Thomas Eldon Anderson works on a podcast out in the elements in Sedona, Arizona, during a recent creative retreat there. courtesy Thomas Eldon Anderson.
Thomas Eldon Anderson perfects his craft and helps empower other creatives, too
Editor’s note: This article has been updated since original publication to clarify that Anderson has been involved in more than 70 theatrical productions, not theatrical productions and films.
The cell reception in Sedona is awful. Thomas Eldon Anderson has to drive 25 minutes into the nearest town to catch a signal—his expressive, almost musical voice crackling over the line as he describes the creative retreat that’s brought him out to the desert.
The Baton Rouge-based actor is there with about 60 creatives, from writers to sculptors to actors like him. At 59, Anderson is deep into a storied career spanning acting, vocal work, nonprofit leadership and crisis management, but he’s always working to improve and evolve creatively.
“It’s innately human to want to explore and understand and discover things … and then you decide, how do you best want to communicate what you discovered in the world? Do you want to paint, or do you want to act, or do you want to make films?” Anderson says. “[All] creatives want to find an impactful way to communicate. So that’s at the core of the process of always pushing boundaries.”
For him, that mode is theater, in which he earned a master’s degree from Southern Methodist University in the 1980s. He first landed in Baton Rouge from New York City as a crisis management specialist in 2002 and quickly put down roots in the city, though he travels frequently.
He’s taught workshops and classes around the country, performed in more than 70 theatrical productions and even recently provided dialect coaching for Nicole Kidman on the set of The Beguiled. He’s a classically trained character actor with an unforgettable presence—as local audiences saw recently in his turn in Stupid F***ing Bird and The Seagull at Swine Palace—and he’s deeply, deeply in love with the theater.
When asked to describe what draws him to it, Anderson brings it all back to communication again.
“The words that are being spoken are human words and language and stories that we know, but an artist has gone through and just filled and edited down to pure essences of ideas, so it’s a very rich experience of language and emotion,” he says. “And you can sit there in the dark and breathe with the actors and have it really affect you.”
Communication—it’s the key to theater for Anderson, but it’s also the key to his ongoing creative growth, as he’s found his niche as a podcaster and audiobook narrator for Audible.com. It’s not easy to take that power and engagement from a physical stage performance and capture it on audio, but Anderson says it’s a “new muscle memory.”
“You have this thought process to say, ‘I know what this word means, but what does the word feel, and how does it become a different, more powerful thing if you imbue it all of its natural proclivities, all of its vowels, all of its consonants?’” he says.
With local photographer Sean Richardson, Anderson co-hosts the “ArtUp Bootcamp” podcast—a series aimed at connecting creatives in Baton Rouge with the entrepreneurial knowledge and resources to make a career out of their craft. He’s launching two more podcasts this fall: “The Crisis of Imagination,” which explores the need for creative approaches in every avenue of life, and “Does This Podcast Make Me Look Fat?” centering on the self-consciousness and self-doubt of being a creative.
“This is my tribe. These are the people who I love and cherish, these creative human beings,” Anderson says of his peers, adding that he knows how lonely life as a creative can be without finding that tribe. “I have a four-decade-long experience of how I’ve lived my creative life. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to live their creative life, but I think if they can learn from what worked for me and what didn’t work for me, that’s sort of the core of mentoring—the willingness to, warts and all, share the journey.”
For now, as Anderson returns to his Sedona retreat, that journey is all about returning to the humility and wonder of nature as the universal inspiration of creativity. Before returning to Baton Rouge, he’ll spend the rest of the summer traveling America’s national parks with his wife, recording conversations with creatives, scientists and adventurers along the way for another podcast of his, “This Creative Earth.”
Just a microphone, words and a lot of imagination.
Listen in
Find Anderson’s podcasts on iTunes:
• ArtUp Bootcamp
• The Crisis of Imagination
• Does This Podcast Make Me Look Fat?
• This Creative Earth
This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.
