David Flaten While studying shamanism is Peru, professor of theater arts David Flaten realized he had been there before. He says he experienced what philosopher Carl Jung would describe as the collective unconscious, and decided to move on to more efficient methods of healing. “How we remember from our history is still a mystery,” says Flaten, who had been studying Native American and Incan shamanism. “What you know is just a leaping off point for not just knowledge, but action.” Flaten is now a pranic healing instructor, practicing Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui’s chronic healing. A 40-year-old woman with no formal education named Vianna has served as his teacher for five years. “We’re all climbing the same mountain, but in different ways,” he says. “We find our own paths and teachers.” He says his focus on healing has been to understand how to help people. He likes to be able to help his students with their problems. “Healing opens your eyes to the possibility the world is a far more interesting place,” Flaten says. "Miracles are simply science we don’t understand yet.” Every Tuesday morning for several years, Flaten has lead a group in meditation at ULV because he believes the beings of body and spirit are not separate. He started leading the meditation because he realized “we carry so much clutter in our lives that we don’t need to. One way is to take a moment of silence to remember who you are.” Meditation is about spiritual growth and centralizing and is different from religious practices, Flaten says. “I honor whatever religious beliefs someone comes to me with. It doesn’t matter what the belief is; the blessing is all the same.” For Flaten, meditation is searching for the silence within silence. “Guided meditation gets you out of your yadda yadda yadda,” Flaten says. “It still your inner monologue. It kind of sets your day up in a wonderful way.” Flaten says a person is a human being, not a human doing. “You just have to be here, be present,” he says. And the perfect setting for that is the theater. “Theater is about everything,” Flaten says. “Theater uses tools of every discipline. Theater is a place that you can talk about everything you find both amusing and important. It’s about the human condition.” He wishes students and society in general could have a better tradition of theater than it does today. “We have no serious dialogue about art in our culture,” Flaten says. “A play production is a very small group of people who care about art.” Flaten performed in theater as a child and throughout high school. At St. Olaf College, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in architecture, Flaten helped design many productions and also played many roles in the theater. He was also active in the choir for two years. “Choir is to St. Olaf as football is to USC," Flaten says. A summer job in a company at Dartmouth after college gave Flaten a real feel of what theater was about and made him realize he wanted to pursue it further. After receiving his master’s degree at the University of Minnesota, Flaten applied for what he says is the elite theater fellowship, the McKnight fellowship working with Sir Tirone Guthrie. “Really big career actors came to work with Sir Tirone Guthrie,” Flaten says of the prestige of the leading English director from the ‘30s to ‘50s. “I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with one of the greatest directors of the 20th century. I learned so much from him.” Flaten recalls a moment when Guthrie didn’t understand a scene, even after working with it for some time. He says the example taught him, “If Guthrie can’t get it, who am I to beat myself up about the things I can’t get?” Because he had trained as an architect during his undergraduate work, Flaten worked for several years in professional design for The Design Trust, designing disco clubs in Florida, Australia and one in New York that never got built. Using what he knew from theater, lighting and special effects gave the clubs a theatrical feel. He has also directed several projects for the National Theater in Croatia and Slovenia. And has directed and designed for the Guilford School of Acting in England. “It was a real asset for me to have that kind of experience,” he says. Flaten came to ULV in 1982, telling himself he would stay as long as there was good theater. He says the department is constantly reinventing itself. “Anything you really want to know you teach, and by teaching it, your level of understanding increases,” Flaten says. He not only learns from his students, but with his students. Flaten never saves notes from the classes he has taught, and often chooses to work with plays he has never read. “I want to be doing what my students are doing – looking at the work with fresh eyes,” he says. RETURN TO FACULTY LISTmailto:flatend@ulv.edu?subject=HELLOHome.htmlshapeimage_1_link_1
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