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[MUSIC PLAYING] GARY EICHTEN: And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday here on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. This hour, some conversations about a variety of subjects, education, crime, and the theater, to be specific. This hour, we're going to present three interviews from our Voices of Minnesota series. We'll be hearing from Honeywell Foundation Executive Director Andre Lewis and Theatre De La Jeune Lune director Dominique Serrand.

First, though, Mr. Win Wallin. 70-year-old Win Wallin is the former chief executive officer of Medtronic. He has donated a lot of money and time to improving education in the state of Minnesota. He and his wife, Maxine, for example, fund more than 100 college scholarships for Minnesota students. Mr. Wallin grew up in Minneapolis, the son of immigrant parents, and he told Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Farrell he was not a particularly good student in high school or college.

WIN WALLIN: I went in the Navy, and when I got out of the Navy, I went to the University of Minnesota. And the main objective was to just get the degree so I could get out and join a company. So I went through in a hurry and didn't learn much, I don't think.

CHRIS FARRELL: How was the job market when you got out of University of Minnesota?

WIN WALLIN: The job market was great. I interviewed three people, and had three offers. And I must say that I wasn't the most sterling. I didn't have the most sterling credentials from the University of Minnesota either. So, compared to what it's like for kids today, it was pretty, pretty easy to get a job back then.

CHRIS FARRELL: Think about today. Could you have the-- I gather that your years in high school also, you weren't exactly a stellar student in high school. Is that fair?

WIN WALLIN: Anything but. My problem in school was for some reason, I was a big daydreamer and I was just not motivated to do the usual schoolwork. And so there was always something else that I preferred to think about or do. But I think today, the kids are getting under more pressure. They know that they need to know something beyond high school.

Any kid coming out of high school today is not qualified to get a job, a good job. They're qualified to get a lousy job, and most of them do. Those that don't go on and get more education. We need to have a change in culture in the United States. And these kids deserve the right to know what's in store for them.

CHRIS FARRELL: How did this evolve, that business and education, two powerful institutions, two very big institutions in Minnesota, seem to have, over a long period of time, they don't talk to each other. Or, obviously, the message has not gotten to the educational establishment what it is that business either needs, requires, demands in terms of skill or education of young people.

WIN WALLIN: I was probably as guilty as anyone in thinking, you know, the business of business is business. And we stick to our business. And we pay tax dollars. The corporations and the individuals pay it, and we hire the government to educate our children.

And if they do their job right, then we don't need to worry about that. They'll get all educated and then they can go into the workforce, and so forth. Unfortunately, because of a very complex set of factors, including a breakdown in many instances in the family, including all the drugs so violence and so forth, including just kind of a change in culture, it didn't work out that way.

I am now of the opinion-- and have been for quite some time-- that government alone cannot do it. And educating our young people is probably the most important thing we can do in this country. We ought to be just as concerned about the people we're going to hire to be the employees of the company as we should be the customers that get our products or services.

And so, whether we like it or not, I think the businesses need to say this is of concern to us long term. And somehow, we need to get involved to see to it that this happens.

CHRIS FARRELL: In thinking about technology and the role of Medtronics and how many companies Medtronics has spun off, is the medical devices industry-- will continue to be a vibrant industry in this area? I mean, what do you think of the prospects of that industry in Minnesota?

WIN WALLIN: Well, I think they're excellent. The demographics of things with more and more people getting older, devices being sold to countries, people in countries that are becoming more affluent and can afford them, and the ability for technology to be produced that will do new things for people. Combination, I think the outlook is just excellent.

It started in Minnesota because of the University of Minnesota, and Medtronic was really the first one that really got underway. And Medtronic did have a lot of people that Medtronic trained who then went out and started new companies and so forth. And so we got a very important industry here. And I would just say I am very convinced that it will continue to do very well. I think that if we didn't have the University of Minnesota, we wouldn't have any of these companies here.

CHRIS FARRELL: How important is chief executives being compensated with stock? This notion of the way to get a good CEO is to tie their performance to a company's stock performance, which at this point, sometimes, you have to wonder is, are we confusing a bull market with brilliance when you sometimes look at some of the numbers. What are your thoughts about CEO compensation and what's been happening?

