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[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Time once again for a series, Art Heroes, which profiles people who are using their art to make the world a better place. And joining me now in the studio, arts reporter Marianne Combs. Welcome back.

MARIANNE COMBS: Thanks so much.

SPEAKER 1: So who's this month's art hero?

MARIANNE COMBS: It's Jeanne Calvit, Director of the Interact Center for Visual and Performing Arts in Minneapolis. Interact serves 130 artists with a range of physical and developmental disabilities. But before we meet Jeane Calvt, I'd like to introduce you to artist Gail Harbeck. At the age of 30, Harbeck was diagnosed with SPMI, Severe and Persistent Mental Illness. One of the symptoms is overwhelming depression. And for years, Harbeck was on disability unable to work.

GAIL HARBECK: I was spending, sometimes, several weeks in a row laying in bed thinking about ways that I could end the pain. I felt incompetent. I felt totally afraid of everything. And it was paralyzing.

MARIANNE COMBS: One day, Harbeck's case manager noticed some drawings she'd made and recommended she spend some time at Interact. 10 years later, Harbeck is a changed woman.

GAIL HARBECK: Interact and my work as an artist has given me a clarity about myself and about the world that I did not have before. I've been self-employed part time. And I've been paying income taxes. Yeah, I could say, yay, I pay income taxes since 2004. I feel competent. I feel confident now. I feel strong.

MARIANNE COMBS: While Harbeck's story may sound extraordinary, it's just one of many amazing transformations resulting from Jeanne Calvit's work at Interact. Calvit started working with people with physical and developmental disabilities in 1980 to help pay her bills as a freelance artist. She used the skills she learned at the prestigious Lecoq School in France to create summer theater workshops for people with physical and mental challenges.

JEANNE CALVIT: We would brainstorm an idea and then we'd have four days to put a show on. We'd work all day and then we'd make the props.

MARIANNE COMBS: The popularity of the workshops led to a year round afternoon program. Eventually, Calvit realized that her side job had become her true calling.

JEANNE CALVIT: There was a certain point where I just felt like nobody seems to be doing this and there was a need for it. And it really did transform people's lives. And not only the artists that was the person with the disability, it transformed their family's life. It transformed everyone in their circle's life.

MARIANNE COMBS: By combining social service funding with arts grants, Calvit created Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. Now, in its 13th year, the company puts on four gallery exhibitions and two stage productions annually and regularly goes on national and international tours.

SPEAKER 2: (SINGING) There is a sweet little phrase they say in Francais that helps me chase all my fears away.

Yes, it's much more fun. It has a lot more life to it.

MARIANNE COMBS: Rehearsal is underway for interact's current show, Madame Josette's Naughty and Nice Cabaret. It's a motley crew of performers. A few are in wheelchairs. Some have Down syndrome. Others suffer from brain injuries. But at Interact, they are not defined by their disabilities, but by their abilities, whether they have perfect pitch, a great sense of comic timing, or slick dance moves.

ALL: (SINGING) If you do. You're still damned if you don't.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARIANNE COMBS: The atmosphere at Interact is often one of contagious joy. Someone might greet a visitor with a handshake and then continue to hold their hand for the next several minutes as they talk. Studio artists are always eager to show you their latest work. Hugs are commonplace. But sometimes, emotions can also flare as people take their work very personally. Calvit remembers one actress who was particularly upset at being assigned an understudy.

JEANNE CALVIT: In theater world, this kind of thing would happen too, but you wouldn't just be chasing someone out of the room when they showed up at the rehearsal. It's so open and out there, the drama. And there's a freshness and a authenticity about it.

MARIANNE COMBS: Writer and performer Kevin Kling sits at the dining room table of his South Minneapolis home, his cat Millie purring in his lap. Kling has collaborated with Interact several times over the years. But perhaps his most personally significant work with the group came in the wake of his motorcycle accident in 2001.

KEVIN KLING: I didn't know if I was going to be able to perform again. I mean, I had brain injury. I didn't to what extent. And Jeanne just said, hop aboard. We got a play coming up.

