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Undeterred, D.C. studied voice and theatre at Ohio’s Baldwin Wallace College (along with actress/singer/songwriter Kristine Zbornik) and did graduate work in directing at North Dakota State University. D.C.,or David as
he was known at the time, left NDSU to study dance with the BILL EVANS
DANCE COMPANY in Seattle, Washington with hopes of becoming a modern
dancer, disproving all naysayers...The naysayers, however, were right
(one right foot, one wrong foot) and D.C. went hobbling back to the world
of theater and music. While in Seattle he appeared in CANDIDE,
THE DOCTOR IN SPITE OF HIMSELF, DEAR BRUTUS, JACQUES
BREL IS..., and a few self-produced revues of the music of Irving
Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen with Paul King
and musical director/pianist Darcy Danielson at the Skid Road Theater
and The Conservatory Theater Company. D.C. is the recipient of the 2002 BISTRO AWARD from BACKSTAGE as Singer/Songwriter. His songbook, "Songs by D.C. Anderson" was released in October 2002 and is available at www.LMLMusic.com as well as Colony Music in NYC and Hollywood Sheet Music in Los Angeles. Individual songs can be downloaded at www.musicnotes.com D.C. is currently on the road with THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA as Andre. While touring, he seeks performance venues for his concert shows. Check the concerts page for information pertaining to his upcoming concert appearances. D.C.'s Philosophy "...There is no more exhilarating feeling than that of my voice in my body involved in a song that moves me, teaches me or that I find humorous or entertaining...I love the freedom of cabaret. There are really no rights or wrongs...no steadfast rules about structure or content...I do see a distinction between being an entertainer and being a cabaret performer. I believe a singing entertainer presents material either chosen by him or her self or by the producing organization specifically with a targeted audience's sensibilities and pleasure in mind. I am fearful of approaching what I do in this manner. Maybe I don't trust my own instincts enough to believe that I won't run roughshod over them in an attempt to be pleasing...or maybe it's that I do trust my instincts and they are telling me to avoid the situation... I can't bring myself to sing "A Foggy Day," smile and snap my fingers at the same time (cheap shot - I'm sorry)...that's the monster under my bed.Coupled with a desire to entertain, I believe a singer who is singing material other than his/her own chooses songs that either support his or her world view outright or present someone in the process of a discovery which could lead to a similar conclusion. I have a interest in the well being of children and strong ideas about the art of facilitating their growth, an interest in peace, a concern for our environment, a desire to explore unconditional love (where does romance fit in?), belief in a higher power...I want an audience to explore these things with me...They have chosen to be in my company. They either consider us to be on similar wave lengths or are willing to be challenged by my notions. Favorite Quotes "It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention, and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial… "So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." Voltaire 1694-1778 "There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time-or even knew selflessness or courage or literature-but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age.. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less." Anne Dillard In the Arts and Leisure Section of the New York Times following the events of September 11 Playwright Paula Vogel writes: "The theater, with its immediacy of flesh talking to flesh, of actors sharing space, time and breath with a living audience, has an emotional imperative in the aftermath...playwrights have an ethical legacy to follow: the charge to ask questions during times of crisis. We ask of the theater more than the simplistic plots of Hollywood films...Euripides gave his peers MEDEA, a play that destabilized the notion of foreighner and the golden-haired local boy. Rather than allowing the Greek audience to feel complacent in its sense of nationality, the playwright sought to portray where arrogance in authority inevitibly leads." Filmmakers Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz: "...there is room for violence - imagine a sanitized Shakespeare. The question is, do we appeal to what is nihilistic in the audience or do we accept our responsibility as storytellers and act as mediators to the vast forces of the human soul ...it is not the subject but the rather the intentions that determine the moral possibilities of a film. Television writer Tom Fontana: "If we turn this tragedy into fiction and try to honor the memory of the fallen, we may end up exploiting their courage: What can a TV comedy or drama possibly add, knowing that its words are make-believe? What value do any of our little "fictions" have now? ...this means