Five Acts with Leta Harris Neustaedter - Part 1

photo credit: Mika Belle

Welcome to the "Five Acts with..." series, featuring artists, performers, musicians, and more from around the Treasure Valley. In this series, Arts Boise presented them with five questions (or, in this case, Acts) and below, the answers, in their own words.

Leta Harris Neustaedter has been performing in the Treasure Valley for decades as a musician and actor. She is a community builder, clinical social worker, arts educator and sole proprietor of Metamorphosis Performing Arts Studio LLC where she has been weaving life skills into voice and acting lessons since 2010. She has taught thousands of kids through her work with the YMCA, TRICA and her own studio. Leta is a tireless advocate for racial justice and human rights, a founding member of the Idaho Antiracism Coalition for Arts & Culture Organizations, the host of The Lovely Afro podcast celebrating and elevating the melanated, and a Certified Change Leader through Idaho Commission of the Arts. Leta has been a keynote speaker on the topic of Racial Trauma, allyship, and personal transformation. She has completed her third draft of an autobiographical musical about growing up Black in Boise, for which she received the prestigious New Works Grant from the National Alliance for Music Theater. She performs jazz & soul at local venues, sings with the Boise Philharmonic Master Chorale and has filmed supporting roles for two SAG feature films in SLC this year.

ACT I: What is your background in the arts?

Music was my first love. I grew up in a house filled with music. My mom was singing constantly and she modeled a deep music appreciation. I started piano lessons at age 5 and joined choir as soon as it was an option in school. By the time I was 14, I was in a choir and also playing in my own band. Forty years later I am still in a choir and playing in my own band.

My first musical was the 1980s 6th grade staple, The Electric Sunshine Man, and my first play was in 9th grade where I played a dramatic French maid with a horrible accent. But acting didn’t grab me the way music did. It took me another decade to warm up to acting. I remember in undergrad, doing HMU for Into The Woods, I was walking through the theater and I saw a class rolling and crawling and leaping around the room pretending to be animals. You know when you see a photo of people walking on a glass bridge a million feet above the ground precariously hovering over a ravine of death and danger? That is the sensation I felt seeing my friends howling and slithering in front of each other. I watched in awe, or was it horror? They moved as if this was normal, as if potentially making a fool of yourself wasn’t the absolute most terrifying thing in the world. I shuddered and continued on my way.

See, I was a performer, I would sing and play my heart out. But I did not take risks. What I delivered to audiences was rehearsed and controlled. My first experience ad-libbing in a performance happened by accident. I had entered on the wrong note and did a little musical zig zag to get back to the right note. It sounded great and it was exhilarating, a rush I had never felt before. And the audience responded. A seed was planted. Four years later during my first real musical, Little Shop Of Horrors, the music director casually told me to ad lib an entire gospel section of a song. I casually responded, “Sure,” as if I was not suddenly on that glass bridge overlooking the ravine of death and danger. I knew I could back out and say, “I’ll rehearse something and we can do it tomorrow,” and it probably would have been fine with him. But I knew it was a crossroads moment – so I went for it. And it was fine. I sounded good. It wasn’t like out of a movie where I blew everyone away and rehearsal came to a screeching halt while everyone showered me with praise. I sang the thing, got some appreciative smiles and nods and we carried on. And that was probably the best outcome. It normalized the vulnerability of taking a creative risk and put it into perspective. Even though I felt like I was standing on the edge of a glass bridge overlooking the Ravine of Danger and Death, to everyone else I was just standing in the rehearsal room singing a song.

Two years later I would find myself on stage at the Idaho Center ad-libbing in front of 8,000 people when my improv techno band stumbled onto an opportunity to open for Boys II Men. And as I learned to embrace the vulnerability of taking creative risks in front of people, the world of acting went from terrifying to exhilarating. So for the past 20 years I’ve been doing film, tv, theater, public speaking as well as music, and I often say, “Vulnerability is my superpower.”

One of the things I’m most proud of is my kids show that ran on Public Access TV for three seasons. It was called Chill Skillz and it was inspired by The Electric Company, Sesame Street and Bill Nye The Science Guy. It was a 30-minute educational sketch comedy, using fun characters to demonstrate social skills. I wrote the scripts, directed it, and edited the show each week. It was set up as a weekly acting class that kids would sign up for and it was a world where my mental health and performing arts selves could merge and flourish. I acted in it with the kids and the whirlwind of putting a show together every week was a master class in releasing inhibitions. Chill Skillz is something I wish I could have done more with if I’d had more resources. But it was an amazing learning experience for writing, directing and editing.

ACT II: Why do you love theater (or performing arts)? What discourages you about theater?