WIN WALLIN: First, I believe it makes sense to have the compensation of the CEO in line with the compensation that the shareholders, in effect, get. But one of the problems that occurs is that the shareholders, who are the real owners of the companies, don't even know what companies they own.

They invest in some fund that then has a manager, and that fund has their own objectives. And their objectives are to produce a quarter by quarter improvement in the value of the investments. So they are definitely on the short term side of things. And you would hope that the investors would take a longer term view of things than they do.

I happen to feel that the government, through taxation, would have the power to get us more into a longer term time frame. And without getting detailed about it, you could have a system where the first year, you might pay-- for your profits the first year, you might pay, say, 40% over 10 years. Maybe it's phased down. If you hold a stock for 10 years, you pay nothing, something like that.

CHRIS FARRELL: Have executives learned something about what to do right and what to do wrong out of this long period of restructuring and overhauling that has gone on?

WIN WALLIN: Well, I have mixed views about the restructuring and the layoffs that go along with it. On one side, American business has become more competitive. The workforce, a lot of people have been thrown out of jobs. And those that have gone to good jobs have had to re-educate themselves in many respects. And that is really driven by changes in technology. So they're adapting to what is happening in the world and will continue to.

I also suspect that a lot of those companies that announced really big layoffs, it's probably because the management didn't operate the thing right in the previous years and ended up with a lot of people that suddenly had to be severed in order to save the earning power of the corporation.

So I think it's a kind of a mixed bag. And it's also true that some of the larger companies-- as technology comes on and they can do with fewer people and they don't have a lot of ideas as to what to do with their earnings. So there are big companies that don't have the innovativeness of little ones. And to the extent that they don't have it, well, they don't need the employees. So the employees need to be shifted over into growth areas in the business community.

All of this gets pretty difficult for employees and families and what have you. But I guess, I think that the major driver is technology and it is going to continue. So we better learn how to deal with this.

GARY EICHTEN: Win Walling. This is Midday, coming to you on Minnesota Public Radio. Today, a series of Voices of Minnesota interviews. Later in the hour, we'll hear from Andre Lewis about a crime fighting organization formed by several Minneapolis companies. Finally, we'll hear from Dominique Serrand about his work as an actor.

Let's return now to Chris Farrell's conversation with Win Wallin, retired CEO at Medtronic.

CHRIS FARRELL: Now that you left Medtronic, is this now a time to go retire, play golf? What are your ambitions at this point?

WIN WALLIN: Well, I'm always going to play golf, and then I go out and play golf, and then I swear I'll never play again. So I do play some golf and some tennis. But unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out how to run my life so that I have a lot of time.

And I think you finally come to the point in your life when you realize that there are other things you want to do. So I am gradually withdrawing from business and trying to simplify my life a little bit. But I guess at this point, I am more interested in the education of the young people than anything else.

I've spent a lot of time with Carleton College. I'm the chair of the trustees at Carleton College, have been for the last five years. That institution is doing remarkably well, I think. And the higher education system in the United States is not the part of the education system that's in trouble, although the cost of tuition may eventually result in some severe problems.

And I've been also heavily involved with the University of Minnesota, another higher education institution. And the University has had a lot of problems. And hopefully, most of them will get solved because we need to have a wonderful University here. So I'll continue to be involved in higher education. But also, I think you need to get farther down into the school system.

I believe that we need to try to change the culture in this country so that kids will get more encouragement on the intellectual things in life, that there will be more of an appreciation of the importance of that, what they know, what they can do, as compared to the athletics, which is what they can do with their bodies.

I'm not knocking that. But I think that sooner or later, just about everyone on this Earth's life depends on what they can do, what they can bring to it with their minds.

CHRIS FARRELL: How do you see yourself most effectively interjecting yourself into this K through 12 issue?

