Joel Veenstra: Interview With The GII Founder – Part One

Joel Veenstra is a professional stage manager, production manager, producer, and improviser. He stage manages large scale celebrity galas, including the Legacy Awards, honouring numerous A-list luminaries, and also serves as the University of California’s (UCI) Claire Trevor School of the Arts’ (CTSA) Drama Department’s Associate Chair of Production.

In addition to being an Actors Equity Association Stage Manager, Joel also serves as a Production Manager, Producer, and Improviser. In 2017, Veenstra and Theresa Robbins Dudeck launched the Global Improvisation Initiative (GII) Symposium at UCI in conjunction with Chapman University. He is an interdisciplinary expert in the management of productions, resources, and people, all through a lens of improvisation. Since the start of the pandemic, he has worked and consulted on over 37 remotely-produced live and video produced projects.

Hi Joel, thanks for talking with us at TheatreArtLife! How are you doing, and how are you coping with the pandemic at the moment?

Hello, thank you so much for talking with me. I’m doing well, all things considered. It’s been a tremendously challenging time, personally and globally, and also an exciting time for theatre and the entertainment world. There has been a lot of innovation and evaluation of how we do what we do, so it’s exciting. As for how I’ve been coping, I take it day by day.

Your career has spanned across various disciplines including stage management and production, so how did you get your start in the industry, and what first inspired you and drew you to the Arts?

My life in the Arts, started when I was very young when my mom thought this kid has a lot of creativity and we need to channel that somehow. My mom was a single mom, so it took a lot of effort on her part, but she could tell that I had this creative bent and was really interested in exploring my creative aspects, of giving and sharing and putting myself out there. And so she got me into all sorts of different art classes and performance classes.

I was Ragtime Cowboy Joe in The Little Rascal Follies when I was a very young child, at our Community Center, and from then until now I’ve just continued to grow and expand on every opportunity that I have been afforded.

My mom worked for a bank and taught me a lot about financial systems and how to stay organized with limited resources. And when I spent time with my dad, who was a lawyer and engineer with a very strategic and logical mind, he taught me ways to think about the world from those lenses. My dad and I also loved going on adventures together: to the movies and amusement parks. So as I got older, I felt drawn to adventures in the creative world and had this proclivity with organizational structures that supported those endeavors. I was also aware of two key things: that my mom couldn’t do it on her own and was empowered by the people and organizations around her, and that the Arts really launched my life. So I have also found so much joy in empowering others in the Arts.

I would say my career started when I began getting hired to stage manage, produce, and direct projects while I was still in college. I was very blessed to leverage all of my college creative activities into knowledge that could be applied to my professional path. After graduation, I was hired as a performer on a professional improvisation team, as a production crew member at our local television station, and as needed on various productions in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan. These endeavours eventually created enough revenue streams that it made sense to organize them under an umbrella company: Veenstra Enterprises.

As I looked at my client base, I thought, you know, I could stay here in Western Michigan for the rest of my life and work with the same people every year because they keep hiring me back again. I can hire employees and really grow this business. Or I could take a leap of faith, and try to go after something that was very interesting to me, which was the mainstream film and television industry. I took the leap and I was very lucky and blessed again that I got in at a company called Alcon Entertainment that had a distribution deal with Warner Brothers. They were fairly well known for films like My Dog Skip, Insomnia, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and I was thrilled to work in their development department and learn about the film industry and learn about how that whole system worked. Seeing the storytelling process and how decisions were made, even before a film went into production was really exciting. And while I did that I also spent weekends and nights at The Second City in Hollywood, and went through their Conservatory program, because I needed to have additional creative outlets.

How did your path progress from starting out in the industry to where you are now, and what did that journey look like?

The journey has several twists and turns and yet each experience was a building block for the future. Working in the film industry was such an incredible education seeing films develop from pitch to premiere, still I missed the intimacy and the unique collaborative nature of theatre. So I went back to grad school to get my MFA in Drama, with an emphasis in Stage Management, which opened up new professional doors for me in the theatre world. Coming out of grad school, I earned my Actors Equity Association card and worked on several Equity shows in Southern California.

While being a professional freelance stage manager is exciting, I was at a point in my life where I wanted something a little more steady to build a family. I was blessed with an opportunity to be hired as the Production Manager at Cornerstone Theatre Company, which is an outstanding organization that engages the stories and the members of underserved communities in their work. I had an absolute joy working with them on several community-based collaborations.