figuring out where the United States figures in the global family. This means examining the roots of intolerance, of fanaticism, of hate. This means understanding the importance of neighbors, co-workers, relatives, friends and faith." Songwriter Paul Simon: "The events of last week, as unbearale as they were to witness, were ameliorated by the almost total absence of popular culture from the nation's airwaves. Award ceremonies and concerts were cancelled. No blockbuster movies opened. No new television shows premiered. It was a temporary respite from the cultural din. Hyperbolic and aggressive selling were not only muted but alse seemed, when one stumbled upon it, to belong to an already distant past made irrelevant by the tragedy of Sept. 11. Within this chaos, there was a deep if momentary silence that encouraged us to re-examine ourselves as a people and a culture." Painter Elizabeth Murray: "I said to (my husband) how futile my artmaking seemed right now: how could balancing shapes with line and color have any meaning or be of any use to anyone ...the next morning I made myself go into my studio and work, because however futile it may be, it's what I do, and all I can do...I played the most beautiful music I have - Berlioz's "Harold in Italy" - and I felt lucky beyond words to be in my studio balancing shapes with line and color." Composer John Corigliano: "American pluralism remains the most resonant political idea of our epoch. All people of all races, classes and genders have value, can speak truth, deserve respect. The question, and the challenge, is to fuse them all into a society as rich as it is coherent. This political idea has artistic implictaions. It is too late for a fundamentalism of a master system, just as it is too late for an ideology of a master race. As we respond to the tragedy of Sept. 11, ... we must struggle to reconcile - imaginatively, flexibly, compassionately, intelligibly - our titanic richness of musical resource with unmistakeable structural order." This is Michael Ventura on writing: I have been carrying this essay around with me for a long time. It was written by my favorite LA WEEKLY columnist. Michael has a number of books available at bookstores and/or through internet booksellers. Michael Ventura LA WEEKLY May 21- May 27, 1993 "People who are young at writing - and this does not necessarily mean they're young in years - ask me, now and again, if I can tell them something useful about the task. "Task" is my word, not theirs, and it may seem a harsh and formal word, but before writing is anything else it's a task. Only gradually do you learn enough for it to become a craft. (As for whether writing becomes your art - that isn't really up to you. The art can be there in the beginning, before you know a thing, or it may never be there no matter what you learn.) "The only thing you really need," I tell these people, " is the talent of the room. Unless you have that, your other talents are worthless." Writing is something you do alone in a room. Copy that sentence and put it on your wall because there's no way to exaggerate or overemphasize this fact. It's the most important thing to remember if you want to be a writer. Writing is something you do alone in a room. Before any issues of style, content or form can be addressed, the fundamental questions are: How long can you stay in that room? How many hours a day? How do you behave in that room? How often can you get back to it? How much fear (and, for that matter, how much elation) can you endure by yourself? How many years - how many YEARS - can you remain alone in a room? I know people who, when young, had wonderful talents: prose of grace and resonance that came without effort, sentences that moved intelligently with that crucial element of surprise, never concluding quite where one expected, so that you were always eager to read the next and the next. Promising work as they say. But to write anything that keeps the promise, to go beyond the letters, verse and stories of their youth, written with enthusiasm, friends and teachers praising them, little magazines publishing them- to take the next step meant that they would have to sit alone in a room for years. Some sat just for weeks. Some lasted months. Some kept saying that next summer, or next winter, or after they graduated, or when they moved to Europe (which they never did), or when they got a grant, or when they weren't so busy, or when they could afford a place that gave them the SPACE, because they needed an actual ROOM, it couldn't be just the bedroom or the kitchen ... sometime in the foreseeable but not the immediate future, then they'd write the novel or complete that sequence of poems. A few of these talented people would even arrange the room. A good desk, a clean well-oiled typewriter (a computer now), the paper, the pencils, the stereo, maybe a hot plate. But after the room is ready you have to sit in it. For a very long time. (Sometimes it takes weeks or months even to begin.) And that's the talent they didn't have. There's no harm or blame in not having a talent. But it is