WIN WALLIN: When I retired from Medtronic, Medtronic established the Wallin Medtronic Scholars Program for the Minneapolis Public Schools, and put $1 million in there. And the first grants are being made about now for people to attend technical colleges for two years. And that's an effort to try to get kids who otherwise may not go to school to go and learn some kind of a trade, something so their skills are marketable, that someone will hire them. And then they start getting income, and then they have to start getting different views on what they ought to do. Their behavior changes and everything.

This country would be a lot better place if everyone who can work would get a, quote, "good job," a job that paid enough so that they could have a reasonable family life. And I think that we have a lot of jobs. A lot of them are lousy jobs. And you can't even keep things together on one job.

And so I just think that the education is just at the core of the problems in the country. And we ought to be addressing it. And I would hope that the business community will get more involved.

CHRIS FARRELL: Do you think there should be more emphasis on two year college or technical training or vocational training for young people, but perhaps going on to college is not the right thing?

WIN WALLIN: If there is an imbalance in it right now, I would say that we have too few people in the technical side and too many in the general college. And I believe here, again, technology is driving a lot of this. And some of these technical colleges now are teaching very complicated stuff.

I mean, this is to do some of the things that you will need to do on a computer or whatever, it requires a lot of education, a lot of study. There's been a kind of a stigma attached to the fact that you really ought to go to a four year college, but a lot of kids go there and get out and can't get a job. Some of them go, then go to the technical college.

So I believe that that's the way the world's going. And your odds are better of getting a good job if you go through the technical side.

CHRIS FARRELL: I have to ask you, are you computer literate?

WIN WALLIN: No.

CHRIS FARRELL: Are you going to learn to be?

WIN WALLIN: No. I figure I was born early enough, so I didn't need to know that. If I had been born 50 years later, I would be computer literate. And I recognize that in this day and age, you had better be if you're a young person. There's still nothing like the human mind to figure out what you ought to do. And I think it is far superior in that way to what any computer is going to do for you.

The human mind does a lot more than just calculations. The human mind takes into consideration all kinds of things when making a decision, everything from the mathematical to the emotional side of things, to the risk, to the implications that it has for all kinds of people.

It's just really surprising. Some of it you're not even aware of. But some of it's called intuition. So I don't think that the computers are going to take over everything in this country.

GARY EICHTEN: Retired Medtronic chief executive Win Wallin, talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Farrell, part of our Voices of Minnesota interview series that you hear regularly here on Minnesota Public Radio.

Every month, Andre Lewis sits down with people from business, government, and city neighborhoods to plot crime fighting strategies. Mr. Lewis is the executive director of the Honeywell Foundation. Just over a year ago, Minneapolis-based Honeywell and several other businesses in the South Minneapolis Phillips neighborhood went to the governor. They were concerned about the rising Minneapolis crime rate. Homicides set a record. Gunshots and crack dealers were plaguing their neighborhood.

So Honeywell and the others formed Minnesota Heals, a crime fighting coalition. Honeywell and the other businesses have donated money for housing and jobs programs, and it provided the government with ideas for reducing crime. Andre Lewis, a former Minneapolis Public School principal, talked with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: A year after Honeywell and others made a big effort to try to make Minneapolis a safer city, is Minneapolis a safer city, do you think?

ANDRE LEWIS: We were dealing with, in my opinion, a lot of perception. People were concerned about the gang violence and the homicide rate. But I think in general, Minneapolis is a very, very safe town. Some of our senior executives were concerned about that homicide rate and what business could do to be helpful to elected officials and our appointed officials as they came up with strategies, or were trying to design strategies to attack this problem.

Business wanted to be at the table as strategies were being formulated. And I think the people made it out like business was dictating, but it was more a question of business saying we have some resources. We could be helpful here. How can we be helpful?

DAN OLSON: The murder rate in Minneapolis is down here in 1997 substantially.

ANDRE LEWIS: That is correct. That's correct.

DAN OLSON: Minnesota Heals want to claim any credit for that?

