Dell’Arte International, a world-renowned theater company and school nestled in the heart of Blue Lake, faces closure. | Photos by Andrew Goff, unless otherwise stated.

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Three years after Dell’Arte International was pushed to the brink of closure, a group of alumni-turned-board members and dedicated peformers are working to get the world-renowned theater company back on its feet. 

The theater just wrapped up its 36th annual Baduwa’t Festival, a three-month performing arts festival at Dell’Arte’s home in the heart of Blue Lake featuring alumni and international physical theater acts. Staff are now setting their sights on rebuilding Dell’Arte’s programming, with the ultimate goal of bringing back its Master of Fine Arts Program, which was one of the first accredited physical ensemble-based theater programs in the world.

The push to bring Dell’Arte back to the main stage is being led by two of the theater’s most successful alumni, Noah Bremer, a former Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil performer, and Artemis Pebdani, an L.A.-based actress best known for recurring roles on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Scandal.” Bremer, Dell’Arte’s producing artistic director, is one of two full-time staff at the theater. Pebdani joined Dell’Arte’s Board of Directors in 2025 after learning the theater was in trouble.

“We’ve woken from our slumber and we’re ready to go,” Pebdani told the Outpost during a sit-down interview. “The Baduwa’t Festival, I don’t think we made much money off of it, but it was amazing in terms of the outreach and the turnaround. I think it was a reawakening of the space as far as bringing the community back into the fold, and being a place again where shit is happening.”

Artemis Pebdani and Noah Bremer. | Photo: Elizabeth Mackay

Dell’Arte, founded by Carlo Mazzone-Clementi and Jane Hill in the early 1970s, has experienced serious financial and organizational troubles in recent years. The pandemic forced the already struggling theater and accredited fine arts school to pivot to virtual learning and cancel all upcoming performances, cutting off a major funding source. 

Dell’Arte’s problems continued during the racial reckoning of 2020, when the theater’s leadership was criticized for failing to “competently lead the organization” on diversity and equity matters. To address the community’s concerns, staff adopted new bylaws requiring 50% of the board to be BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ and revised the board’s term limits, forcing several long-standing members to step down. While many felt the move was a step in the right direction, others worried that it fractured the organization and ostracized some of the theater’s most loyal patrons.

As the pandemic wore on and bills piled up, Dell’Arte made the difficult decision to end its Master of Fine Arts Program. The theater reached a breaking point in 2024 when it laid off all but three of its staff members due to ongoing financial turmoil.

At that point, the remaining staff was willing to do just about anything to save the organization, even if that meant selling the theater itself. Dell’Arte was able to sell some of its assets instead, including the 1.33-acre property on Taylor Way in Blue Lake that hosts Paskenta Mad River Brewery. The organization also started a community fundraiser, which raised more than $167,000. It didn’t solve all of Dell’Arte’s problems, but it was enough to keep the organization afloat for a little while longer.

Bremer and Pebdani had heard through the performing arts grapevine that Dell’Arte was struggling, but they didn’t know the extent of it. Pebdani found out how bad it was when she came up to Humboldt for a three-week intensive during the summer of 2025.

“At the very last day of the 2025 workshop, one of the teachers walks in and says, ‘You might be the very last class of Dell’Arte,’” she said. “Later that day, somebody said, ‘Well, maybe you should join the board!’ I had to drive back to L.A., but I drove right back for the 50th reunion and they gave us the full scope of what was going on. Well, not the full scope.”

When Pebdani joined the board in September 2025, she walked into a “very chaotic” scene.

“I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but it wasn’t going well,” she said. “There was a lot of arguing, so much so that somebody else who was supposed to join the board with me didn’t end up going through with it because of the emails that were going back and forth between members. Everybody was in a place of panic.”

“At that time the thought amongst a particular group of board members was one of managing crisis, and [they] didn’t know how to manage that crisis anymore,” Bremer added. “A great idea would come up, and then because they didn’t know how to go in that direction fully — because of fear and seeing other areas that need to be tended to [as well as] financial drains — they couldn’t justify one aspect without dealing with another, and it was too complex of a problem to solve.”

Everybody had the best intentions, Pebdani said, but nobody knew how to hone it in a way that would fix the theater’s problems.

In October, one of the board members sent out an email announcing that the board would have to choose between selling the school and selling Dell’Arte’s main building in Blue Lake. 

“That night, I wrote the first in a series of persuasive essays,” Pebdani said. “I wrote that we didn’t join this board to let [Dell’Arte] die an easy death. Like, why did you bring us on? Why did you tell alumni to join the board? … You asked for all these people, and here are all these people. Noah [Bremer] is ready to come on, Sarah McKinney [of the Papaya Lounge] has agreed to come on as our events manager. … Then we had the meeting and nobody even talked about closing. All of a sudden, people were like, ‘Oh, somebody thinks there’s hope.’”

Dell’Arte’s Carlo Theater sits empty.

Bremer came aboard as the producing artistic director, joining the community outreach effort to let people know that, yes, Dell’Arte was still alive. 

“Dell’Arte has been stripped to its barest bones,” Pebdani said, noting that Janessa Johnsrude had quietly kept Dell’Arte’s Prison Arts Program at Pelican Bay State Prison afloat through the years-long ordeal. “The Prison Arts Program was keeping us alive, and it was keeping us respectable, honestly.”

Earlier this year, the organizers behind Cannifest, the county’s annual weed-themed festival, approached Dell’Arte about throwing the event in Blue Lake. Long story short, it didn’t work out because Cannifest founder Stephen Gieder got off on the wrong foot with Blue Lake city staff due to a miscommunication. The Blue Lake City Council gave Gieder the green light on the condition that he obtain a conditional use permit and conduct environmental review before the event. He decided to ditch the plan and throw the event in Arcata instead.

The decision was a blow to Dell’Arte, but staff still felt it was a step in the right direction. “We’re actually really hopeful about festivals like this going forward,” Pebdani told the Outpost’s Ryan Burns back in February. “If nothing else, this process opened the door for real conversations about hosting larger events like this in Blue Lake, and that feels like progress.”

Dell’Arte’s shoestring staff and board began planning for the Baduwa’t Festival, which began in June and ended in mid-August. It went well, Bremer said, but it didn’t bring in as much money as he had hoped. “I think overall we were pretty successful in terms of gathering people,” he said. “If you think about it as a growth period, man, we are growing wonderfully well.”

Now, Bremer is focused on upcoming workshops, including a biomechanics training with Vladimir Rovinsky, a Minneapolis-based performer. He’s also working out a partnership with a local educational institution to restart Dell’Arte’s year-long program, but the details are still being worked out.

“I think the major hurdle we have is the debt,” he said. “There’s a lot of debt we’ve inherited.”

Pebdani added that the board is applying for a loan that would take some of the pressure off of staff and enable the organization to “widen its reach.”

“That will help us be more secure while we get the word out,” she said. “It’s like we’re putting pavement down every step we take, and we need more money to put like three or four pavers ahead so there’s at least a little bit of a path in front of us. Right now we don’t have that.”

Pebdani acknowledged that many other small and regional theaters don’t have that either. Even before the pandemic, theater audiences were dwindling. And with the proliferation of social media and the advent of AI, people are becoming even more isolated and “separated by non-tactile experiences,” she said. Still, she’s optimistic that the “pendulum is starting to go the other way.”

“We want to be a cornerstone of our community, artistically and otherwise,” Pebdani continued. “We’re rebuilding from just about zero, and we’re so lucky in that we have the lineage, a track record of artistic innovation behind us that shows people that we’re worthwhile. We just really need help … and we’re going to need our community to help us get back there.”

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