Dana B. Westberg ’72 Teaching Different Learners by Joseph Sheppard, College Counselor
re-adapts film narratives so that he can speak them—just as Dana the coach re-conceives corporate communication to be addressed to other people rather than read off of “some PowerPoint slide show.” For non-professionals, that “ain’t as easy as it sounds,” he emphasizes, adding, “There’s never enough follow-up [to my lessons]!”
Dana B. Westberg began his lifelong career in a modest, lowbrow manner: playing a couple of character parts in musical comedies that Dave Smith ’65 and I wrote back in the early 1970s. The young Rhode Islander proved to be a versatile actor, song-anddance man, and comic—and, when rehearsals were going badly, the spark that kept the cast energized. He went on to Amherst and then to Yale Drama School. Along the way, he met his wife, French editor and publisher Caroline, at the Bread Loaf School of English, and eventually followed her to Paris. Les Westberg have lived there ever since.
While a “belting tenor” soloist with a concert choir that performs AfricanAmerican spirituals in Paris, over the past decade Dana’s mellow baritone has been immortalized for anyone abroad who has offered Disney’s “Magic English” DVDs to foreign children or anyone traveling who pays attention to Air France pre-flight security instructions: “If you listen to the knucklehead telling you how to fasten your seat belt and, you know, prepare for the worst, that’s me!” Dana says. “What a career, n’est-ce pas?”
S & S Productions’ musicalwriting efforts ended the year after Dana graduated, while he has built a varied and colorful career that “remains,” he adds in a phone conversation, “decidedly” modest and lowbrow. College students are probably Dana in 1971, standing on the McDonald Library terrace overlooking Gibbet Hill Expatriated and far from what Dana’s most “traditional” he’d planned, Dana found a pupils, in that they are taking niche acting in industrial shows, explaining ADSL technology his university courses on the French theatre for English-speakers, all over the world before “it became a reality.” He translates and but they learn the same way as “wannabe actors” and executive narrates documentary and industrial films as a voice actor and has types—by doing. Because their French language skills are usually directed theatre productions and acted on screen. limited, Dana teaches his charges the “non-verbal language” of the theatre: how to understand the Dana the actor-director some“gist” of a play or presentation, times morphs into teacher-coach. what else is going on, and what His students and clients aren’t else is at stake other than the just aspiring French actors or talking. Then they go to the theatre American students taking a year and watch professionals, learn to abroad. Many are corporate become professionals, or to stand executives and managers; he has up in front of a corporate crowd coached in the pharmaceutical, “and make magic happen.” investment, insurance, and cosmetic industries, among others. The corporate types, Dana explains, need to learn to “stand up and testify.” The same holds true in something as ubiquitous as the voiceover on a documentary or an industrial film. Dana the editor often
Dana has learned his craft the old-fashioned way—by doing it. And I’ll bet he’s still a pretty good song-and-dance man.
Dana 1972
Dana Westberg in 2012
ACADEMY JOURNAL / FALL 2012
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