very painful to have some of the talents, almost all of the talents, except the one you really need. The teachers who fawn on your early work (if you were lucky or unlucky enough, as the case may be, to have such teachers) don't usually tell you about this because they're not writers, they're teachers. They may do some writing on the side, but few have staked their lives on writing. Their wages, their prestige, their social life, their surroundings, the rhythms of their days and of their years, are rooted in the profession of teaching, which is an activity done in a room with other people, surrounded by rooms filled with people, upstairs and downstairs and down the hall. You cannot teach the demands of solitude in such places. Even if you talk about it, you're not teaching it - the surroundings contradict the lesson. The surroundings always ARE the lesson. That's the trouble with college. What it teaches, more than anything else, is how to go to college. Thus most writing courses, by their very nature, ignore the fundamental thing you need to be a writer. That's why, although thousands teach such courses and tens of thousands attend them, precious little work results. You'll notice that the ratio of teaching to work accomplished is much better in med school or in truck driver's school, because those are skills that can be taught. Nobody can teach you how you, in particular, are going to behave when you're alone for hours a day over long periods of time trying to deal with unknown quantities: who you are, what you have to express, what experience your expression draws on, how that experience relates to the solitude necessary for its expression; the form in which it comes out (which is never quite the form you planned on), and how that form changes as it progresses; and, first and last, who you are - all these are just a few of the unknown quantities that are locked up with you in your room. If you're Sharon Doubiago, your room is your van; if you're the young Ernest Hemingway, your room is a cafe table; if you're Emily Dickinson, your room is your garden; if you're Marcel Proust, you write in bed; if you're William Faulkner, you compose AS I LAY DYING in a humid shack while you work days in a factory (or was it work nights and write days?) - but whoever you are, whatever shape it takes, that room is the center of your life and it's VERY crowded. Everything you are and everything you're not backs you up against the wall and stares at you. You stare back. And eventually you get some writing done. The thing about the room is: it's likely you'll have to remain there for years before you even know whether or not you're any good - and it may be years more before anyone else knows. And that only if you're any good. Because you can have the talent of the room, you can spend years in the room, and still not be much of a writer. Or 20 years can go by and you ARE good and you don't get published; or you get published and nobody notices; or they notice, and they hate it; or you're a lousy writer, but they love it and you get rich. Whatever. The only thing you know you'll have twenty years down the line is the experience of the room - how you behaved, what you felt, what you thought, what you dared, what you fled, how you lived life, how life lived you, alone, in that room. Remember, even if you're financially successful at writing, and even if success comes young, you still have to spend the rest of your life in that room. Money and recognition make many things easier, but they don't change the basic conditions of writing. You may furnish the room better, but you will have to enter it alone and stay there till something happens. And if your livelihood and your family's well-being, now depend on your behavior in that room - then the quality of that behavior becomes crucial in many new ways. Your honesty, your originality, even the accuracy of your memory may very well become financial liabilities. Most people can blame their sell-outs on the institutions they work for, or on the way everybody ELSE does business, or on the political climate, or whatever. The vast majority of us are simply hired to do a job and then ordered to cut corners, and we feel we have little choice. But nobody orders anybody to become a writer. And nobody becomes a writer without dreams of glory and art. Writers do their selling out consciously, alone in their rooms, where they can't help but know what they're doing, adjusting sentence after sentence to what's saleable, what the publishers or the editors or the studios want. It takes a while for those adjustments to become reflexes - a long while of whittling away what's best in yourself. When the process is over you have a face to match it, which is why most screenwriters and freelancers look the way they do. When it's all over, if you've stuck and had some luck, you have a few things published that you're proud of and a pretty good idea of who you are. Without the first you probably wouldn't have stayed in the room so long, and without the second you'd have gone crazy a long time ago. "Crazy" defined as a writer would