Dana B. Westberg ’72 Teaching Different Learners

Dana B. Westberg

’72 Teaching Different Learners

by Joseph Sheppard, College Counselor

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.

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. Expatriated and far from what he ’d planned, Dana found a niche acting in industrial shows, explaining ADSL technology all over the world before “it became a reality. ” He translates and narrates documentary and industrial films as a voice actor and has directed theatre productions and acted on screen.

Dana the actor-director sometimes morphs into teacher-coach. His students and clients aren ’ t just aspiring French actors or American students taking a year abroad. Many are corporate executives and managers; he has coached in the pharmaceutical, 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 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]!”

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

Dana in 1971, standing on the McDonald Library terrace overlooking Gibbet Hill career, n

’ est-ce pas?” College students are probably Dana ’ s most “ traditional” pupils, in that they are taking his university courses on the French theatre for English-speakers, but they learn the same way as “ wannabe actors ” and executive types—by doing. Because their French language skills are usually limited, Dana teaches his charges the “ non-verbal language ” of the

theatre: how to understand the “ gist ” of a play or presentation, what else is going on, and what else is at stake other than the talking. Then they go to the theatre and watch professionals, learn to become professionals, or to stand up in front of a corporate crowd “ and make magic happen. ”

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