Interview with Dennis Cahill - Part One

As promised, my very first interview. This is part one, part two will follow, to make them manageable sized posts.

K: So I’m interviewing Dennis Cahill who is the artistic director of Loose Moose Theatre in Calgary. This year marks an anniversary of sorts for Loose Moose. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Dennis: Well, the Moose has been around for 30 years – over 30 years I suppose. We started in the fall of 1977. But also it’s the 30th anniversary of the beginning of public presentations of Theatresports, which we first started doing in January of 1978.

K: Wow. So Theatresports was born in Calgary…

Dennis: Keith Johnstone had the concept for Theatresports when he was working in England at the Royal Court Theatre, but during that period of time, improvisation would have been illegal on the stages in Great Britain.

K: I heard about this.

Dennis: So, it was only a concept and I think he did some workshops. He would have experimented with competitive improvisation. But it wasn’t until he introduced the idea to his University of Calgary students that it really took off. He developed it or began developing it at the University of Calgary – and then brought it to Loose Moose. As I mentioned, we started doing public presentations in early 1978 at the Pumphouse Theatre, and it was more or less developed from there. It actually took some time to develop because the initial format that we used is a fair amount different than what we have now.

K: It’s funny you mention Keith Johnstone. Anybody who knows anything about the history of improv knows or considers him to be if not the father of improv, to be one of the founders of that art form. And whenever you read about him you always hear it mentioned that he had a big part in starting up or… I guess starting up Loose Moose in Calgary. But how did you get involved with Loose Moose? Were you there from the beginning?

Dennis: I was a student of Keith’s. I took his acting class at the University of Calgary and I think the year following that he started the Secret Impro Group. We would do improvisation demonstrations under Keith’s direction during noon hour at the University. And then the following year Keith, and a fellow by the name of Mel Tonkin, decided to start a theatre company based on improvisation and Keith asked a number of his former students including myself to be a part of that. We would do workshops in Keith’s basement and we would do performances once a week on Sundays at the Pumphouse Theatre, because we could pretty well guarantee to get the theatre every Sunday – at that time. We also did short runs of plays. So, that’s really how Loose Moose began and how I got involved.

K: Nice. Many Calgarians may know about Loose Moose Theatre but they may not understand or know anything about this company’s impact on the world improvisation scene. Can you shed some light on the historical importance of Loose Moose on the world of improvisation?

Dennis: Well, I would say most of that impact is directly related to Keith, because Keith is really considered one of the world’s foremost innovators, teachers, and writers about improvisation. Once Theatresports took off here, Keith took it to Vancouver, and to Denmark, in Copenhagen, where he taught every spring. From there Theatresports spread either with Keith going to places and teaching, or people seeing it in one place and then importing it. So that definitely had an impact on how people knew about Loose Moose. Then we did an international Theatre Sports tournament for the Winter Olympics in ’88, which was an Olympic sanctioned event…

K: Really….?

Dennis: …we had cultural medals to hand out – Gold, Silver and Bronze medals. We asked them if we could hand out wood and aluminum medals, etc. but they said no – it would be against Olympic protocol, so it was the one thing we had to take seriously. Then it became really clear to us that lots of people were interested in studying under Keith, but also lots of people were interested in coming to see what Keith Johnstone’s theatre company looked like and how we. So we decided to start an annual summer workshop called the International Improvisation School in 1989. Every year since then we’ve had people from all over the world – performers, teachers, directors, writers, corporate trainers, psychotherapists – a really wide range of people come to Loose Moose. Loose Moose’s reputation has been spread by a number of different ways – because of Keith, because of Theatresports, and because of the Improvisation School. As well, because there are people from Loose Moose that work in various places around the world - Derek Flores who is artistic director of the company in Wellington, there’s Patty Stiles who is artistic director for a company in Melbourne. There’s also people like Shawn Kinley, Steve Jarand, and myself who go out and teach and perform in Europe, etc.

K: You just came back from a tour of somewhere in Europe – wasn’t it Germany?

Dennis: We did a tour of Germany last spring, and also made it into Vienna for a couple of shows. We were invited to perform some children’s theatre in Singapore this past August/September. When we first started there was not that much improvisation – anywhere. In North America there was maybe the Groundlings in Los Angeles, there was Second City in Chicago and Toronto, and there was Keith’s group in England called the Theatre Machine, but really other than that there’s really not a lot of improvisation. I think particularly because of Theatresports improvisation has spread worldwide. Now there’s hundreds and hundreds of groups all over the world. It’s been an interesting 30 years.

K: So, this class that you took of Keith’s – was it at that particular point in your life that you realized you were interested in improv?

Dennis: I’d been at the University for a couple of years. I was disappointed in the acting classes that I’d been taking. I blame myself – I thought – well, I’m not getting it. I’m an idiot. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to be doing. But a friend of mine had taken a course from Keith earlier and said if Keith ever comes back to teach at University of Calgary… Keith had been here and then left to teach at Queen’s. He did return and I saw his name on the calendar, so I immediately signed up for his second year acting course. It was immediately apparent to me it was a different approach to theatre and to acting. There was certainly some improvisation, but we also did text and we did mask work. I was really blown away how practical Keith’s work was. Keith sees a problem and tries to find a practical way of having you understand what the problem is and find a way to solve the problem. When Keith asked if I wanted to join the Secret Impro Group and subsequently Loose Moose I leapt at the opportunity. It was an interesting time because I don’t think we had a concept of how the world of improvisation would grow over the next 30 years, or how Loose Moose would end up. But we knew that whatever we were doing was different – certainly different from anything else that was in Calgary. It was definitely an exciting time.

K: So going back even further, it’s obvious that you were interested in performing in general before you got interested in improvisation…

Dennis: Well, to some degree. You want to know the truth? I was flailing about in high school. I was taking band class. I really wanted to play the saxophone or the flute because those are way sexier – more rock ‘n roll instruments. There were no saxophones or flutes left, so I was stuck with the clarinet. I don’t think I was a very good student but the music teacher, Charlie Liegerot, who was a great teacher, a really nice man, came to me one day and said “Look, we’re doing this musical and if you take a part, I’ll make sure you pass the music course”.

K: Nice.

Dennis: And I thought, that’ll be easy. He’d heard I had sang, that I was in a band. I thought it would be some small part and I’ll pass the music course and it will be great. So, I ended up doing Finian’s Rainbow and I ended up playing Finian. So I kind of got the acting bug from that. I think I’d always been a bit of a performer, but when I went to the University I was being more practical, I thought I’ll go and get a teaching degree.

K: I was going to ask you what steered you toward performance, what inspired you….

Dennis: Well, it was to pass playing the clarinet. Because there was no way in hell I was going to pass that course without that bit of help. I think it was great that Charlie recognized that – he knew I wasn’t really interested in playing the clarinet, so I thought it was very clever of him. Suddenly I found this is something I really like – I like being on stage. I was really frightened like everybody that gets on stage. But there was something I really liked about it.

Part two follows......