Local Artist Highlight: Eirann Betka-Pope

Eirann Betka-Pope (they/them) thinks fast and seems to have a knack for making unexpected connections. When I learned that Eirann’s childhood centered around competing with three brothers to see who could make their mom laugh the hardest, Eirann’s talent for coming up with new, creative productions made a lot of sense. We sat down over coffee and covered a wide range of topics…from growing up in Ludington to practicing accessible theater arts in Grand Rapids to local history and being a queer person in West Michigan.

So, are you from West Michigan? Yep, I'm from Ludington. Best state park in Michigan. Well…maybe in the lower peninsula, I'll say that. There weren’t a lot of resources and options. We didn't even have a theater department or class. We had an afterschool extracurricular situation. But I had a wonderful theater director named Chris Plummer, and she inspired this creativity in me. I had always been theatrical, putting on shows. She focused that energy onto stage and gave me the tools I needed to move forward in theater, to use that in life both as a passion and as a career. My mom was also a musical director—there was always music in my house, and she's very theatrical as well. So, I grew up with strong female influences that led me to know that, even if I stayed Ludington, there was something there for me. But there wasn't much for me as an outwardly queer, nonbinary person in my hometown. 

Here in Grand Rapids, we’re still in West Michigan. We build our bubble of chosen family, and sometimes that bubble gets so beautiful and protective that I forget what exists outside…the homophobia and the transphobia that exist outside of my bubble. I feel really privileged to have my community here. I'm having the time of my life. Our little underground queer artist community is thriving, and we're all connected. When I say queer, I really mean not just sexual preference or gender. I mean like ‘out there.’ Even if you don't identify a certain way, you can still identify with this community that exists. So, it feels like I can thrive here. Sometimes it's just survival, but a lot of times it feels like thriving.

I’m trying to make art for the group of people, too, who can’t afford to go see a lot of the things in Grand Rapids…Broadway Grand Rapids, opera and plays. I can’t afford it. If I had a budget for all of that, it would just be so much money. I would love to see everything, but we just can't. So, we try to make more accessible art as well. And I know a lot of these groups and theaters are also doing that. There're a lot of “pay what you want” nights, a lot of programs that you can get on board with. But even walking into the spaces can be intimidating, walking into big theaters—and you don't know how to dress or act, what to do or where, when to stand up or sit down, or ‘can I clap here and hoot and holler.’ We try to break all those barriers when we do our productions, and we try to get intimate with the audience. Super inclusive. We embrace the fact that we are all here to experience something together—feel how you want to feel and respond how you need to respond, as long as you're not hurting the environment. That's something I really appreciate about the more alternative performance pieces. It's just not just our production company…I'm talking about across the board.

Do you have an early memory of when you first experienced performance or experienced the core of what drives your interest in this whole thing? A moment when you recognized something in yourself. That's a great question. Yeah, my brothers and I are all queer. Three gay men and myself. We grew up in a theatrical home…the more theatrical you were, the funnier you were, the more attention you would get. Not that my mom was holding back love or anything like that. But the harder you could make mom laugh, the more you felt that precious feeling. So, we would all just try to riff off each other and still do. It was like ‘make mom laugh the hardest’ was kind of an unspoken goal in our family. And so that's really where it first started…just competition with my brothers.

I remember one of my brothers was playing the part of Theo in the musical Pippin. It's this small boy in Pippin at the very end. Theo and Pippin hold hands, and Pippin is singing this song. Theo is in the spotlight. My brother was home sick that day, and because my mom was a musical director, I was being dragged along to every rehearsal. Anyway, they put me up there in that spotlight. I just remember the song ended, and they literally had to like come and move me from the stage. They were like ‘Eirann, it’s over.’ And I was like ‘No. It’s not. It just started.’ And it was a rehearsal. There wasn't even an audience. I mean, the audience was just all the other actors and the director Chris Plummer. I just remember feeling so at home, so in my element.

From then on it was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do when I grow up, but I really hope it's not at a desk. I really hope it's on a stage, or if it's not a stage, I'll make a stage. So, we've been making stages since.