MARIANNE COMBS: Interact staged an updated version of The Birds by Aristophanes with Kling in the part of Hephaestus, a god who, according to Homer, was banished from the heavens because he was born with shriveled legs.

KEVIN KLING: But he created a forge with the cyclopes and made gifts for the gods like Apollo's chariot and Artemis's bow and arrow. And because of that, he was able to bring himself literally out of the underworld using his art. And I really think of that when I think Interact that, through the arts, through having a job, we can really take ourselves out of the depths of despair.

MARIANNE COMBS: Kling says the theater Interact creates isn't just transformative for the performers. It also offers a powerful experience for the audience.

KEVIN KLING: There's a thing in acting called a cathartic moment. I mean, it goes back to the Greeks, again. And it's that moment where you touch on something very deep and very emotional inside yourself. Most actors try to get to that point. At Interact, they start at that point. I mean, that's the word go. To me, those emotional wells, you get a lot more bang for your buck when you're at an Interact show.

MARIANNE COMBS: Back at Interact, 37-year-old Mike Brindley recites from memory one of the thousands of poems he's written.

MIKE BRINDLEY: She carried her Down syndrome baby boy lightly and snugged. She kisses me on my cheek. My mother. She gave me birth.

MARIANNE COMBS: Brindley's mother Patti says, before he joined Interact, he was employed, but it was doing menial labor.

PATTI BRINDLEY: The one that comes to mind that was the best was he had to take cardboard, break it down, step on it, put it in a trash bin, climb up into the trash bin, and jump on the cardboard until it packed down into the trash bin so you could get a lot of cardboard in the trash bin. That was his job.

MARIANNE COMBS: Brindley's job didn't offer much in the way of social interaction. He spent his free time watching movies and writing poetry. Interact was just starting up and Brindley's case manager suggested it might be a good fit. Immediately, Brindley's mother started seeing a difference.

PATTI BRINDLEY: The first thing I noticed was that he could relate to the things that were happening around him with politics or whatever news items were being discussed. And he would bring that home and discuss it with his brothers and sisters, who used to say, how does he know that stuff? And it was because they were having discussions about it at Interact, staff and artists alike.

MARIANNE COMBS: 15 years later, Brindley doesn't just have a broader worldview. He has a resume any performer would envy. As a poet, he's competed in and won poetry slams, self-published several volumes of poetry, and performed on the streets of Paris accompanied by a musician. As an actor, he's been on stage at the Guthrie Theater, toured shows nationally, and taken performances to Canada, England, and Scandinavia. More recently, he's traveled with Calvit twice to Thailand to help teach theater skills to other people with disabilities. His mother Patti was so impressed with Interact's work, she's now on the staff.

Kim Keprios is the CEO of Arc Greater Twin Cities, a developmental disabilities advocacy group. Keprios says she doesn't discount jobs that involve mopping floors or breaking down boxes because many individuals take great pride in that work and find fulfillment there.

KIM KEPRIOS: But I think the trap that we get concerned about at Arc is not having the bar high enough. People with disabilities too often get kind of pegged into a particular spot and that's what they're going to do for the long haul. And Jeanne just kind of shook that whole notion up. Jeanne doesn't have a bar.

MARIANNE COMBS: Keprios says Jeanne Calvit is a national role model in the disability movement. For Calvit, the great lesson of her career has centered around human potential. Time and again, she has witnessed people who were treated as broken or worthless discover their hidden strengths through the arts.

JEANNE CALVIT: If I had been told that I could only be a secretary, I would have been the worst secretary on the planet. There are certain jobs that I would have just failed at miserably because it's not my talent. And that's the same for people with disabilities. They all have talents. They all have abilities. And if you don't give them opportunities, they're just a loss of human potential.

MARIANNE COMBS: Because of Calvit's many partnerships with other Twin Cities theater companies, more artists with disabilities are being seen on local stages. And her work in the Twin Cities is beginning to ripple around the world as she helps to create similar programs in Australia and Thailand. Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio News.