hour for our CCT workshops - an hourly rate that more than doubles what they might make in other contracted work as actors. And still, I have a long way to go to achieve the Big Goal: salaried positions for ensemble members with benefits, working in multi-faceted full-time positions, performing, teaching, and growing the business in a variety of ways.

And let’s be honest, I am having my cake and eating it too by continuing to raise money as a nonprofit. But my goal isn’t to stop being a nonprofit, my goal is to demonstrate there’s another way to be a nonprofit, one that relies more on earned program income, and less on donated income. One that engages the dynamism of entrepreneurship, drives its resources to supporting people not products, and lives in the assumption of abundance. But in order to become that kind of nonprofit, we need to prove our value to businesses. We need to activate, not wait.

Lineage

ANTONIO FAVA IN HIS WORKSHOP WITH HIS MASKS.

In 2006, I had the great good fortune to study with a master of the commedia dell’arte Antonio Fava. For two weeks I was in a group of Philadelphia theatre professionals, making fools of ourselves under Fava’s smiling countenance. It’s hard to express the impact those those two weeks had on me, not only for the fascination and awe I developed for the extraordinary genre he was teaching, but also in what I learned from him about being a teacher of acting and improvising. On that latter point, if I could distill it down, it would come to this: the master teacher loves his students, especially when they fail.

VYACHESLAV (SLAVA) DOLGACHEV

A couple of years earlier, I studied with another master. Slava Dolgachev is the Director of the New Drama Theatre in Moscow. His own acting teacher had been a student of Contantine Stanislavsky. For a person steeped in the process of rehearsing, performing and teaching realistic acting, I felt like I was two degrees away from the legend who invented it all. But what I got from Slava was not at all what I expected. Rather than lectures on performance theory, he put us (a group of acting teachers) through a series of drills and exercises on our feet that were entirely experiential. In one, we had to move around he room with a partner, maintaining the distance of an imaginary stick between our outstretched hands. In another, we attempted to stop a blindfolded partner from moving away from us by jerking our head up and focusing on their back. The number of times this actually worked made the hair on my neck stand and tingle. I asked him about Stanislavsky’s interest in spiritual energy. He paused and said, through his interpreter, “Acting is not for ‘smart people’, acting is for people of faith, who dive in, who are a little crazy.”

Both of these men practice and teach their art from a distinct and acknowledged lineage. I remember Fava telling us that his own father (or uncle?) was a commedia performer. And Dolgachev worked on the plays of Chekhov, the playwright who was in essence Stanislavsky’s partner in realism. And so I am led to ask . . .

What is my lineage? What is yours?

The word obviously comes from the root “line”. The suggestion is we can draw a line from who we are (creatively, familiarly, politically) to a person or persons who came before us. In the arts, this is usually a teacher or other mentor figure, who we feel has imparted to us foundational ideas about art and creativity. And if we name ourselves in that person’s lineage, then we are saying that who we are and what perform and teach has been deeply affected - almost formed - by that person in our past.

MOM PERFORMING WITH DOUGLAS DUNN IN THE GRAND UNION

All of this came to the fore for me when I participated in an online conversation last weekend with my mother, the dancer, teacher and choreographer Barbara Dilley. Called Talking Improvisation and moderated by my friend and colleague Amy Smith, this was a fundraiser for Bright Invention attended by members of both my mom’s and my own art tribes. It has been source of curiosity to me that many of my creative undertakings and approaches to teaching have been deeply influenced by my mom, even though I never had anything like an apprenticeship with her, never studied with her, and in fact, have had to navigate an occasionally fractured relationship with her.

Mom was discussing her work with the Grand Union, the seminal dance/theatre group she was part of in the early 70s, that improvised all its shows. She came to that work out of a tightly choreographed experience with Merce Cunningham. I came to long form improvisation from the scripted work of stage acting, and this parallel we share - from scripted/choreographed work to improvisation - was a subject of our discussion. My mom has developed an exercise called “Lineage tree” - you can read about it in her book!

ME PRACTICING LONG FORM WITH ENSEMBLE MEMBERS AIMEE GOLDSTEIN AND OWEN COREY

Mom calls Merce and his partner John Cage her “art fathers” and Yvonne Rainer and the Grand Union her “art mothers.” Its a beautiful way to honor both approaches to dance without choosing one over the other. As she spoke I longed for such a neat lineage, but the truth is mine is blurrier, at least for now. Perhpas Bobbi Block, who introduced me to long form, is one of my art mothers. But so is Virginia Ness Ray, my voice teacher at the Yale School of Drama, who taught the work of Kristin Linklater. And speaking of Yale, Earle Gister, my first year acting teacher there, is certainly one of my art fathers. But so are Slava and Fava, even in the brevity of my time with them. I know I carry some of them into my creative work to this day. It feels as if I don’t have a lineage as much as I have a kaleidoscope, a great mandala of teachers who are significant pieces of the ongoing design which is me.

In some communities, your lineage is biological, and for the most part you can’t choose it. This has given rise to generations of oppression, as “chosen” lineages oppress others in order to preserve and consolidate their power. Think of Indian castes. Think of English peerage. Think of white supremacy.

But also think of your own parents. Perhpas the clearest lineage I have creatively is to both my mother and my father, Lewis Lloyd, who was professionally an administrator and producer of performance. My dad was a stage manager, company manager for the Cunningham Company, managing director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, leader for the New York State Council on the Arts, public television manager at WGBH. As Executive Director of Bright Invention and also improvisor and artistic director of the ensemble I am somehow, almost comically, a perfect combination of my mother and father.