My favourite show was Café Vida by Lisa Loomer, highlighting how food can build community with Homeboy Industries, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

When an opportunity to teach theatrical management at the University of California, Irvine opened up, I immediately applied. I knew how much education had advanced my own path; in addition, I knew that this would provide me a stable platform from which I could explore a wide range of creative activity

With this home base of work, I’m able to branch out and do projects that excite me and feed my passions. I’ve been able to work on a number of new works as well as large scale celebrity based galas and events, which are always fun. I’ve also had an opportunity to launch the Global Improvisation Initiative that explores and documents improvisation in an academically rigorous framework to elevate the art form to a higher level of respect and understanding.

In addition, I have been able to just deep dive into all of my various passions as well as use the platform of university professor to empower others to realize their visions. Several years ago, I helped a student bring to life his vision called The Black Youth Stories Project that looked at the challenges of black youth growing up in America. I can do exciting projects myself and help others put them up and I can move back into the classroom and utilize all of these experiences to help my students to understand the arts world, and the craft of putting together theatrical projects collaboratively.

In the past three years, I’ve worked on 55 projects in addition to the numerous productions that we’ve been doing at UCI, and over 85 times people have invited me to come and speak and share my insights, about stage management, improvisation, applied improvisation, or collaborative production.

The pandemic seemed to accelerate the need to innovate and continue to create in new ways. It’s been exciting and challenging.

You co-founded the Global Improvisation Initiative, and are also the executive producer – can you tell us about the initiative, what it is, and what you love about improv?

Theresa Robins Dudek and I started the Global Improvisation Initiative (GII) in 2016. I came from a Second City/Viola Spolin framework, and she was coming from a Keith Johnstone/Theatresports framework. We met and we shared our knowledge and our passion for improvisation, with an appreciation toward the history and importance of it within a cultural context, as well as it being a paradigm for how people move through the world. We were also wanting to document and archive how improvisation was evolving and so we launched the GII to examine, explore, and document the art of improvisation, how it has existed, and how it’s going to evolve in the future.

In 2017, we produced our first 4-day symposium, which was a collaboration between University of California, Irvine and Chapman University. We had almost 200 people attend, including Viola Spolin’s granddaughter, Paul Sill’s daughter, Aretha Sills. We also had Keith Johnstone come to the United States to attend and to lead a lead a workshop. Several presenters from all over the world came and shared their work and their research about improvisation.

Two years later, we did the second 4-day symposium in London, collaborating with Improbable; they are a theatre company that uses improvisation as a core modality for how they do their work and how they engage with one another. We also collaborated with Middlesex University, and again we had about 200 improvisers from all over the world come and share their work and how they engage with the world, and it was just outstanding.

This past year, we were evaluating what should we do because we are all in this unique space of the pandemic and we can’t gather people together in person. But over the course of a year, we’ve been evolving and evaluating new ways to improvise online and also to meet and collaborate and do conferences online, and as such we decided to move forward and have the symposium once again but this time completely online. At this year’s 4-day online symposium with over 24-hours of continual access, we had over 600 people participate from six continents and a wide range of countries, which is absolutely incredible.

It was both a joy and exhausting to produce.

What I love about improvisation is how it is in essence one and the same as life. We are all improvising from every moment to spontaneous moment. I apply improvisation as a lens to how I manage, organize, and produce events. Every single live event that we do is an improvised experience because we’re doing it live. Even though we may rehearse, even though we engage a sequence of technical aspects within technical rehearsals trying to lay out all the possible parameters, there is still this live factor that things shift in the moment or always change, based on an audience, or performer, or even technical equipment, that we may not expect – an improvisational mindset helps one to appropriately respond to the given situation.

We’re in a dynamic world that’s constantly changing and improvisation helps with that tremendously. I’m also continually inspired at how people are utilizing and evolving improvisation – how they’re applying it to very unique frameworks.

A year or so ago I would have said, improvisation online is impossible. And now I’m a firm believer that that’s just not the case. There are some people who do it really exceptionally well. And I’m excited that we highlighted some of those folks at the GII in 2021. I also love the collaborative nature of improvisation – this mindset helps folks work together by being in the present moment together, accepting and building trust together. It’s beautiful approach to sharing space together whether online or in person.

Links:

Global Improvisation Initiative Website

GII on Facebook

GII on Twitter

Also by Michelle Sciarrotta: