Miss Heidi’s Work

The seven members of Heidi Arneson’s Direct Action Workshop are gearing up for the final performance of their self-scripted play, Esta Es Mi Historia, This Is My Story. Arneson, a Minneapolis-based performance artist, is trying to provide a sense of calm before the audience arrives, leading her students through breathing exercises and physical and vocal warm-ups. This would be an unremarkable scene except for one thing: All the participants are inmates at the Ramsey County Correctional Facility in St. Paul.

Most of the men are first-time offenders with minor violations, but some have been in and out of the prison system for years. Many of them are minorities—black, Native American, Hispanic—and almost all of them lower class.

Arneson recently made it her mission to help the disenfranchised. Skeptics may question the value of a yoga-practicing, novel-writing raconteur teaching prisoners how to breathe, but she is too busy running Direct Action to care about the naysayers. For her, the work is as spiritual as it is practical, and everyone—regardless of race, class, or gender—can benefit from it.

Ron Bergee, RCCF program coordinator, says Arneson’s workshop gives inmates the confidence to make eye contact, express themselves clearly in job interviews, and—here’s the ineffable quality that makes potential donors hesitate—learn more about themselves. The theory, Arneson and Bergee say, is this: If the men can understand where they came from, they can make smarter choices about where they want to go. A lot of the guys enter prison feeling as though they don’t have options. They have low self-esteem. They act tough while inwardly feeling ashamed and terrified. A one-year prison sentence may keep them off the streets for a while, but the system more often than not dumps them right back where they came from, with no quantifiable life skills, no job prospects, and no way out. By improving their self-esteem and confidence, the men have a better chance of staying off the streets, getting and keeping a job, and, ultimately, contributing positively to society.

Arneson got the idea for Direct Action in 2004. “I’ve been teaching [performance and writing workshops] on the outside for twelve years, and it’s powerful medicine,” she says. “I wanted to bring it to the people who need it most.” She then approached Joe Selvaggio, founder of Project for Pride in Living, an organization that helps low-income individuals find jobs and affordable housing. He had taken Arneson’s class a few years before  at Patrick’s Cabaret and loved it. When she asked him if he would help her get start-up funding for Direct Action, he agreed and raised about $2,500 for the project—enough to get the project off the ground. “Most of the people who give me money are conservative Republicans who value work,” says Selvaggio. “I thought [Direct Action] would be a great thing to build confidence in a job interview.”

While Arneson knows Direct Action has practical applications, she’s still grappling with articulating those goals—the importance of which is not lost on Selvaggio, who says, “I hope she’s keeping track of [how many students get jobs], because if she wants money from me and my people, she needs to keep track of it. If you’re going to go to rich people and corporations, they need to see results.”

At presstime, Arneson had led three workshops, all at RCCF. Of the thirty Direct Action graduates, two are at Metropolitan State University and working, and at least eight others are also working or in school. But, says Arneson, it’s cost-prohibitive to keep track of released inmates. “It would cost $44,000 a year. That’s more than my whole budget.” It’s impossible, she knows, to rehabilitate every person with the magical healing powers of art, but it happens more often than you’d think.

Using drama as a kind of therapy is not a new idea. The National Association for Drama Therapy, founded in 1979, defines it as the “systematic and intentional use of drama/theater processes to achieve . . . personal growth.” Arneson is not a licensed practitioner of drama therapy, though her goals and practices are almost identical.

A native of New Brighton, Arneson, forty-seven, has been performing in the Twin Cities for thirty years. She doesn’t own a cell phone. She still uses dial-up. She eats homemade vegan pancakes with butter. She’s a walking contradiction—a woman who’s made a career out of portraying crazy, psychologically fractured characters, yet whose personal life is orderly and serene.

Her West Bank house is sectioned off into areas: the painting area, the novel-writing area, the work area, the yoga area. Her bobbed hair frames an impossibly wide-eyed expression that seems to stare directly into your soul. The effect is disarming. Her image is one of a moonbeam-riding earth mother, albeit one who’s dedicated her life to creating some unusual theater pieces.