ANDRE LEWIS: I think it's a combination of the efforts that our law enforcement and our judicial system, what they were going to do anyway, but bringing this added resource to the table has been helpful. With these crime statistics, it's always, always kind of a nebulous thing. It could be the weather, it could be, you know, anything. So I don't think anyone wants to step up and take credit. I think that we're all in this together, and I think it's important to keep that in mind, that it's a long term kind of effort. It's not something that you can judge really, truly over just one summer.

DAN OLSON: Residents of Phillips, Hawthorne, Central, other neighborhoods in Minneapolis, have been almost begging for years for greater enforcement, for jobs programs, for you name it, closer attention, more attention from the city. There's the unmistakable impression that when folks with money and who pay big property taxes, and who do a lot of hiring, show up and ask for the same kinds of thing, that's when officials start paying attention. Is that a fair analysis?

ANDRE LEWIS: I'm not sure that it is, Dan. I really believe that on the whole, most of our elected officials are looking at the city as a whole and not to some special interest group or whatever. At least here at Honeywell, we have always wanted to be a partner with the neighborhood, a partner with the city.

We look at this as our home and that if we're going to accomplish anything, we have to do it together. And so we tend not to try to get into all these different games of pitting one neighborhood against the other or pitting the neighborhood against downtown, the city officials, and all of that.

We like to play the catalyst role of bringing people together and saying we all have to be in this together.

DAN OLSON: Have the results been good enough? The drop in the murder rate, for whatever reason and other activities? Have the results have been good enough to convince big private sector employers like Honeywell, hospital, and the others? Yeah, well, it appears to be safe enough now in Minneapolis. We'll stay. We won't-- I don't know if there ever was a threat to move out-- but we won't have that hanging over us in the same way.

ANDRE LEWIS: I can speak for Honeywell. There was never any threat to move or anything like that. There was always the rumors. And I think that's good play for the media and the community worries about it. But there was never anything on the table there.

We just feel that we have a responsibility not only to our employees but to the community. And just our history, we've been in this neighborhood for over 100 years. And I think Abbott Northwestern has been in the Phillips neighborhood for over 100 years. So for at least those two organizations, I don't believe that there's this threat. I think it's important for people to keep in mind that this is not a new situation, that Honeywell has been involved in, like you said, job creation, job training, housing in this neighborhood, infrastructure for the neighborhood. And the same with Allina and Abbott Northwestern.

DAN OLSON: Is Minnesota Heal in it for the long run, to address the kinds of things that relate to jobs for those young people, summer activities and all the rest?

ANDRE LEWIS: I thoroughly believe that one of the things that we try to get across to all of our new members as they join us is that this is not just a summer 1997 project. This is for the long term. Crime is just a response to something. And what I meant by you can't arrest your way out of this, if there is a young man or a young woman, they're doing whatever on the street corner and the police officer is going to arrest them, that takes care of the problem for that point in time.

There could be 50 more tomorrow or the next day, and on and on. You have to get to the root cause of what is causing this violence, what is causing this crime to be happening. And we believe that it has to be addressed with some of these long term issues like jobs and opportunity and housing, and training and education.

GARY EICHTEN: Honeywell Foundation Executive Director Andre Lewis. He says the Minnesota Heals members have spent well over $1/2 million on various crime fighting initiatives this year. Lewis's parents moved to Minneapolis from Texas back in the early 1950s. He became a teacher at a Minneapolis high school principal. Let's return to that conversation with Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: Do city kids not have nearly as many after school or in school or recreational opportunities as kids in suburbs? And that is that an important-- not a big cause, but an important cause of kids running amok?

ANDRE LEWIS: I think it is an important cause. I think we have a number of opportunities, but not to the extent and the level and the quality that there may be in some of our suburban areas.

DAN OLSON: What's missing?

ANDRE LEWIS: If you ask me, the key component that's missing right now, I would say it's transportation. We have a number of places and programs. But getting the kids there and getting them home after it's over is the big key. In the suburbs, there are many opportunities and there are these organized transportation, mom mobiles and pop mobiles taking the kids there. And you don't see that in the city, and a lot of dangerous territory kids have to travel through to get to the different programs. And so I would say transportation is a key component missing.