How do you come up with your work? Do you work out of a studio? My art is performance art and pop-up. I used to have an artist workspace on Division through Dwelling Place. That was from 2014 to 2018, I think. Since then, it has just kind of been popping up wherever works for us... I've always been first and foremost a theater arts fan, whether it's producing, directing, active, writing. I love the theater art of storytelling. A friend and I founded The Fuse Box. We collaborated together as roommates at first, and when he moved out, I had the space to myself. I built a makeshift stage. We would put on house shows of local musicians, but mostly it was ragtag productions. It was experimental. We did everything in that studio space—all the preparation, the costumes, the cardboard props and sets. I built wooden lofts that I slept on but also used for mounting makeshift spotlights. It was truly a creative space. I fed myself by joining a community garden—that’s how we made our money stretch. Everything else was just whatever we found around the dumpsters. Whatever we found around Division Street that looked like it could be reused, we reused it.

That studio was my first space I had that felt like it was mine—where I could curate it and bring community around it. I was able to make rent for a while by doing that. Eventually though, I had to relinquish that space and move on. But, I never lost that love of scrapping together what I can for theater. I’ve also taught at the Grand Rapids Civic Theater for going on 13 years. I was teaching there the whole time I was producing through The Fuse Box, so that’s also why the whole thing worked doing those pieces on the side.

What’s it like teaching at the Grand Rapids Civic Theatre? Is it mostly kids, adults, who and what are you teaching? Finding this polished, beautiful theater that seats 750 people, being able to teach there and work there, is super humbling and inspiring. And with The Fuse Box, we were trying to do art on the opposite end of the spectrum at the same time, too. So, at GRCT, it’s adults, children, everything from sketch-writing and improv comedy to 10-minute playwriting and core acting. I don't do song and dance. I mean...I can sing and I can dance. I just don’t teach that—it’s not my forté and I have to draw the line somewhere.

Teaching really helps pay the bills as a gig-working artist, and it has been a solid gig for close to 13 years. It has allowed me to open up different doors. When the pandemic happened in 2020, all of the theaters shut down for a while, and all of our other gigs shut down. That’s when my wife and I started our company, Betka-Pope Productions.

And you were called to do something yesterday, right? Yes, yes, I teach improv at different colleges—there are four of us who come and do different workshops all over. It’s great that we get so much work, but sometimes it’s also exhausting. Anyway, one of them last minute couldn’t do a workshop, so I was like “I’m in. I’m on it.” It’s Calvin College, Aquinas College. We went to Byron Center High School and Community Center. I do corporate events—I went to Amway this summer and worked with their pride inclusion network. I had no idea they had an LGBTQ+ group that exists at Amway. So, anywhere I can kind of spread joy with a little bit of improv. I really enjoy doing that.

What’s your elevator speech to explain what Betka-Pope Productions does? Yeah…it’s all over the place. Like, it’s more of a wonk-a-vator speech, if that makes sense. At the core, it's my wife and I providing opportunities for local artists, providing an outlet for ourselves, and giving back to this community that we love so much. That's through creating opportunities that are paid for different types of artists, mostly performing artists. In Grand Rapids, we are notorious for our wonderful and strong community theaters. And we do need community theater for people to get their foot in the door. But there are not a lot of paid opportunities for actors. There are paid opportunities for directing teams and production and musicians, but actors just don't get paid very often in Grand Rapids. We pay our actors, and we try to pay everybody that's involved with the production. We do that through sponsorships, but it's all community-based sponsorships. So, one aspect of our company is production-based.

The next aspect of our company is based in history and tours. We run GR Tours—we have a pride tour, a crime tour, and a haunted tour of Grand Rapids. During the pandemic, when everything kind of opened up with a refreshment area, I wrote a historic tour of crime in Grand Rapids and walked people around with drink stops. So, I started that in 2020 and just continued on. We'll do private tours or tours for Downtown Grand Rapids, Inc., their Downtown Ambassadors. We did a tour for people who work at Celebration Cinema. People just want to walk around Ground Rapids to learn about it, so we do that.

So, big productions, tours, and then we do pop-up events, like Trivia Night at House Rules Lounge on the first and third Mondays of the month. We do a thing called Adult Spelling Bee where we have adults have a drink of mead, and then spell words, and then have a little bit more mead and a little bit more words…until the end of the night when everybody is feeling buzzy as a bee. And we have our ultimate winner. We do pop-up markets, the Halloween bash at the Fulton Street Market. We're also doing a Pride Market there this year. So, it’s really just finding gaps in Grand Rapids or things that we might find fun and building them. And people come! Which is really cool.