define it, at least while in the room: too unbalanced to work. If you can still write, then how crazy can you be? Plenty crazy, is the answer. The room can become a hole. Your talent of the room, your ability to be there with all your soul, can overwhelm you. Then the rest of life becomes unreal, and worse than unreal - becomes a kind of unlife. So you find yourself writing with a very sophisticated consciousness but living in your relationships with other people far beneath what you write, because it's gotten so you only really exist in that room and you don't really care about outside. And since you write necessarily from memory - for writing in a sense IS memory, is what you cared about yesterday, or last month, or in your childhood - since these are the basic conditions of writing, your lack of feeling for the present may not show up in your work for a while. But when it does, you're through. You may still be published, still make money, still be read, but people won't care the way they used to - and they'll know it, and they'll let you know it. The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in itself, but because YOU'RE dangerous. The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they've always been in the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations, every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you're on it, there is no knowing what will happen. Locking yourself
up with such things, letting them stir, using these pure psychic creations
as raw material; and deciding, each time, how much or little you're going
to participate in your own act of creation, just what you'll stake, what
are the odds, just how far are you going to go - that's called being a
writer. And you do it alone in a room. Another Quote from Michael Ventura, who was asked, "Why do you write?" This is what he wrote: LA Village View November 11 -17 "I spent several days feeling that I couldn't answer such a question; then suddenly this poured out: I write for a country called America, a country that doesn't exist now, a country that never existed - yet at certain times, and through certain souls, America gave (and gives) humanity a dream of the people, for the people, by the people, and this will haunt the world from now on. I write in the name of that haunting. I write for the living and the dead. I write for the unborn and the young. I write for the stone-people, the rose-people, and the tiger-people. I write for Randolph Bourne, Sherwood Anderson, Emma Goldman, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Nelson Algren, Willa Cather, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, John Cassavetes, Stevie Ray Vaughan - to pass on what they, and many others, have given me. I write for my family. I write for my friends. I write for my gods. I write in answer to the spirit in me that has said, since I was a boy: write. I write the way a tiger hunts, the way a leaf grows, the way a stone shines underwater in a river, not because it is anything special, but because this is how it was created, and it can do nothing else. I write not to save or attack anything - though there are things I have attacked - but as a way of honoring everything, both what I've tried to preserve and what I've attacked. I write because it is my way of being a man, and the woman in me speaks through that man. I write because it is my way of being a citizen - and the rebel in me speaks through that citizen. I write because it is my way of being a friend, a lover, a worker. I write in the faith that those who read are as complex, as desperate, as hopeful, as afraid, as couragious, as tired, as haunted, and as full of dreams, as I - and in the faith that, when they read, they complete what I write, taking what I write into territories I know nothing of. I write in trust of that unknowing. I write to pray. I write to laugh. I write to leave home and come home - and to find a home, and to make a home. I write to move from here to there. I write to go the distance. I write to be remembererd, but I also write to be forgotten - not only because every word, and every language will be forgotten; but forgotten because to enter in to the memory of another is to become a changeling, a creature hardly recognizable to oneself, so to be remembered, is at once to be forgotten. I write to lose myself and to find that which is more than myself - that which connects me to my ancestors, to Eternity, to the unknown that is to come, to the unknown that is right here, to you. I write because my life is at stake. I write to sit long in the silence that rises when the writing is done. At the end of all that, I added: Well - you asked." "The
music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway
where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's
also a negative side." "Artists are the
messengers of a culture's soul. When a culture changes, the artists are
the first to grapple with articulating the difficulties of the new and