DAN OLSON: I guess there's an unmistakable notion that this is a city issue and that the suburban environs, including some of the areas where some of the Minnesota Heals companies do business, are somehow separate and apart from that. I don't know where you live, where you come from, but you have been an educator in the Minneapolis school system. Is there still a real sense of them versus us, of well, that's the city and that's where poor people live. And what do you expect?

ANDRE LEWIS: I think that is one of the big, big problems in this whole thing. Minneapolis is the engine that drives this metropolitan economy. And so we have to pay attention to it. But further than that, if Minneapolis is going to come up with programs and initiatives to deal with this crime rate, it's like squeezing a balloon. That crime is going to be dispersed somewhere. And I think the suburban areas have to be genuinely concerned and involved with dealing with that issue, because they don't want the problems that Minneapolis is eradicating to be brought home to them.

And also, one thing that you got to remember, it's this bugaboo that I've had for a long, long time. People think that this violence and drug trade in the Phillips neighborhood is driven by the people in Phillips. And that's just not so. The economy of this neighborhood would clearly show you that the neighborhood by itself cannot continue to drive this drug trade and this crime based on economics. Huge percentage of the majority of the buyers are from outside the neighborhood. And a majority of that is from outside the city.

And so you have your suburban residents coming into Phillips to buy drugs. And that, to me, is really what's driving, to a large extent, this drug trade.

DAN OLSON: You were a teacher for a while, I assume.

ANDRE LEWIS: Yes, sort of like that Welcome Back Kotter program. I graduated from North High School, left to go to Augsburg College, and I came back and did my student teaching at North High School. And then I taught for five years at North High School, also. I taught social studies.

DAN OLSON: You had a great job but you grew up in very poor circumstances. Who was there for you?

ANDRE LEWIS: I had a mother that was of the belief that opportunities are there. You have to seize them. You have to work hard. She instilled in us values that are bedrock, not just to a Black family or a white family, but bedrock in us as American citizens, that education is the key, and that you can do it if you set your mind to it and work hard.

Yes, there are going to be obstacles there. Yes, some people will not like you because of what you look like or your color, but that in no way should be a crutch or be a reason for you not to be successful. Also, it's the job of the educator. I don't want to take educators off the hook. It's a combination of all three of those things.

I think teachers have to be properly trained, they have to stay current, and they have to know the child to impart that knowledge, that experience that we want them to have. So I'm saying it's a combination of all of those things. Poverty is one of them. I won't discount it. But I agree with you, I wouldn't say that it is the key make or break thing. If you ask me, the key make or break thing is the family and that family being actively engaged in that child's education.

I remember always telling parents at the beginning of the year when I would have my first parent meeting, I said teachers teach differently when they know that a child's family is involved. And we know that children behave differently when they know that the parent and the teacher know one another.

So it's advantageous for teachers and parents to know one another because teachers behave differently and kids behave differently when the teacher and the parent know one another.

DAN OLSON: Both cities, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, face lawsuits saying that the districts have not provided equitable education for children. And I just wonder, you were an educator at the time when the conversation about metropolitan wide desegregation came up. And I wonder what you think is the solution.

ANDRE LEWIS: There's no more wiggle room. Something has to be done. And you're going to have to bring all the players to the table.

DAN OLSON: What's your impression of the reaction of white Minnesotans to the willingness of white Minnesotans to mix, to live next to people who are African American, who are American Indian, who are Asian American, who are Latino?

ANDRE LEWIS: They don't have a choice. It's as simple as that. We're at that defining moment, I believe, that Minneapolis is a multicultural, multiracial city. And you don't have a choice anymore. You can just drive out so far, you know. You work in Minneapolis or Saint Paul, or close to it, or Bloomington or along the strip or whatever. You know, you can just run out so far.

DAN OLSON: But in a way, that's what people seem to be doing. They seem to be leaving not only the city, but maybe in some cases, the first ring suburbs. And because we have no real restrictions to growth in the Twin Cities geographically, folks are leaving.

