By Lucia Mauro

Daniel Stein - "Building the Theatre of Tomorrow"

During a weekend long workshop at the Chicago Dance studios in April, Daniel Stein–director of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre–pares down to its intense internal motivation the seemingly simple gesture of walking with one’s eyes closed across a room then reaching down to touch a shoe. One actor lets out a frustrated sigh when he misses the shoe; another participant squeals with joy as she almost telepathically hits her mark.

But as these artists soon learn, the joy is not in the destination but in the journey. To prove this, Stein measures the long length of the path toward the shoe against the minuscule point of making contact with the object.

"We put a lot of importance on this little chunk here," he indicates by holding up his thumb and index finger about an inch apart. "We invest a lot of energy in the result, not in the process. Rejoice in the trip!"

When one of the actors refers to that "little chunk" as "the punchline," Stein is quick to counter, "But what’s the punchline without the set up?"

The title of Stein’s workshop, "Heart of a Poet, Mind of an Actor, Body of a Gymnast," encompasses the tenets of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, based in Blue Lake, Calif., where he has served as director since 1998 (and taught since 1994). The highly specialized and respected school, founded in 1975, is not geared toward the circus arts. Its main goal is to treat the actor as a whole being and to cultivate within the actor the qualities needed to generate his or her own creative work.

"The overall approach at Dell’Arte," explains Stein, 48, "is that the body is as valuable an instrument as the voice. And we deal with the actor-creator doing original work. Somebody has to build the theatre of tomorrow."

Since being named director, he has expanded the Dell’Arte program from a single class of 26 students to two classes of 20. The artists, who range in age from 18 to 47, come from around the world to participate in Dell’Arte’s intensive one-year Professional Actor Training Program, its summer workshops and Dell’Arte Abroad Program. Students are encouraged to create original work that is "human and social." They accomplish this by training the body, mind and heart to hear each other so that, according to Stein, the whole is attuned to listen better to the world around it and reverberate for an audience what it hears."

Stein–a tall, slim man whose entire body appears to be the canvas for his emotion-based performance work–is originally from Milwaukee, Wis., and studied "terribly traditional" acting at Carnegie-Mellon University. He quickly became a convert to unconventional, movement-based theatre after studying with Etienne Decroux in Paris, where Stein lived for 20 years and opened his own school. He acted with the French National Theatre, and his solo performances have toured in more than 25 countries. He has taught master classes at The Juilliard School of Drama and Tokyo’s Institute of Dramatic Arts.

At Dell’Arte, Stein teaches "Preparing the Instrument," "Generating New Material" and "Poetic Dynamics." During the Chicago workshop, he began by asking the artists how they spent the previous evening and any thoughts they might like to share about their lives or the world at large. He applies the same human touch to his classes at Dell’Arte, where he hosts discussions rooted in the students’ physical health and emotional well-being.

"Our students are not being lectured to," says Stein. "We want to spark a dialogue. A student is not a vessel to be filled; a student is a whole human being. Unless you’re dealing with the whole human being, you’re not being responsible."

He distinguishes between the actor-interpreter and the actor-creator, the former existing in the traditional realm of interpreting someone else’s material as opposed to the latter who promotes originality. So Stein frequently stresses that actors planning to apply to Dell’Arte must be attracted to the idea of creating their own material. The school is an artist-run organization rooted in collaboration. Adds the teacher-performer, "We try to treat the ensemble-based idea, but it’s an ensemble built on strong individuals."

Stein then sums up Dell’Arte’s basic structure: "We have what we call rigid flexibility. There are obviously perimeters. But we give students the time, space and proper amount of guidance to do work themselves.

"Some people think they are corks on the water of life. I believe what we do can be guided by our own intelligence. We look at how the pieces fit the whole. One of the things we train students in is Alexander Technique, in which the body is not getting into a specific position but is looking for a sensation of balance."

Balance is at the core of his own artistic philosophies. One of his exercises is called the "Greta Garbo/Sara Bernhardt Walk" in which students saunter across the floor in a laid-back manner, then radically shift the direction of their energy to pull up into a focused upright gait. Stein points to the three main body parts–head, chest and pelvis–which make this movement possible. He then explains how the head corresponds to the intellectual; the chest to the emotional; and the pelvis to the sexual, noting, "You must have all three of these elements working with equal intensity."

The Dell’Arte program is rigorous and all-encompassing. Auditions consist of three parts: Applicants must sing a song to show, as Stein says, "if they can fill a room with non-self-conscious abandon." He adds, "If you can’t embrace the space in front of you, you can’t embrace an audience." They are required to recite a published monologue to demonstrate if they can carry an intention. For the final portion, they are asked to generate a three-minute autobiographical piece using a broad range of skill bases. This segment is geared toward exploring Stein’s belief that "There is no one on earth who can achieve this better than you can; give yourself permission to create outrageous art."