When it is done well, acting has the ability to build our capacity for empathy, which is the holy grail of humanity. Whether it is film, tv or theater, we become better people when we learn how to embody another perspective, and evaluate our choices from within the parameters of someone else’s values and circumstances. Since I am a therapist as well as a performing artist, I get giddy about opportunities to expand my empathy and broaden my toolbelt for self expression, and also to guide others in that process as a director and instructor. Storytelling is so important. As a species we are driven by curiosity and we thrive on connection. We want to know how other people live, to see the different ways people navigate their lives. But we also want to feel like our ways are understood and that at least a couple other people out there see things the way we do. Acting and music are my ways to be part of that storytelling fabric.

One thing that discourages me about the performing arts in the Treasure Valley is the lack of diversity among the decision makers. The people running the organizations, the board members, the donors, they all determine the programing, so when you’re living in a White-dominated community, that’s who determines whose stories get to be told. And often the efforts toward diversity are performative, like including a Person Of Color in the cast, but wanting them to fit within the ideals and preferences of Whiteness. For example, I was cast in a corporate video but they asked me to straighten my hair so it would look more professional (Black textured hair has historically been a litmus for implicit racism when it is inherently deemed as less “professional”). Or when I read for a role that had no specifications about race and they asked me if I could “not sound so Black,” because as is often the case with local films, the stories were written by predominantly White males, and Black women weren’t part of their world. So if you bring Blackness to a character they say, “That’s not how I imagined her.” And they don’t question why that is, or whether that is a good thing. Or when I cast a supporting role after the director told me that I was the best person for the lead but he didn’t want an interracial couple. Or the time I did a commercial with a local production company and they warned me that they would not cast me for any new commercials while the current commercial was airing because the clients did not want the actors in their commercial showing up in other commercials. I pointed out that my co-star (a White woman) was in a different commercial that was currently airing, and a different colleague of mine (a White male) was in two commercials that were both airing simultaneously. They shrugged it off and said that since I was Black it was more noticeable.

It can be easy to write these things off because in isolation they might not seem like a big deal. But when I experience these types of incidents repeatedly over the course of several decades they wear me down and limit what feels possible for me here. There are some groups in the Treasure Valley embracing diverse storytelling and casting, and kudos to them. It is really exciting to see some of the work being produced. But as a performing artist hungry to do stories about my ancestry and Black identity, I am left with relatively few choices unless I create it all myself, and that is a heavy lift. It makes moving to a larger city appealing because I want to spend more time creating collaboratively and less time struggling to pull things together on my own. But I have deep roots here and many people in the community have lifted me up over the years. So for now, that’s what keeps me here.

ACT III: Who/what inspires Leta Harris Neustaedter?

Inspiration is a juicy, broad concept. I can be inspired in the sense of something giving me a boost of energy or motivation which I will then apply to whatever has my attention in that moment. And I can be inspired in a more linear sense where one thing gives me clear motivation to do a particular thing. So I try to stay in a curious mindset with a childlike ability to be easily delighted and amused. And I am the queen of reading into things, so random tableaus like a group of birds on a powerline with one bird separated from the others, that will inspire a whole internal discussion about isolation and solitude, is this the bird’s choice? Does the bird care? Is the bird protecting itself, or are the others protecting themselves? Is this a non issue that I am reading into? Let’s write a song about being alone, or maybe I can learn animation or stop motion and create a little short story…. This is my internal state on any given day.

Also, I was extremely inspired by Ava DuVernay’s keynote speech for the LA Film Festival in 2013. She talked about the importance of not getting energetically and emotionally stuck in a state of neediness, thinking you can’t do the things you want to do until you acquire a certain resource, or piece of equipment, or connection with a specific person etc. She called it a stinky coat of desperation and talked about how it is repelling. Whereas the energy of creating, of doing what you can with what you have is an attractant and will often bring those things you were hoping for into your world. I have been guilty of wallowing in neediness and being focused on why I can’t do the things I want because I need _____. Her talk has helped me toss off the stinky coat and roll my sleeves up. Although I have to keep this in balance because I tend to swing too far the opposite way and fall into a trap that is common for many people, but especially prevalent in Black women, where we think we have to do everything ourselves because we don’t have the support we need. I have created things I am really proud of with very little, but I have also seen how projects can be elevated with additional resources. I think the key is to keep creating SOMETHING while I figure it out, so my energy does not become stagnant waiting for the answers to emerge. Leap and net will appear.

Be sure to check back in to Arts Boise and read part two of the interview with Leta. Thanks for reading and supporting the arts in the Treasure Valley!