the pain of what has been left behind." Here's a letter I received on the Internet following the Presidential election that I found inspiring: November 3, 2004 And now, there's work to do. The disheartening outcome of Tuesday's election is not a death knell for social justice; it's a wake-up call to progressive conscience. The specter of an ultra-right wing, vengeful religious figure augmented by the starboard list of the House and Senate is made even more disturbing by the passage of all eleven of the discriminatory state initiatives barring same-sex marriage and it is on this last issue that I would like to address my gay brothers and sisters and their allies. In particular, I would like to offer some words of encouragement to those either who are new to activism, or who, owing to this year's flurry of gay marriages, have been lulled into a sense of complacency about our place in society, and now feel perhaps betrayal, fear or disillusionment. We've seen struggle before. We survived McCarthy and Hoover; we survived Nixon; in Colorado, we survived Amendment 2. We started bouncing back from Reagan-Bush before the current psychotic administration trashed our international image, our civil rights and our economy, but those can be healed too. We've witnessed how grassroots activism stopped a war and led to the removal of one Whitehouse tyrant, and it can happen again. Don't be discouraged. For those of you who are younger -- say, under forty -- let me offer a little perspective: gay and lesbian Americans have it better now than we've ever had. Sure, there has been some backlash to the recent progress regarding gay marriage, but people are actually talking about these issues now. Seriously talking. When I was in high school, there were no GLBT Clubs, no Gay-Straight Alliances. There were no gay themed shows on TV, and the only gay characters were either victims or villains. Anita Bryant was barnstorming the country with her homophobic rhetoric and it was simply not cool to be gay. My college had no gay clubs or activities and PFLAG wasn't even a concept. My point is this: things are getting BETTER, despite the venom of the religious fanatics and the ultra-cynical, ultra-conservative minority running the country. Look at it this way: women were granted the right to vote less than eighty five years ago, though the country has yet to pass the ERA or its equivalent. A little over a hundred years ago, slavery was abolished and African Americans were given the right to vote, but until 1967, sixteen states still had laws against interracial marriage, and the recent suppression of the Black vote is cause for national embarrassment. The American Medical Association considered homosexuality a medical illness until 1973 (and it wasn't too long before that when those arrested for homosexual conduct were given the choice between electroshock or incarceration), yet we've recently seen elected officials in several states grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples and the subject is a matter of national debate. Have some hope, will ya?? Dig this, two hundred years ago the country was virtually one hundred percent racist, sexist and homophobic; now that's down to about fifty percent, so you've got to admit we're making progress here! Remember this also: gay people have been healers in countless cultures throughout history. We've been the storytellers, the shamen, the spiritual guides. It is no different now. It is our destiny to continue to tell the truth and to offer healing to those who suffer from the effects of oppressive forces, as well as to help guide the oppressors themselves out of their own darkness. This requires of us to be compassionate to those who would persecute us. Certainly, we must not acquiesce, but our patience and a deep commitment to helping them out of their sickness of hatred and fear is what will heal our fellows and free our brothers and sisters. For this task we must, therefore, do our homework. Read, discuss, debate, listen, and above all, know that you are fighting the good fight. Take strength from kindred spirits, but let's not spend the bulk of our efforts preaching to the converted. Resist the pull to ghettoize the spirit. It takes a lot of courage to speak the truth -- especially when there is a perception of threat to either our physical or emotional safety -- but you will get good at what you practice, so practice bravery and truth. A single election, or decade for that matter, does not a movement break. Look at the bigger picture and remember that the thrust of humanity is spiritual evolution. We are taking a conscious part in that evolution -- it is inclusive, it is compassionate and it is growing. Feel the love; now get to work. Keep the Faith, |
D.C.
Anderson’s performing career actually began "on the road"
- in the back of the family station wagon where he and his sisters would
repeat, from memory, the entire score of THE
MUSIC MAN.
He often made "personal appearances" - singing the hits
of Petula Clark and Gary Lewis and the Playboys while
upstairs changing into his PJ’s. The entire family would gather outside
his door to listen, anxiously waiting for him to emerge so they could
ask him, "Are you all right?"