Sometimes when you’re talking to an artist who isn’t just one discipline, the topics can go all over the place. It feels that way, sometimes for me too, in the projects. I start with an idea, and then you see all the different ways that could go and all the different people that could be involved, and the route is never one straight path. It's very much like a root system—I've grown to feel really comfortable in that chaos. It’s almost predictable chaos, making art in this kind of way. We have a lot of really fun, cool stuff coming up.

What are you planning with Avenue for the Arts? I'm so excited. This is the brainchild baby of Zachary Trebellas. It's called Rapid Art Movement. He did it a couple of years ago. It involves taking over one of the city buses—it's a DASH bus this time around—for a fully immersive one-hour tour of Grand Rapids arts and the north loop of town. Passengers will get on at Rosa Parks Circle. The bus, from the outside to the inside, is wrapped in art pieces, hanging, sitting, vinyl, all over, projection, mapping. So, the whole bus is experience. We go through the four phases of winter. It starts with the first snowfall, light and breezy. There’s the freeze, the hibernation. We get into the storm. There’s that winter feeling that everybody gets that’s hard to shake sometimes. And then there's the melt—a little bit of hope at the end of winter.

Along the way at certain stops, a performance artist will get on and do a three- to five-minute performance piece. We have a tap dancer, a classical guitar player, somebody who does chalk arts…there’s the spoken word, music, a little bit of a drag, of course. The passengers are immersed in this art, they don't have to do anything. It's free—it's part of The World of Winter. We have a grant from DGRI to help make it happen. Zachary is handling the visual arts end, and I'm on the storytelling and performance end.

That's January 24th and 25th. Each night the bus will loop three times, so there's six chances to catch these performances and as many seats as the bus can handle.

What’s your ultimate vision—what would be so awesome if it happened? Yeah…that changes. Ask me in a year, and it will be as completely different. I love that about my artistic brain. Sometimes it trips me up, but I also really appreciate that things change, and it adapts to change. I like that.

So right now, in Grand Rapids, I would love to see two things happen. My own personal selfish dream…I think it would be fun to have a dinner theater that's super kitschy. We’d either do shows that exist, musicals that exist that we buy the rights for, or we give a chance to local writers and musicians, and people get paid for what they do. They don't have to move to Chicago, New York, or LA to have a career. This is a city that can sustain the arts. We might as well move into performance arts as well, right? So, that would be really fun to do.

Then’s there the more noble path. I would love to see a nonprofit that exists in three different parts. The first is that it buys up tickets for all the theaters, even maybe Broadway Grand Rapids. Then, you can buy a punch card for a hundred bucks or something and then you can go see one performance of everything. Maybe there's blackout dates, whatever. You go see one performance of everything for $100, or whatever price point makes sense, so that it's accessible for everyone.

Then, the second piece would be to help community actors who are giving up their serving jobs or whatever kind of work, or doubling down on work and doing work while they're learning their parts. Can we find a way to subsidize that when the theaters can’t pay them? Ticket prices don’t cover paying everybody, I understand. And if we can have this third party that subsidizes it with personal grants. Like, you write a grant proposal that says ‘I’m going to be working on this show at Circle Theater, it's going to be rehearsing here and performing here. Here's how many hours that I will have to contribute.’ And then you get a check for that amount of time. That would be the second part.

The third part would be to act as a resource for Grand Rapids theaters to celebrate them. All of the theaters used to come together for a thing called The Grand Awards. For 20 to 30 years there were these awards, and honestly they were a bit self-congratulatory for the theater community. It's like you’re patting each other on the back, and then patting yourself on the back, and then you realize ‘Oh, that was my own back! Sorry!’ So, self-congratulatory…yes. In a way, it did also cause hurt feelings because there was a ‘best’ acting or ‘best’ scenic design, but there's only one designer, and there's 80 actors. So, that felt unfair. Egos got bruised, and feelings got hurt. The whole thing kind of fizzled out, but the core—the crux of it—was a scholarship for people to go to school here in Grand Rapids colleges for theater arts or tech arts. The one goal was to keep young people here and keep theater arts alive. That scholarship does still exist—it’s called the ‘Combined Theatre Scholarship’—but it’s sort of back of mind now. It used to be forefront in everyone’s mind because of The Grand Awards.

