Meet Michael Saenz

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michael Saenz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michael below.

Hi Michael, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

So much of my personality, both inherent and learned, comes from my mother. Olivia Saenz was an amazing person born to the wrong circumstances and in the wrong time. She was a strong, intelligent and opinionated woman in a time when none of those qualities were valued in women. She gave very little credence to what other people thought of her and taught me to do the same, especially if people were trying to tear me down. In my youth I struggled a lot with bullies and suspicion about the way I was. As an effeminate little boy who loved theater and the arts over anything athletic, I faced a lot of hardship. My mother taught me not to consider others’ opinions when I was deciding who I was and what I wanted to do, and for better or worse she had little time or consideration for crying or complaining. While I had to learn a lot about patience and empathy as I grew older, I learned very well how to be tough.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

Currently I am primarily a theater educator. I spend a great deal of my time teaching high school theater and producing and directing for the after school drama program. This has been the main focus of most of my adult life, with my pursuits as a professional actor, director and playwright taking a back seat. I am working now on reversing that split. I think the most exciting thing about being a teacher and having been a teacher is how much I’ve learned about myself as an artist and as a person while I’ve been teaching others about my craft. I’ve learned a lot about patience, courage, artistic risk, work ethic, relaxation, and what it means to be a theater artist. I see the world every day and anew through my students’ eyes, and they have helped me to change with the world, to stay curious, energetic, creative and bold. I do my best to embody and live the values I teach them, and when I’m working on my own projects I hear my own voice as I have told my students to be brave, to take artistic risks, to work hard, to make interesting choices and to live the life that I want to live, not the life that others tell me I should. To this end I am finally working to teach less and do more. I am endeavoring to pursue more professional work as an actor, director and playwright and less time on teaching. The unfortunate thing about teaching is that when you’re a teacher people don’t take you seriously as a professional artist. There is indeed the misperception that as a teacher if I were really any good at professional theater I’d be doing that instead. But I am good at it, and so I am working on doing it more.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Oddly, I think one of the most important skills I learned at a young age came from the military. I went to an all-boys, Catholic, military high school where ROTC was mandatory for the first two years. I thrived on the discipline and made it a part of who I was. This approach to life has made me a MUCH better artist. As a director I have always preferred hard work in my actors over raw talent with no discipline, and I try to approach my professional work with a strong foundation of discipline. I also believe strongly that creativity can be taught, or maybe more accurately, can be coaxed to the surface. I believe that a great deal of what makes an individual creative is being given the permission (by self and others) to be creative. And this permission leads to confidence and confidence leads to taking risks and making interesting choices. So I suppose the skill/quality/knowledge is less creativity and more confidence and belief in oneself. The third quality/skill/area of knowledge is diversity or breadth of knowledge…intellectual curiosity. So much of what I’ve learned has come from my own desire to learn about things and a curiosity about more than just one thing.

So if I have any advice to give about these things, I suppose it might be this:

1) Discipline and art go hand in hand, and whatever talent you have can always grow and expand through study, hard work and a willingness learn and keep learning all your life.
2) If you lack confidence (or even if you don’t), get some therapy. If you lack confidence, explore why, get to the root of it and deal with those causes that are blocking you from believing in yourself. I’m a huge believer in therapy, but not just any therapy…therapy with purpose. Make a goal in your therapy and actively work toward it.
3) Read. Take classes. Google. Learn other art forms. Seek diversity within your own art form. As a teacher one of the greatest things that ever happened to me was being obliged to learn acting, playwriting, theater history, technical theater, directing, producing, puppetry, pantomime, dance, voice, opera, clowning and so much more. And everything I have learned, from fan dancing to finance, informs what I do as an artist.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

Theater is a collaborative art form, so absolutely am I always looking for people with whom to collaborate. I would like to collaborate with people who share the following beliefs or values:

1) That theater belongs to everyone, should be accessible to everyone, created by and for everyone

2) That theater is more than entertainment, that it is about humanity…what it means to be human and what separates us from all the other living creatures on this planet

3) That life is about struggle, and it is through the struggle that we are revealed for who we really are

Anyone wanting to contact me can take a look at my and my husband’s production company at vitalsaenz.com and then contact me at [email protected]

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vitalsaenz.com

Image Credits

Headshot: Tim Palin
Additional Photos 1 and 2: Jason Grow
Madhouse Poster: Tim Palin
Remaining pics: Michael Lopez