Stein points out that the creative process is often regarded as inspirational. But he believes that artists can take concrete steps toward "being available" and can create that availability within themselves in order to hear and see what, for instance, an object is capable of. "So it’s not about manipulating an object," he continues. "It’s about receiving that object’s tendencies. The creative process is like making love–either you’re sensitive to your partner, or you do what you want."

Another one of Stein’s tenets is "If it’s true in the physical world, it’s true in the metaphysical world." Over breakfast, he dissects the physics of sight, explaining how we confuse the act of looking with projection. "But we are really receiving an image," he says. "When you’re receiving rather than projecting, it changes the way life happens. There’s a humility, a vulnerability and an availability that possesses the performer when he or she is receiving."

When asked how he develops his own work, Stein (who also performed Timepiece, his one-man journey across a physicalized landscape of eons, at the St. Patrick’s Performing Arts Center while in town) acknowledges that he can’t sit and write a play: "I can only discover the stuff that’s already there." He then points to a plate of blueberry-filled pancakes and notes, "It’s bringing disparate elements together that you never would have thought of mixing this way — like pancakes with blueberries."

Gastronomy, incidentally, serves as his main analogy for the art of creating. He even stops his class periodically to tell them, "It’s like cooking. You have to experience it [a sensation of movement]; you have to taste from time to time."

"If there were one metaphor to most clearly describe how I see the creative process that I am involved in," explains Stein, "it would be making fine spaghetti sauce. One starts with tomatoes, many of them, and they are boiled and boiled until what remains no longer even looks like tomatoes. They have been transformed, abstracted so to speak, because we have boiled away the water, which is not necessary to the tomatoes’ taste. What is left, however, is the best part: the essence of the tomato, to which we add a bit of spice, and that’s all one needs."

Steve Gibons, a violinist-composer, studied with Stein in the late 1980s. He continues to utilize Stein’s rhythmic ideas in his music. "I could easily draw parallels between Daniel’s philosophies and how I write music. He makes it clear that tempo and rhythm are two different things: Tempo can be defined; rhythm is much more organic. His approach is very methodical, but it encourages you to be extremely creative."

During his seminar, students engage in a variety of activities from yoga warm ups to balancing a stick to working on balance and alignment. Students also had a chance to create their own performance pieces illustrating the differences between something that’s "inherently theatrical" and "being theatrical" using two envelopes. He emphasizes relaxed muscles so that the performers are free to explore new movement, urging them to "feel the muscles…they’re starting to sing a little."

He continues, "We’re trying to discover how to be kind to our bodies when doing things it’s not used to doing. You have to allow for things to happen rather than force them to happen."

One of the most revelatory moments in the workshop involves a door analogy. Stein swings a door open, a pretty pedestrian action. Then he pulls it back against its hinge until we hear a crackling noise. "That’s the interesting part," he announces, "That’s what theatre is about, that sensation of the muscles screaming. We want to feel it, not see it. You don’t have to indicate in your facial expression how you’re feeling.

"Most actors are taught to show intention in their faces, and the body comes along for the ride. Do the opposite. Make the intention come through the body, and the face follows."

This demonstration leads into a pointed discussion on ho-hum versus thrilling theatre. Stein attaches a rope to the leg of a chair and begins pulling the chair across the floor horizontally. "That’s Mediocre Theatre 101," he states, "because it’s doing what it says it’s doing."

He then holds down the rope with his foot and begins pulling the cord vertically through his hands to move the chair across the floor. "That’s insightful theatre," Stein describes. "The energy source is vertical; the movement is horizontal. When an audience says, 'Hey, neat!,’ that’s all they need."

Stein holds two sticks parallel to indicate popular, recognizable art: Those sticks can never cross each other. He places the same sticks perpendicular to illustrate classical/avant-garde theatre: The sticks cross; there’s opportunity for contact and depth.

During a lunch break, Stein says that, as a child, he was dyslexic. His mother found a teacher who taught him how to identify letters in a creative way. "I would have to physically feel and say the letter B," he explains. "It was a very image-generating way of overcoming dyslexia. So, from an early age, I enjoyed the process of building pictures."

Life and art to Stein are all part of a process. "I don’t know where I’m gonna finish," he says, "but I keep moving. It’s okay to not know where you’re going; but have a direction. I have a problem with people who have a destination. They’ll get there, but who cares?

"By forcing people to have a specific destination in life, we wrench the creativity out of them. It’s essential to not know where you’re going. The French have a wonderful word for this–"truvielle." It means to find while you are working."

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