Today we’d like to introduce you to Dano Colón.
Dano, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I did theater in middle school and high school, and loved it and felt like it was what I would love to do with my life. But, when the time came to go to college and decide my major, I felt like it was an impractical and irresponsible thing to be pursuing, and that using my college degree to get into an industry where my chances of success were so astronomically low would be a really stupid decision that would ruin my life. So I went into college thinking I was going to do something “smarter,” get a philosophy degree and become a history teacher or a philosophy professor- which, now I look back on that decision, and I think it was really only slightly more practical and only slightly less stupid, so whoops. But I continued doing theater just for fun while I was there, and I did so much of it that I realized I could just double-major if I took a few more classes. And now I’m doing exactly what I was afraid to do- trying and struggling and probably failing to find success as a theater artist. But I’m really glad to be doing it. After college, I went to physical theater school, more recognizably known as clown school, to specialize in that very specific method of theater performance, and at some point I got involved with a film studio in San Francisco who I do development for; they come to me with an idea for a show or a character or a movie, and I help them fill out the idea with character/plot arcs, etc. We’ve got a few projects that are in the pitching/selling process, a sci-fi teleplay that’s won a bunch of festival awards, and so on.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
Most of the time, in my theater work, directors come to me, and they say “we’ve got this role that’s really reliant on physical comedy and we’re told that’s something you do.” I’ve been working on building my brand here in Houston as a performer who uses his clown training to enrich non-clown theater performance. I really enjoy physical comedy- I grew up obsessed with Lucy and Monty Python and Mr. Bean. It was a kind of party trick of mine in elementary school that I could stand there if you had an hour or two, and act out “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” line for line, describing the visuals and singing the music.
When I’m not performing theater, I really love teaching it. I’m really lucky to have trained under a lot of geniuses, and it makes me really happy to cobble together all of the brilliant things they taught me into a lesson plan to pass on to other people. Mostly I teach kids- I teach Main Street Theater camps and classes at elementary schools, where my hope is that I’m helping some kid who’s never heard of Monty Python find a little piece of themselves that would enjoy acting out their favorite movie as a party trick.
When I’m writing, my primary goal is to tell stories in a way that isn’t the way everyone is always telling stories. I hate the formulas. I hate that the entertainment industry has boiled down plot structure and tweaked every nuance so they can achieve a maximum asses-in-seats ratio per page by “optimizing” components arbitrarily- “if we have a sexy this-or-that in this scene, or an actiony whatever in this scene, then 25-year-old dudes will watch this movie, and if we have blah blah blah, then 40-50 year old blah blah blahs will blah blah blah.” It’s boring. I always tell people about how my dad has this weird thing he can’t stop doing where like, you’re watching a movie and the guy says “Janice, you have to come with me, it’s about Robin” and as they leave the camera lingers on Janice grabbing a letter opener, and my dad starts “predicting” exactly what you know is going to happen- she’s going to stab the guy with the letter opener after he tries to kill her. Of course. But I always tell people I want to make movies for people like my dad who are so used to the formulas that they’ve already seen the movie before they even watch it- I want to trick and confuse and surprise the hell out of my dad.
What would you recommend to an artist new to the city, or to art, in terms of meeting and connecting with other artists and creatives?
I went through a really hard period after I came back from Sweden, where my friends and I had started a clown company. I was supposed to come back for a couple months to get my visa renewed, but I wound up stuck- it’s been eight years or something, now, and I’m still here. I got really depressed and scared, living in my parents’ computer room not doing anything because auditions were few and far between and I never got the part, exactly what I had been afraid of when I told myself I wasn’t going to do theater in college. My mom saw that it was killing me, and she just went on Google and looked at every theater in Houston until she found one that had something on their website about, rather than a specific audition, “we’re doing this play, audition for it on this day”, it was, “send a headshot and resume to this email address, and we’ll put you in a file and we’ll contact you when an audition comes up that you could be right for.” I did that, and months!! later they didn’t have a man my age for a murder-mystery spoof with a lot of funny accents and physical comedy. They found me in that file. So they called me, and I auditioned, and as it turns out this kind of thing was exactly my wheelhouse, and I’ve been working with them ever since. I would never have gone in to audition for that murder-mystery spoof because I never would have heard about it.
My advice is, yeah, it’s frustrating. The nature of art is that we fail. Constantly and actively. And that active failing can have a huge psychological impact on you, make you think success will never come. If you can find a way to put yourself in a passive file, where you’re there specifically for the exact moment you are the one they need, that’s a really valuable alternative to just continuing to actively fail. I felt like every time I auditioned for something, and nothing came of it, I was sinking further and further, and I was going to drown- but when *they* came to *me* because the moment was exactly right and I was what they needed, that pulled me back up. I’m not saying don’t audition, I’m not saying don’t actively fail- I’m constantly auditioning for things I know I won’t get and for parts I don’t want, but I’m doing it because I know at some point one of these people is going to remember my name and something that is actually right for me will be on the table. “Oh yeah, Dano was absolutely wrong for Stanley Kowalski, but we’re doing Noises Off next year, and that’s our guy right there.” That should be our goal as artists when we’re marketing ourselves- to make ourselves recognizable as options where *they* think of *us* when the time is right.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
I was “recently” (over the course of several years, and it’s recently come to fruition) involved in a process where my friend wrote and directed, and I acted in, a web short that got developed into a web series that got re-cut and restructured into a feature. It’s called People With Issues, and it’s streaming on Amazon now. That was pretty cool to be involved with- one of my friends randomly sent me a message one day like “I was browsing AintItCoolNews at work, and when I opened it up, you were on the front page- you got a really good review.” That was bizarre and awesome.
For live theater, I do a lot of work with Company Onstage in Meyerland- they’re a great theater with a really tremendous history. I’ve been working with them for like six years, and in that time their old theater, where they were since the 60s, got suddenly sold and demolished and they had like two weeks to get out and find a new place, then they found a temporary home in the activity hall of a church where they didn’t really even have a stage and everything was all drops and black curtains and imagination, then they made a deal with a different church- this new church had a basketball gym that they weren’t using, and they let Company Onstage come in and build risers and walls and paint the floor black and turn it into a theater. Every year it becomes more and more a “real” theater, and you forget sometimes that it isn’t- until you look up and there are basketball goals hanging from the ceiling.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.danocolon.com (currently under construction, Not Very Good Right Now)
- Twitter: dano_colon (I mostly use Twitter to tweet mean things at the President and tweet Conan O’Brien as if he had agreed to work on a project with me and I’m having trouble getting in touch with him- my hope is to someday go on his show and show him 8 years of tweets about this movie he “agreed to produce” and act like I’m mad at him for being so flaky)
Image Credit:
People With Issues photo (three men sitting in a drained pool): Director of Photography Brandon Torres
Accidental Death of an Anarchist photo (Dano in suit biting cop’s ass): Photograph by David Torres
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