So I invite you to create your own lineage. Think of it as a thought exercise - not a destiny or edict. The great thing about this exercise is you get to notice what parts of your art mothers and fathers you hold on to and what parts you’ve left behind. In this way, you are “purifying” what made them so powerful, distilling them to their essence in your own work and play, keeping the best parts of them alive. It’s a way to do something I think we don’t do enough of these days: honor our elders, their love, their wisdom, their experience. Who knows. Maybe someday you will be in someone else’s lineage . . . and may they honor you when they put you there.

To access a video of Talking Improvisation with me, mom and Amy click here, then use the passcode: #*b3xY5B 

Here’s a silent video of me and mom improvising together in 1968 . . .

The Total Artist

Lee Breuer

When I was in my second year at The Yale School of Drama, our acting class had an intensive with avant gard stage director and creator, Lee Breuer. He was the stage celebrity of the moment, having made ripples around the the world with his production of Gospel at Colonus, and was working then on his musical The Warrior Ant. He had the kind of restless, rebel energy I related to, appearing before us with a shaved head and dressed in blue jeans with paint on them and an old white t-shirt. He looked like he was taking a break from renovating the basement of the building we were in. Plus, he shared an artistic lineage with my mother, the dancer, choreographer and teacher Barbara Dilley. So I felt especially close to him.

“What is an actor?” he asked this group of 16 actors, bent on fame and fortune, convinced the world was their oyster, brimming with world-class conservatory training. We were stumped. “Come on people!”, he bellowed, “what is an actor?!”

THE GOSPEL AT COLONUS

Someone, I forget who, it might have been me, but maybe not, ventured . . . “Um, someone who . . . who interprets dramatic text, under the direction of . . . of . . . a director?”

“NO!” he nearly screamed. “An actor is a total artist who has something to say!” And I felt a gentle dagger land inside me, warming me, killing something old and useless, planting something new and terrifying, changing me forever.

ME IN A DREAMER EXAMINES HIS PILLOW AT YALE, AROUND THE TIME I MET LEE.

Over the next 30 years, the implication of those words have guided nearly everything I have done as a theater artist. In my brief, six-year stint as a struggling New York actor, I designed a theater group called The Total Artist Group (or TAG - nifty, right?). It was based on the empowerment of actors to be more authoritative in their creativity as they worked together in an ensemble over time. TAG was to be a company which partnered with clothing shops and furniture stores to advertise their products in our productions. Even then, I was thinking of innovative ways to solve the age-old money problem. But TAG never left the page, and just after I had finished writing it all down, I left New York.

In my life as an acting teacher, my bottom line has been to give my students the tools and the support to make their own creative choices, within the boundaries described by the script and in partnership with a director. And it is this concept of the actor as the total artist which has led to the creation of Bright Invention, and my commitment to long form improvisation.

After years of performing scripts and working with directors, I finally found scripted acting limiting and repetitive. The actor in a play is asked to repeat a performance again and again over the life of the run. Deviations from the rehearsed performance are not allowed; indeed, they can be catastrophic, since a well directed play is a well-oiled machine with many parts depending on all the others to work the same way each night. I came to understand that there is no greater version of the actor as total artist than actor as improviser. The actor/improviser is both author and actor. In my teaching I have named the four virtues of the actor, and no one needs them more than the actor/improviser: Courage, Empathy, Creativity and Faith.

WITH TIM MOYER IN INTERACT’S PRODUCTION OF THREE IN THE BACK, TWO IN THE HEAD

I also came to understand that my commitment to the actor as total artist was threatening to some in the theatre community, in which actors are expected (generally) to be compliant, agreeable, and to have no other priorities personally or professionally that supersede the production they have been cast in. It began to feel to me that theatres felt they were doing me a favor I should be grateful for by casting me in a play. I am sure I lost two significant jobs in part because of my stubborn refusal to be the kind of actor I was expected to be (People’s Light & Theatre) , and to pass along the requisite expectations of compliant acting to my students (Villanova University). You see, being a total artist means you get to be “difficult” when your spirit is offended by activities in the room, or you know you need to explore in a certain way, even if the authority in the room resists it.

The truth is, this paradigm of the compliant actor is driven more by capitalism, and less by any ill will anyone has for actors. I learned that plays are products sold to audiences, and that the priority for the producing entity is to keep production costs down. Total artists are expensive. They ask you to slow down. They meander off in unexpected ways to see what’s out there. They engage in challenging discussions and they demand to be heard. Total artists are have been known to say “no” occasionally - a heresy in the professional theatre. Compliant actors are efficient. They do what they are told, are easy to work with, don’t ask too many questions and say “yes” nearly automatically.

IMPROVISING WITH JOSHUA BODEN IN THE DEEP END, OUR TWO-HANDER.

Ironically, the kind of acting I am invested in now requires saying “yes” - all the time, and to everything. What makes that “yes” so easy to come by is that it allows for the creation of an original performance, co-created by the improvisers on stage in that moment, emanating from the totality of who they are. That “yes” creates the most authentic performative expression of me that I have ever experienced, and paradoxically, I must share it utterly with my stage partner.

During the time Lee Breuer was in residence with us at Yale, I was working on a solo clown multi-media performance piece called The Birth of Benjamin Lloyd. I was dressed in a giant diaper and (as I recall - the memory is bit dim now) I did a kind of stand up routine mixed in with some movement and dance. It finished with a video of my mother (who Lee knew well) and I playing together on a stage in New York City when I was six or so, accompanied by Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? and me doing some wordless movement. I was very nervous about the piece, as it represented the first time I had ever performed in anything I had created, and it dealt with some vulnerable territory.

Lee came and saw it. Afterwards he bounded up on stage and was unexpectedly over the top effusive in his praise for it. Like, he couldn’t get the words out for how excited he was by it. He saw something it would take me many more years to see. He saw my total artist.