BrownHEN interviewed Barbara Michaels, Brown '93, Founder, Interactive Performer & Producer of Applied Theatrics, New York, NY.
1. Barbara, please describe Applied Theatrics.
Applied Theatrics provides interactive costumed characters and audience-participatory activities to the events industry, including corporate, non-profit, and community events. My specialty is custom-creating new roving characters for each of my clients on their specific themes and messages. Characters feature original costumes, mannerisms, scripting, back-stories, and even accents, all pointedly designed to engage event attendees with the mission of my client. Our characters then populate the event with client-themed, guest-inspired interactive improvisation—reflecting the group back to itself. As people naturally remember faces, interactions, and stories, my characters help guests feel and retain the unique importance of their event in a warm, lively, and artful experience.
Examples include:
• Petunia fanatics for a flower seed trade show, complete with petunia props
• Stilt-walker for a bio-diesel expo that blends a sunflower (fuel source) with a gas pump (fuel delivery)
• Constantly changing costuming for content management software with a “constantly changing content” trade show theme
• Living statue of a town’s beloved Revolutionary War hero for a 4th of July
Many pictures and stories of my custom characters are at http://AppliedTheatrics.com.
2. Please describe the path that leads a Modern Culture and Media concentrator at Brown to become an innovative actor and playwright. What encouraged you to be an entrepreneur?
I can trace a thread of interactive art making in the service of larger missions. At Brown, I studied documentary video. My honors thesis was a collaboration with local 8th graders to produce a video for the classroom about how babysitters can help prevent lead poisoning
Out of college, I developed interactive fruit and vegetable characters to promote public health for the City of Portland, Maine. At a local arts council in Boston, I created the Art Cars project in which local residents could permanently decorate their daily-use cars to create mobile murals for the neighborhood. I rediscovered theater through studying performance art as a grad student at Massachusetts College of Art, doing audience interactive one-woman shows. I eventually found clowning as a creative home, again an audience-participatory medium with no theatrical “fourth wall.
I’ve also been an in-character tour guide and done interactive dinner theater. Even as a theater teacher, I focused on creating original plays with my students for us to perform together. Now, I also write a column about interactive art as part of the Examiner.com series in New York. My most recent one-woman show was in the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival. Titled The Doormen, it explored how loved ones metaphorically open doors for each other, even as we may walk through those doors alone. The show took the form of a humorous interactive walking tour set in actual doorways in downtown San Francisco. I’m planning a street theater project in New York City for summer 2009.
So, I was already an experienced freelancer in performing, arts administration, and teaching when I started Applied Theatrics, with the urging and collaboration of my friend Liam Breck
I love being an entrepreneur for the same reasons I love being an artist: freedom, invention, devotion to craft, and evolution. I enjoy asking myself to dream and rallying my trust and clarity to follow that call to action. This has been a deep learning process that has sometimes felt like a whirlwind of progress, confusion, hope, action, insight, and guts. Two years later, I’m often feeling inspired, with a certain peace from really trusting the value of my service.
3. You describe yourself as a "physical actor." Can you explain the term?
“Physical Theater” is a discipline of acting that has worldwide roots in Commedia Dell’Arte, Butoh, clowning, mime, Noh, and more. For me, it’s where theater and dance meet. My characters are delightfully physical on a range from elegant to sweet to zany. Body language originates and first conveys the character. I’ve heard various impressive quotes on how much of the communication we actually perceive is non-verbal. I enjoy serving a high tech world with a low tech medium – artful connection face to face!
4. Doing improvisations sounds very scary. How do you prepare for each performance? Do you ever find yourself in a mental block, where no ideas come forward? What do you do in these cases?
I smiled at this question. In truth, everyone improvises every moment of his/her entire life. I prepare for each role by learning the client’s material that inspired my character, such as the event’s messages, specific product information in the case of a trade show, community service information in the case of a gala, details of the honoree in the case of a private party, etc. I also develop characters’ back-stories and stand-out mannerisms. These character details support us as actors to connect with people because they deepen our creative experience.
I thrive on improvisation and the warm connection it affords. Mutually uplifted, open moments between people are freeing and bonding at the same time.
If I don’t know what to do or say next, that’s a welcomed moment to listen in for the next inspiration, which will be drawn from the people with whom I’m interacting. Ready listening is the cure for fear in improvisation.
5. The clients of Applied Theatrics seem to run from corporations to schools to civic organizations. Conventional wisdom is that an entrepreneur must focus. Do you think you will have to eventually?
My focus as a performing artist with Applied Theatrics is “events,” which spans corporate, community, and non-profit gatherings. I enjoy and would like to continue working in all three areas. One reason I create a new character for every client is I thrive on variety. All people gather, and within that there are so many kinds of work—bio-diesel, flower hybrids, software development, reading programs, a town’s 200th anniversary parade, and on and on. I’m delighted to learn about the world this way.
