Linda McDaniel

As both an educator and director, I'm a

     "social engineer for brave work"

I create conditions where vulnerability becomes possible.

My approach focuses on client consent, developing personal buy-in, and growth mindsets that frame storytelling and theater skills as tools for authenticity and meaning making. Helping children and teens develop the bravery to speak honestly and the skills to shape their own narratives in empowering ways. With 20+ years of experience teaching youth theater, I’ve seen firsthand how this focus provides complimentary therapeutic value alongside social and adaptable work skills gained through collaborative improv and theater.

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Some History: I've been a performance coach since graduating from The Stella Adler Academy of Acting right after high school. Teaching color guards, drum lines, and marching bands to take ownership of our attention, to say something worth our time, and to give themselves permission to care deeply about their art. Trusting that care, is worth our time. I worked as a founding member of a children's non-profit "edu-tainment" theater company, The Collaboratory. 

In my side jobs: I was always looking for opportunities to support my peers and staff, injecting a spark of play and care.  At Starbucks I created a viral Youtube video in service of the new LaBoulange launch (over 1 mil. views), set national record sales for the Veteran's Day 'Send coffee to the troops' drive, and facilitated a 'Grounds for your Garden' season that diverted 4,500 pounds of coffee grounds waste into free compost for customers, making a pound for pound trade in carbon footprint conservation. As a retail manager of a small box store within a franchise, I lead a sales team of 5 people to rival and outpace the company's number one national flagship location. 

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More recently: I have spent just under a decade at 'Acting Academy for Kids' training staff and building programs that produce young resilient artists who confront the pressure of competition with grounded self-kindness, and team focused outcomes. At UCI, I  produced and directed "Beyond Prison Walls," leading 50+ people from different communities of experience to stage 6 plays written by incarcerated artists. These productions hosted talkbacks with previously incarcerated participants of the writing program and working professionals from the judicial system. An audience member during the talkback called the production, "transcendent."  For the past five years I've worked in clinical settings, helping young people, experiencing neurodivergence, to find their own self advocacy through the art of, "Yes, and..." 

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I direct: new works, experimental works, new takes on classics, devised pieces, and therapeutic performance.

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I'm building toward: community-responsive-theater integrated with mental health services at all levels, with all ages -community spaces where its participants can be seen and applauded for it. 

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A Fierce Defense of Ethical Theater:

           

        Theater built civilization,

     not the other way around.

 

And we've been cutting it from schools across the country for 25 years now.      

I'm constantly asking certain questions; How much free will do we actually have? Is it getting harder to have will in an increasing algorithmic world? What do I owe to others? What do I owe to myself? How, and when, do those answers change? Do I want them to change? 

Here's my observation: People enter bad systems believing their willpower will withstand the system. Then the system grinds them all into the same meat. Those who are comfortably outside the bad system lament the 'moral' failings of the meat—not the grinder. ...And on it grinds. 

My own path from poverty to affluence overnight, before I was old enough to  participate in my own trajectory, taught me something about environment, viscerally. We can't control people's day-to-day choices, but we can change systems that are not helping them towards their best chance, to make their best decision. It's actually the only thing a society can do.

                You can't opt out of a

                system you can't see. 

Theater peers behind the fourth wall and tells the story of the meat. Making public, the abuse that survives in privacy. 

A view from an olive branch: Imagine hearing an entire audience gasp at a climactic moment and realizing ...'I've done the same thing'—watching your own story unfold but with the anonymity of an audience. There is a truth to the crowd's reaction,

          the alive-ness of live theater.

 Theater, is both a powerful mirror and transformative hammer that smashes the anonymity of bad systems...

                        when it is at it's finest.

     

      I take issue with people adding the word "theater" to the end of things where it does not belong like:

                   'political theater.'

      We, the people, did not vote for a                                    show.

And, if an 'audience' faces real life consequences, than they are not an audience, they are the target of the con-person. Who, has always learned from theater, but their purpose is to take it outside the consent of theater where the people do not know they are an audience, and if they don't know?       ...then it's just lying

                                    ...with more steps.   

       The kids are desperate to learn,

            "how to tell the difference"

       between fiction and non-fiction.  

 

Theater was my first effective mental health intervention. Theater can allow us to see how we participate in these systems so we can change our participation.  

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It's a dialogue.

A declining art.

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What could be more human than that, at the forefront of a new AI world order -racing forward without a public dialogue.

 

We are going to need places to scream safely, and cry bravely, within the container of a performance. For the  consenting audience to consider and gain  nourishment from. Places to dream, design, and rehearse better responses to big questions. Questions we cannot answer on our own need places to host the dialogue.  A place dedicated to making the invisible, visible, by the people in the room, for the people in the room, and their people who come to witness and hold space. Long-live the alive-ness of theater. Long-live civilization.