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Andrew Dickson is familiar to Portland audiences as the longtime host of the storytelling juggernaut The Moth, emceeing about 150 of those live shows over the past decade. But his alter ego AC is the one in charge at Dickson’s new one-person show AC Dickson: Life Coach, which is running this month at Kiln coworking space off Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard.
“AC is like me on three cups of coffee,” Dickson says.
The show opens with a hilarious video montage of the motivational speaker industrial complex—lots of Tony Robbins and Oprah. Dickson originally created the AC character for a show about 20 years ago called AC Dickson: eBay PowerSeller. That one toured Europe, Los Angeles and New York and led to a gig as a copywriter at Wieden + Kennedy. An early version of Life Coach premiered in 2012 at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival.
While every show will be different, the Oct. 16 performance featured Dickson telling a Moth-style story about buying his backyard hot tub, introducing the audience to the concept of life coaching and then guiding some workshop-style games and writing exercises with the whole crowd.
The evening culminates with one pre-selected audience member coming onstage for a 20-minute, one-on-one life coaching session with AC. It’s improvisation, storytelling, performance art, and an unlicensed, crowdsourced coaching session all in one 75-minute, unscripted show.
Staging Life Coach in the bougie coworking space Kiln after hours, complete with stylish corporate décor and leftover post-meeting snacks, makes for a unique ambience that Dickson calls “pretty perfect.” Though it’s not the only place Dickson will perform this week: He will take the stage (as Andrew Dickson, not AC—try to keep up) at the Aladdin Theater on Tuesday, Oct. 22, to host The Moth GrandSLAM Championship.
One highlight of the Oct. 16 show was when Dickson asked the audience if there were any life coaches in attendance. Four hands went up. Next, he asked if there were any people in the crowd who were skeptical of the idea of life coaching. Many more hands shot up, including that of one of the life coaches.
“You can’t script that,” he says. “If you scripted it, it wouldn’t be believable.”
SEE IT: AC Dickson: Life Coach at Kiln, 1120 SE Madison St. eventbrite.com/e/ac-dickson-life-coach-tickets-1028450271447. 6 pm Thursday and Monday, Oct. 24 and 28. Free, but reservations required.