6. Please estimate the percentage of the time you are actually performing? Doing management? Marketing? What other activities take up appreciable time?
My time includes daily outreach, biz networking events, researching my clients and their industry, budgeting and contracts, costume creation, character design, rehearsal, and performing, which also includes casting if I’m doing an ensemble. Performing is the smallest amount of hours, but the rest of it also fuels my artistic process. Connecting with people about business is creative for me. When I hear their event mission, my mind instantly starts to generate ideas. Creating characters is play writing. Crafting costumes is visual art. Updating my site (which is a blog) with photos and stories is journalism. Performing the character is fulfilling in yet another way.
Learning how and who to pitch Applied Theatrics, which has a boutique quality, has been fascinating. Decision makers are found in different roles across the events industry, and the variables among non-profit, corporate, and community events can be quite broad. I’ve happily discovered that I’m an avid net-worker, easily invigorated by positive connection
7. What do you see yourself doing in 10 years? Do you see an obvious exit strategy?
I love my business, and Applied Theatrics evolves as I find new markets. My next initiative is officiating weddings in character! I also have other life goals, such as creating and touring a body of my own theatrical work.
I have an overall vocational mission of “Artful Connection,”—literally using the arts to connect people in positive way—that I imagine will inform my next ten years in new ways. It’s an umbrella concept for me that so far has included Applied Theatrics, performing in my own and others’ shows, journalism, arts organizing, and arts teaching.
8. You seem to specialize in roles that emphasize doing social good—like Bio fuels or early childhood education. Do you ever turn down a role because you do not support the organization's mission? If so, do you have a formal set of guidelines?
I am enthused by causes and businesses that have a positive social mission alongside their fiscal mission. I naturally prioritize marketing to those clients, though I’m not exclusive about it.
9. Would you speak about fear as a motivation or hindrance toward accomplishment? How has that played a factor in your path, if any?
It might not be apparent from my interactive arts through-line, but listening to fears about living my full creativity did keep me from taking limited steps toward my much larger visions for awhile. I’ve been befriending fear upon realizing that sometimes it’s actually an invitation, sometimes it’s a genuine warning, and sometimes it’s just a habit. It’s not inherently good or bad. Some fears I even find funny. Kindred spirits—whether other artists, actors and dancers, adventurous thinkers, or growth pals—have been key in getting perspective on the stories in my mind, the primary cause of fears, as I understand now.
10. Do you have a mentor who has helped you in your career path / personal development?
I started Applied Theatrics with tremendous support from Liam Breck, my partner at the time. He’s a Silicon Valley-based software designer and entrepreneur, who also happens to have a vibrant theatrical spirit and a great eye for costuming!
Applied Theatrics was born from a conversation we had about what I really wanted to do next with my life. We first collaborated on my website, with my content and his tutoring, editing, and coding. He then advised me on focusing my marketing and materials in both my familiar non-profit arts world and the then-new-to-me corporate arena. His attention to both process and detail were good models for me, and have become gifts that I have now adopted.. We also developed character ideas and designed costumes together, and he played the role of principal costume engineer. He documented characters at gigs across the country; dozens of his photos are on my AppliedTheatrics.com website.
At the same time, I helped him evolve ideas and presentations for his current software project. We had an enthusiastic working partnership and continue to advocate for each other to this day.
Working with Liam, I discovered that being in business for oneself is not about being a lone source. It’s vital to find kindred collaborators, as all projects ultimately thrive with contributions from many hands and hearts, and hopefully, much humor.
11. Who are three other individuals (dead or alive) who have influenced you?
My childhood improvisational theater teacher, Pam Hoffman, from Creative Theater Unlimited, a program at Princeton’s McCarter Theater. We would read a story together, then take away all the characters and dialogue. We’d then rewrite the same story with our own new characters and dialogue. The lesson to flexibly recreate my story of the world has stayed with me, as has my true love of improvisation.
Stephen Baird, the director of Community Arts Advocates (CAA), an artist-support organization in Boston. He serves artists in all disciplines and is a national resource for street performers rights. While I was interviewing him for a local arts paper about his being the new Director of the Jamaica Plain Arts Council, I asked him for a job! He taught me community arts administration, which today serves my collaborations. He patiently nurtured me as an artist through resources of the Arts Council and CAA. I’m now on the Board of CAA.
Susan Porter, Charley Holley, and Curtis Jones, founders of Cooperative Artists Institute (CAI), a Boston non-profit dedicated to using the arts to solve problems and help communities thrive. I performed with their touring company and did school residencies with their Tribal Rhythms program over about six years. One kind teaching of theirs is, “Someone made a circle to keep me out, so I made a circle to include us both.” They modeled for me devoting their lives to the richness of shared creativity.
12. What is the latest insight (about life, work, play) that you picked up and would like to share with BrownHEN?
Don’t hold ourselves or anyone else to who we used to be—even yesterday. Thrive anew together.
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© BrownHEN.org – 2009
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