Dan VanHoozer hasn’t had a “normal” career path.
He finished college thinking he wanted to be a teacher, but quickly realized he hated it. Instead he found a love of theater, which inadvertently led to a job in fundraising, which led to a job in marketing, which led to starting a theater company, which eventually led to an MBA program studying consumer behavior and innovation.
We sat down with him to get his thoughts on making art and how creativity and inspiration work.
Tell us about your beginning with theater.
After college, I spent a year teaching. I didn’t like teaching, but I did get to teach Shakespeare. I made an adapted Shakespeare play with a range of kids from third to seventh grade, which was really rad. So, I decided the next year, I would spend an entire year and do a whole bunch of jobs and write a play. Every Friday, I would write—no matter what, no excuses. Eventually, I wrote a play for my friends to perform for our other friends. The admission price was a can of food that we would give to a local food bank.
You’ve combined theater with business. How did that start?
I made a show called The Pabst and Popcorn Hour Presents the Tragedy of Doctor Faustus. Essentially, I love four-hundred- year-old plays because they are ridiculous. The language is beautiful and the plots are wildly inappropriate and wouldn’t happen—but who cares? They’re really fun!
So I called Pabst Blue Ribbon [a national bewery], and then they gave us fifty cases of beer. We toured this little show all around DC. We got some attention from that and won an award. I also started talking with one of the Pabst guys and he offered me a job, so I took it. They handed me a five-figure budget and they basically said, “You’re job is to become the most popular person in the city.” They really just wanted me to make stuff for them. Which was kind of the only thing I ever wanted to do in art, to make things for other people and have them participate and engage.
After a couple months on the job I eventually just made a foundation for arts. I kind of became a producer and presenter. People forget that about making community: you have to participate. You have to create a space for people to participate in ways that they want to participate, and then let them find their own connections.
Then you started your own theater company, Haymaker. What kind of plays did you make?
We made like six productions ranging from adapting a classical opera, Electra, to adapting the Federal Budget, which is this clown show, to making a show about who you are in different places. We were going to businesses and we actually did a play for them. We did residencies, we did workshops, we did everything I could dream of in my 20s that I wanted.
Where did you get those ideas? I mean, adopting the federal budget into a play is pretty out there.
I don’t know, I just find things that might be really fun, that I can’t quite figure out. A lot of times, it’s going to sound crazy, I have visions in my head of old moments of plays.
Edward Albee talked about this when he made Zoo Story: characters would literally talk to you, and you would just write down what they said. And that’s happened a few times for me. Like the Pabst and Popcorn Hour, it woke me up in the middle of the morning one time and told me I needed to read a play that I hadn’t read in six years, and I came up with the whole concept that afternoon. You have these weird things and you try to go figure them out.
How did theater lead you to an MBA?
I just got tired, so Haymaker stopped doing stuff so intensely. And I thought, Okay, I have all of these skills—can these be put into any other place besides theater?
I started following these agencies. They’re not quite advertising agencies; they’re more like innovation agencies. They look a lot like the theater rehearsal process. You start with this abstract idea, you apply some principles about how people are motivated, how they behave, how they interact with objects, how they interact with other people. These are all the things you talk about when you’re in theater and when you’re making participatory art. But these people were doing it for businesses. I just thought that was really, really, really interesting.
What’s that rehearsal process like?
Well, you usually start with a prototype, or in theater it’s called a script. You start with a rough idea, or an abstract idea. I have this thing, like I have a Hamlet. Great. What do we do with a Hamlet? Then usually the next question is—at least in my rehearsal processes—who are we giving this to? I try and think of plays and objects and things like that as gifts, and when I can remember to do that, then the process usually becomes much more generative, much more fun, much more optimistic.
I like to talk about the audience a lot. I like to talk about the people who are consuming it, who have actively come to take it from you. Mainly because I think that is an amazing, amazing thing, that somebody can choose something that you’ve made to want to make a part of their life, to take up their time. There’s something magical about that.
So, if you start with that, you’re like, Great, who do we want to give it to? For me, it was my friends. Oh, great. Well, who are our friends? Immediately, you’re shaping how to match this thing with this person. How do they do this dance together? If it’s for my friends, it’s like, Well, they know Hamlet, so we want to surprise them.
And then somebody usually starts—and this is the funnest part of the process for me—with “what if.” And this is what happened when we did Hamlet years ago. We started with, What if we got rid of all the famous lines? What if we just got rid of them? So we got rid of them, and then we read the play and we’re like, Is that still Hamlet? And we thought, Yeah, that’s still that play, but you have to really listen to it now, and you have to really listen to Hamlet the character as opposed for waiting for “To be or not to be.”
How are art and business related in your mind?
In a business context, I think that’s called innovation. It’s essentially about renewal. In theater, you would call that surprise. And I think in a business context it’s: how do we give something to somebody so they are renewed in some way, so they are so overly excited about it?
The stuff I study comes does come down to decision-making, and the things I’m studying now are a lot about the barriers to decision. What you find out is that we’re really interesting human beings. What decisions are people making? What priority are they making those decisions? And then what influences those decisions? And there’s no rationality in that. It’s all about people, it’s all about relationships.
So you have to figure out what barriers are there in between that person engaging, and fully engaging, and fully participating. Sometimes it is about rational, transactional things. But I would say, in a lot of ways, it’s much more about these communal, human, social values. And there’s nothing more social than theater, and there’s not supposed to be anything more social than art, in my opinion. So, I think that’s where the cross-over is for me. It’s about people.