ANDRE LEWIS: Well, the Metropolitan Council is dealing with that now. Even in these corporations and as you go down to Dayton's to shop or you go into the Mall of America, you have no choice. You're going to come into contact with people who are different from you with different backgrounds, different cultures, different skin colors. And you you're going to have to learn to get along with them sooner or later. You're going to either be working next to them, you're either going to be taking instruction from them. You're either going to be supervising them or being supervised by them.

I remember years ago, I had a teacher when I was a student, and when I came back as a teacher, not as administrator, she was getting ready to retire. And at her retirement dinner, she said, be very careful what you do and say to your students, because one day, they might grow up and be your boss. And I always kept that in mind. So to answer your question, they're going to have to whether they like it or not.

DAN OLSON: Dr. Andre Lewis, thank you a lot for your time.

ANDRE LEWIS: You're very welcome.

GARY EICHTEN: Honeywell Foundation Executive Director Andre Lewis talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson, part of our Voices of Minnesota series coming your way today here on Midday. Next, actor Dominique Serrand, a native of Paris, France, talks about the theater. Serrand is a founding member and artistic director of Teatro De La Jeun Lune in Minneapolis. Company has made a name for itself for its creative, even zany productions of original comedy as well as French classics.

Company got its start in France nearly two decades ago when four graduates of the Jacques Lecoq Acting School began touring and performing together. They spent seven years splitting seasons between France and the US before finally settling permanently in Minneapolis. Serrand recently talked backstage with Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr and said it was his grandmother who introduced him to theater.

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: My grandma, who had no idea about theater and was a single woman-- she had lost her husband during the war-- had decided to celebrate just about every moment of life. She was very Christian and she had a teapot cover, an old cloth teapot cover that she would put on her head and she would become the archbishop. And we would get married between brothers and cousins and stuff, and we would have children, and would be baptized, but every week.

So maybe it's a little bit her fault if I never understood that marriage was something that needed to be kept in one piece and in one way because it changed every week. But that was my first theatrical experience. And we would baptize everything, puppets, dogs, cats, the new dolls. And it was always done in such a great spirit.

She's probably the most inspiring spiritual experience in my younger years. She was she was very generous. And then, of course, then I started going to the theater with school because in those days, it was important for schools to go to the theater. And we'd go once a week.

Probably, by 12 years old, I'd probably seen-- as well as my other friends who've never been in theater-- I'd probably seen 200 plays, I would say. So that was heaven. It was the time that you enjoy without knowing the difficulties of it. And I do think that discussing the place and that experience, whether it's going to the Luxembourg Garden, going to the Comedie Francaise, which is such a beautiful hall, and the journey to it on the bus was the bus with a back platform that's open air. So you go across through Paris to Saint and you see all these statues. It's incredible architecture. And you enter in this gorgeous place, which has all these memories of statues of Moliere and all these people.

And you see a live show that's probably been carried on for 300 years with actors who are very skilled. And you come back home feeling that you've entered your past or that you've just been part of your past in a great way and it's been re-enacted for you. So the theater was a place where history was alive, in a way.

EUAN KERR: When did you realize or decide, or whatever the process was, that this was something that you wanted to do?

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: My mother says at two. Other people say different age. I think very early. But for me, it was never a choice of making one choice only. I wanted to be a fireman. I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be the Pope, you know, those kind of things, and an actor.

It never made any difference for me. I never chose that one would have to be the one. I didn't think that the world would be made in such a way that you had to choose one thing. I thought you could do several things. And now that's what people do, actually. You do several things. You're an actor and a waiter, or a waiter first and then an actor.

And so I didn't really-- first of all, I never thought that I could choose that profession because my father would never have allowed it. He was totally against doing profession in the arts. He thought that you had to have a special gift. I don't know how he made the judgment of that, but I just think he was terrified by it so he never encouraged us to do it.

He would always show me this actor who was sitting on the bench across the street from our house. He was probably about 50 years old, turned into a drunkard and was completely abandoned and living there and didn't have any money. And he said, see? This is what you'll get. This guy was very well known. This is what you'll become. So that was a very good introduction to a hopeful experience.