Arneson is primarily a solo artist whose shows can be best described as multidisciplinary memoirs that are part psychoanalysis and part pure zaniness. Arneson portrays all the characters, who do things such as hold séances, worry about their breast size (illustrated by blowing up gigantic red balloons until they pop), play air guitar, and get trapped, naked and alone, inside boxes of their own creation. Her work walks the line between joy and terror, and is starkly confessional in a way that makes some people uncomfortable. Her early pieces in particular drew from the abuse she experienced as a child. “I want to be careful about blaming family,” she explains, saying that much of her mission—in art and in life—has been inspired by the emotional and physical violence she suffered while growing up. “As I use art to heal myself, I also seek to work with others who have experienced trauma and help them use the creative process to heal.”

Dean Seal, a performer, producer, writer, and former Fringe Festival director, has watched Arneson’s work develop over the years. “When I met her twenty years ago, she was doing solo shows at the Southern, coming up into the audience and smelling people,” he says. Seal used her strange, sometimes provocative images to advertise the Fringe before it hit its zenith. “Sending in Heidi was like sending in the Marines,” he jokes. “She always made an impression.”

Now working as a chaplain and teacher of religious studies, Seal says Direct Action “is the best example of the transformative power of art that I’ve seen in thirty years of show biz.”

Leslie Ball, a Minneapolis musician, teacher, and activist, has also known Arneson for years. Of Direct Action, Ball says, “People often become what we tell them they are—if we tell people we respect them, it’s easier for them to bring value into the world. People need to experience respect before they can give it. Most of the people in prisons are already disenfranchised and left out and given so few resources, and [our solution is to] lock them up.

“I’ve spent a night in jail. I can’t even describe the hatred that came out of [my] fear. I was lucky enough that I was able to articulate [my situation] and that I could make the judge understand what my story was. If I was a person of color or English wasn’t my first language, I could still be locked up.”

Ball says Arneson’s project is akin to restorative justice work. “Hopefully, Heidi will be able to find funders who understand that the long-term benefits are much more significant than the short-term benefits [such as getting a job],” she says. “There’s no way to measure the gift that narrative healing gives. Our culture is so driven by the calculator that the spiritual part is neglected, and it’s what we need more than anything else.”

As with the GED tutoring, ESL classes, and AA meetings prisons offer to inmates, Direct Action is optional. Arneson admits ten to twelve students into each class. Over the five-week workshop, she helps her students confront and understand their own pasts during ten intense, two-hour sessions involving physical exercises, writing, short solo performances, and ensemble collaborations. Her authenticity, quirkiness, and wisdom infuse her students with a sense of camaraderie and fearlessness. The environment she creates is safe and supportive (hard to do anywhere, but especially so in a prison), and the men eventually open up. They talk about the abuse they’ve suffered, the things they’ve done wrong, what they value, and their hopes for the future. They learn how to deal honestly with themselves. For many, it’s liberating.

In and out of prison for the past twenty years, Hassan said participating in the workshop was the first time he ever felt listened to. Another student, Darnell, said he felt comfortable with Arneson because “you could see she wasn’t fake. She really cared about us and what we did. She made us not feel ashamed. She made us feel no embarrassment, because she wasn’t embarrassed.”

In mid-March, when the Direct Action students performed their company-created This Is My Story, it was for an audience made up of the correctional facility’s volunteers. The hour-long performance filled the prison gym with poetry, music, and monologues—some angry, some regretful, but most were about the importance of faith, God, trust, and love. Julio, twenty-two, spoke tenderly about his family, the lessons he’s learned, and the role Arneson played in opening his soul to a greater purpose. “I didn’t think going to jail was going to be this fun,” he joked after the show. Turning to Arneson, he said, “You have given me a second chance and shown me love. This class is amazing.” He hopes to become a preacher after his release.

Another participant said, “I had so much anger in me. But after this class, I’m the most peaceful person in the world.” Raymond, a twenty-one-year-old who was convicted for possession of a firearm, explained, “There’s some ‘code’ that we have living on the street. People don’t talk about things. The first week, two weeks, I just opened up and I just let her know.” By the time he left the correctional facility in April, he had obtained his GED, a college scholarship, and a mortgage on a house. All of the men I spoke with were smart, articulate, and optimistic about the future. Some even said they would keep doing “Miss Heidi’s yoga” because it cleared their heads in stressful situations.

After the show, Arneson’s students surrounded her in a small circle, unable to contain their giddiness, the high that comes with performing. Arneson smiled back and asked them, for the last time before the workshop ended, to stand on their tiptoes, take a deep breath in, and reach toward the sky.

Jaime Kleiman is the theater columnist for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.