Herbie Barnes and TO Live’s The Arts Squad bring the imaginative world of acting to kids

The COVID-19 pandemic has squelched a lot of events, habits and pastimes. But it need not suppress a child’s imagination or creativity. Thanks to TO LIVE’s new educational digital series The Arts Squad, children can create, perform, and discover their creative talents safely and supportively in their own homes. The Arts Squad provides an ongoing series of episodes focusing on different artistic disciplines. Each series is taught by a professional artist: actor and director Herbie Barnes (theatre); choreographer and dancer Edz Gyamfi (dance); cartoonist Kean Soo (comics); writer/storyteller Nathalie Vachon (storytelling); and actor, singer, and conductor Tahirih Vejdani (music). In discrete 12-13 minute episodes,  young people at home this summer can reap the benefits of each artist’s career experience and expertise.

Barnes, who creates the theatre lessons, got a phone call “straight out of the blue” to participate in The Arts Squad. It might have been Keith Barker (Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts Centre) who recommended him for the project –  and Barnes accepted “of course!” In each episode, Barnes mines his 30 years of acting, writing, directing – and especially his deep roots in improv, which he started learning at the age of 16. He would bus from his high school in North York to Harbourfront, in order to take “all sorts of classes” from famed Theatresports Toronto (now Bad Dog Comedy Theatre) improv troupes. Learning from performers and mentors like Paul De La Rosa, Neil Crone, Magie Matulic, Moira Dunphy, Norm Hiscock and Garry Campbell deepened his love and skills of improv. “I’ve used that to create my career; the basis of my knowledge is improvisation,” he explains. “It’s learning character; it’s learning storytelling; it’s learning status – all of those things are what I use as the basis for everything in my writing, and everything I use as an actor.” Since most of these techniques are collaborative – like how to deal with and react to other people – they are best learned as group work. But that, of course, is not possible in the currently required digital environment. So for each Arts Squad episode, Barnes has selected exercises that can be done by one person. He has carefully considered how to present these skills as one person demonstrating them to another person in a different room. Clarity and focus – and fun – are his goal. 

For someone who has built his craft on the cooperative “yes, and – “ philosophy of improv, he admits that solo teaching from his home basement is “really difficult”: “I’ve been teaching now for over 30 years. I come into a room, and I can gauge how the room is and where it’s going to go, and what kind of energy I bring to the room. So sometimes I lay back because there’s tons of energy in the room. Other times, I have to bring the energy up. And in  this online [environment, that] “connection is lost a little bit. So I have tried to create it by imagining the young person on the other side of that camera.” This became a “really interesting” process when he was “down in that basement alone” while his wife and daughter worked on various floors upstairs: “I thought about how young people would hear me, so I tried to make a connection through the camera. I was literally trying to create that world and make contact through the lens.”

Barnes planned and shot his 8 episodes, which are being released weekly, over 2 days. Tapping into his extensive improv experience, he opted to create a sequential framework for all 8 segments, rather than scripting each episode. He planned out how to go from one exercise to next, then to the next. “And then I did it. I shot every episode about five or six times, making sure that it was exactly right.”  Sometimes, he would get seven minutes in, “mess up,” and then start again. 

Although Barnes conceived and filmed his episodes by himself, he stresses that the vision and concept of The Arts Squad series is very much a supportive group effort. “It wasn’t started slapdash. There was a lot of conversation with the team that put us together. We were lucky to have some great people at the helm who made sure that we were taken care of.” Yes, the episodes are shot “off the cuff”, but he planned the intro of each episode to be consistent, in order to pull back his young audience to recognize him: “oh, that’s my old friend!” Then each episode opens with Barnes leading his viewers through a set warm-up routine (yes, actors have to warm up their whole bodies!) to build in a comforting sense of familiarity before introducing the acting technique that is the focus of the episode. 

Young people will find plenty in each episode to fuel their imagination while building specific skills, such modulating pitch and moderating force to adjust emotional intensity, or using a part of the body to create a distinct character. For Barnes, the bigger objective is “about creating the imagination, allowing the imagination to happen”. Having  grown up with the “yes, and – ” philosophy, he admits that it drives him crazy when a technician or designer says something can’t be done – to which he counters, “I think it can be done, and we just haven’t figured it out yet.” In fact, his eyes sparkle when such a challenge is posed to him. “Rather than oh, this is how it’s done, and we’re going to do it this way, I always love when someone says, ‘we’ve never done that. Let’s try it.’ That’s the most exciting theatre can be, when it’s never been done before, and we’re going to try and do it. That’s what I think theatre is… creating worlds that have never been visited before. The beauty of it is: how do you tell that story differently?”  

His abundant enthusiasm and prolific creativity aside, he recognizes the adverse effect of the pandemic shutdown on children. “I’m very aware that children don’t understand what’s going on right now, that they’re struggling. This is a weird time where all of a sudden, in March, everything shut down in their world. We have two lovely neighbours next door who are in grade one. And they’re very friendly, and they come over and they sit on our porch, and they talk to us. They’re playing in the backyard as much as they can, but they don’t understand, ‘why am I locked up? What did I do wrong?’.” He considers any ability to reach out to be a “very moving thing”, and is gratified that The Arts Squad project is feeding that. It helps him to keep busy at a time that is “extremely difficult” because he “can’t wait for this all to end, so I can get back into a classroom or back into a theatre where I can work with other people and make that contact”.

For Barnes, contact is both a professional requirement and a personal philosophy, so it is a key part of his distanced Arts Squad lessons. The pandemic has coincided with a deep and long-overdue reckoning with systemic racism. In this light, Barnes hopes his simple, fun acting lessons for The Arts Squad form a connection – and that connection can play a small role in unlocking new thinking:  “I’m First Nations (an Anishnabe from Aundeck Omni Kaning On Manitoulin Island), and so my goal always is to make connection, to create a human bond, and to show that in every work that I do. I try to tell a story every time, and I find that I want to open up the world when we do. My goal is always to communicate that we’re all on one small world, and that we have to share.” 

If there’s one thing that children – who have been denied camps, theatre and concerts – can use this summer, it’s a way to use their voices and bodies to connect and open up their imagination and the larger world . . . without leaving their homes.  Barnes’ acting lessons and the other lessons provided by The Arts Squad are just the trick – SesayArts encourages you to check them out!

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, in which SesayArts interviews cartoonist Kean Soo about his career and his art lessons for The Arts Squad.

News You Can Use

What: The Arts Squad, presented by TO Live with the support of Meridian

Who: Children 5 years of age and older

When: New episodes every Monday until August 3, 2020

Where: TO Live Kids

Info: The Arts Squad — TO Live

© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2020