And actually, I got him back because two years later, the guy went back up and did films, and now he's very well known and he makes records. So I said, you see, there are difficult moments in life.

EUAN KERR: Then, at some point, you decided to go to school?

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: A friend of mine was an actor who said, don't go to school. You'll never learn theater by going to school. I said, well, but if you really insist and you feel so uncomfortable, then you can go see this guy Jack Lecoq. If anybody, He's a teacher. So I went there. It was a shock of cultures, which I thought was just fascinating. And I got out after two years really deciding that that, yes, this was my profession. This is what I wanted to do.

EUAN KERR: One of the things which I understand is taught at Jacques Lecoq is what is basically, I suppose, almost a medieval skill, the clowning skills, the physical movement skills, which still form a great deal of the work done here.

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: For Jacques, the purpose of research in the approach of his pedagogy is to work with lots of cultures and lots of nations, to find a language that is common to all of us, which is theater. But of course, if you bring a Japanese and a Sudanese and a Danish and a British in the same room, they are not going to use the same body language. They don't have the same culture.

But interestingly enough, going back through a commedia dell'arte, very far back-- the buffoons, the farce, all these very basic, very important techniques of theater-- then you realize that everybody has their own way of doing it. But there is a common language and the cultures enrich that. So that's a fascinating part.

But the reason it is called or referred to as a movement is because Jacques' basic idea was always that movement is a fundamental principle of life. Everything is through movement. The first thing is a movement. The cry is a movement. The cry of the baby is a movement. Birth is a movement.

So until we die, which is the end of the movement, we never stop moving. And life is in movement. And we were in a theater, or we were in a world of theater that was very still, that had decided that life could stop and hold for an extended period of times, and give its time to thoughtfulness.

And Jacques' principle is that theater is alive. And Peter Brook says the same thing, and Mnouchkine said, and so on, and so forth. It's an old debate that it's only alive when it captures the life, and the movement is what carries life. And movement betrays you unless it's completely organized and structured in a way that you hide everything. You can always hide behind movement.

But if you allow it to be the expression of what you feel, movement can be much more telling than any word. It was not denying, by any means, text and words, which we did. We did a lot of work on text and even on writing. But it was not his point. His point was to do research on the fundamental part of what makes the fact of acting. What is it that creates this event that people are standing in a place and somebody comes on stage and the magic starts?

So that's what we worked on. It was very, very exciting. And I still can tell when I do workshops here and I bring new people in, and we'll all sit together, professional and the older people in the company, and very young actors. And people have very little experience. And we do the same fundamental steps of going through, let's enter a room, see what happens, and we are here watching. And we'll know when something happens or if it doesn't.

And we're always amazed at it's always new. We never know what will happen. It's always the same story. Somebody walks on stage. But the way they do it, the way they tell us, the way it's either very boring or absolutely amazing, electrifying. So it's that same story that we keep requestioning. What is it that makes that relation?

So Jacques gave us a gigantic dictionary. And I should never use that word because he would kill me. But that's what he gave when the experience was over, not that's what he gave when we came in, for sure not. He said, basically, you're your own tool. It's like a violin player, except we are both a player and the instrument.

And to learn how to play it, I'm amazed when I see how many actors only use 10% of their entire being. And it's often the 10% that's above the mouth.

EUAN KERR: While you were at Jacques Lecoq, you met Barbara [INAUDIBLE] and you met Robert Rosen, both Americans. You're with [INAUDIBLE]. And you decided to not only put together a company, but you hit upon this completely ridiculous idea of spending half of the year in France and half of the year here. Tell me about that.

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: You mean I have to do that again, just flagellate myself, remember how stupid that decision was? Yeah, it was really dumb. It was part of an ideal we had that we thought you could you could move on. You could move, you could play in different cultures, in different countries. What was sad was to abandon Paris because it didn't happen. And our show was just a bomb, just an absolute disaster. And so we had to leave. We had to decide to stop going.

And it was always the hope we could come back. And eventually, it was so clear to us that we were so much happier being here. I mean, life was relatively cheap. You can find a rent for really relatively very cheaply. You could do your work. And that's what we did.

