Miss Heidi’s Work

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.”