So, that’s the third part of the dream—a nonprofit bringing back some sort of community thought space…where there's no ‘turf,’ no political maneuvering. It’s very utopian feeling, but I think it could exist…the real nonprofit that would make the most change in theater. Instead of building another theater company, why don't we build up things that exist? Instead of trying to learn all you can so that you're ‘good enough’ for Chicago or New York or London or wherever, have a way to stay here. London and New York need people too, right, and that’s great. But Grand Rapids needs artists who are feeling valued, and I don't think performance artists here feel that right now. I don't feel it—I have to make a lot of my own opportunities, and it’s exhausting.

Have you ever thought about leaving Grand Rapids and going somewhere else? Yeah, for me and my wife, it always been in our dream plan to live somewhere internationally.

So, if there was a move, it would not be to another U.S. city. It would be something totally different. We're both really ingrained in what we’re doing right now. We'll see what happens, starting in February. With the climate that we're in, and how fast that move might need to take place, unfortunately…It’s a scary reality. We were pretty paralyzed when the results came in, and we were very scared. Then, we understood the assignment…we have to keep doing the work for our own sanity and our own selves, but there are also a lot of other people depending on that work. So, we married 12 people in a big group wedding for six couples at the Pyramid Scheme. It was called Queerly Beloved, and it was beautiful. This was just last month, and it was really special to be able to give back and do something. But, I also I feel like we're just throwing sh*t together until we know what to do next, you know? Yeah. But I feel lucky to have art too, as a life-saving device that we’re floating on.

It's fun, you know, to live and work in Grand Rapids. I think we've made it our own city in our own way. And I say that for myself and my wife, because we work on this company together in that way. Especially when I did the research for these tours…the crime tour started as ‘what are the stories here in Grand Rapids?’ A lot of them have been written about, and written about to an extensive degree. And then a lot of them haven't been talked about, and those are usually about a marginalized group of people who really worked to make Grand Rapids what it is today. They just didn't get the statue, right? They didn't get the proclamation from the mayor, because they didn't quite fit in with what that type of person should look like or act like.

There are some really, really incredible stories. Georgie Young, who owned two blocks of land, was a madam…a lady pimp. She had her ‘scarlet sisters,’ and she paid them big time. She made downtown what it was. And then there's Dr. Emmet Bolden, the black dentist who went all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court because Keith’s Theater on Lyon Street wouldn't let him in to see a show because he was black. They desegregated every Michigan theater in the 1920s because of that. Yet, we don't know anything about him. There was a little plaque that used to exist by the AT&T downtown, and now it's gone. That sometimes almost physically hurts me as a passionate storyteller/historian when I walk by. I see so many accolades handed out to people…and not to the wrong people or anything…I don’t mean that…these people have done a lot for our city and continue to do so. But there are so many others who are worth learning about and visiting and exploring. Grand Rapids has an insanely deep, cool, weird, funny, and unfortunate history that I get excited about.

It's the people with the pen…the ones at the end who tell their stories, but really we have a long history. It’s kind of scary how history can just get completely lost. Especially queer history, to be honest. Back then, there were people who were out, and you just didn't see them all the time. They had their own spaces. Grand Rapids was no exception.

I went to the Grand Rapids Library archives when they finally opened during the pandemic—the library did an amazing job of digitizing them. I was able to find a lot about GR history. I called ahead and asked them, ‘Can you grab me all the LGBTQ+ files that you can? I'm coming in, on this day.’ So, I get up to the archives, and there are rows and rows of filing cabinets labeled ‘Furniture City’ and ‘Beer City’ and all of the huge things. Then, they brought me a single manila envelope. I open it up and inside are two newspaper clippings—one from the first Pride celebration and one from another Pride celebration in the 1990s, and that was it. It was very sad. That was our LGBTQ+ file in the archives in the library. I was like, ‘That is not true. I know that's not it.’ I know for a fact they're now actively working on bulking that up with all of these incredible stories. But at this point, it's a lot of hearsay. When I say ‘history,’ I mean the 1970s. It's not even very far back. It’s oral histories and what people remember. I go back to buildings to see what exists there now…to see what the transition was like. It’s just such an interesting, strong community, and sometimes very lost community. You know…and I love that.

Eirann has given me nearly a full hour, and I feel like I’ve gotten to know them a bit. I’m grateful they have no immediate plan to leave Grand Rapids—Betka-Pope Productions’ work to build the theater community here makes our unfolding Grand Rapids history that much more fun. There will be more and more material for the LGBTQ+ manila folder(s) in the library as time goes by.