So in a way, going back and forth was really crazy. But it was amazing. It was very difficult, very tiring, but it was amazing. The only part was, of course, after a while, we realized there was no way to continue because there is no win. The press would always be in France. You can't understand half of the cast. And the press would be here in America, then you can't understand half of the cast. So we had to decide.

EUAN KERR: I suppose the concern was, was it the same half?

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: Yeah. It was always one half.

EUAN KERR: But then you almost crashed here too. I mean, there was this legend. I suppose it's not entirely a legend.

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: It's a true legend.

EUAN KERR: $200 you had left?

DOMINIQUE SERRAND: Yeah, but we didn't have it. No, no, we didn't have anything. The money was all gone, completely gone. And I remember board members would bring up food, bring some food to the rehearsal. And a board member gave us some money and cash to cover this so we could still be open. And they would make checks signed just without knowing that they could even be reimbursed so we could just be alive.

And you put about $150 or $200 in that show called Yanks and Frogs. And it made about $120,000, I think, which at the time, was just outrageous. It was a great success. And we went on. And it's always been in a moment of greater difficulties that we found a way to survive. We're great survivors, or we've been until now. We're getting older, of course.

But no, it's true. And we had a great spirit. And I don't think that the show, and the quality of that show, and the creativity in that show would have happened unless we had been in this survival type of situation. Not to say that artists need to starve in order to do good work, which is just outrageous.

But that show was not about doing good work. That show was about being the funniest you can be to make sure that the money's going to come in, which is a very different story. And it succeeded. And it's very interesting because as we got more stable, we tried to do shows that were the same kind of quality and it never worked the same. It never quite did it.

But interestingly enough, as everything would push us to become more conservative, well, on the contrary, feeling more and more to go and discover and go on new territories and try out things that we've convinced we should keep trying and working towards that have been in seeds over the years, and now is the moment.

So it's an exhilarating moment in terms of the clash between a certain image that people have of us and the comfort that, I think, that people think we do have, and where the reality is and what we want to do of it. I guess it's an old-- I don't know if it's a legend or if it's-- I think it's true because legends are supposed to be true.

But it seems that whenever you succeed, that's when people start to shoot you down. So as soon as we got our building, it started to smell. There was some rot in the newspaper. It's still growing. I use my newspaper to wrap fish, so it's fine. There's a fitting purpose.

So you need to be careful and you need to realize that there are trends. And so we need to go out. And being invited is a great way. Of course, we go to La Jolla, we went to Berkeley, we went to New York, we went to Yale, went to Trinity, to all these places. We're being seen in a space of seven weeks by three times the amount of audience who sees us here.

So in a way, in the last three years, it's very telling to see that our shows have been seen by many, many, many more people than in the Twin Cities. So it starts creating a need, and thank god for us, a venue so that if the local press decides that they've seen enough of us over 20 years and they're way too old, that we can go and be seen where it's a completely fresh feeling.

And it's fascinating to go to those places because no one knows us. So you get the true response of an audience who doesn't know who is exposed to the work. And it's very good for us because it tells us when we're not doing our work the way we should. And it's very important in terms of seeing an audience who is new to us. It would be very easy to bank on old territories and continue, and do huge marketing campaigns and have a gigantic staff, and do season tickets and all that thing.

But we've never been interested in that. And we're convinced even more now that we're even less interested in it. Going back to the idea of an actor walks on stage, an audience is there, first of all, where are they? Where are we? Where does it start? The magic starts. Is it real? Is it true? Is it important? If it's not, curtains.

GARY EICHTEN: Dominique Serrand, founding member and artistic director of Teatro De La Jeun Lune in Minneapolis. He was talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr, part of our Voices of Minnesota series. By the way, the current production is called the Pursuit of Happiness. It's a two part theatrical extravaganza about America, and tickets are available at the box office, 333-6200.

Our Voices of Minnesota interview series is produced by Dan Olson with Sasha Aslanian and help from intern Susan Riedel. That does it for Midday today.