Thomas C. Hoegh

All the World's a Stage

Since boyhood, when he first began staging skits with his own puppet ensemble, Thomas Hoegh has loved theatrical production. As a teenage impresario in his native Norway, he put on mind-bending multimedia shows and created satirical revues for Oslo's high-school crowd. After majoring in theater at Northwestern University, he returned home, cofounded a production company, and, as artistic director, gained a reputation for cutting-edge performances of both new and traditional material for radio, television, and the stage. In 1994, he led the creative team that planned and executed the opening and closing ceremonies for the Winter Olympic Games, a smash hit enjoyed by a global television audience of hundreds of millions.

"Reindeer, sled dogs, and fiddlers were my life for an entire year," laughs the lanky, amiable Hoegh. "Then came my Middle East 'intervention.'" Just a few months after the Olympics, Hoegh was called in to rescue a high-profile event in shambles - an Oslo concert to celebrate the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords secretly brokered in Norway. A scant two weeks later, the show went on, with a surprise breakthrough at intermission - the signing of the second Oslo treaty by Messrs. Arafat and Peres.

Given his artistic bent, why did Hoegh enroll at HBS? "I see myself as a catalyst," he explains. "Having both an artistic and a financial background makes it easier for me to bring brilliant people together and ensure that they have the wherewithal to accomplish great things." A principal organizer of this year's student-led "Cyberposium" conference about the Internet, Hoegh has worked as content manager for Firefly, the innovative Internet startup, and serves on the boards of several online companies. He is also interested in the artistic potential of the Internet.

"My next big project," explains Hoegh, "will be a multimedia collaborative outdoor spectacle that will tour the globe, with performances involving local people as well as a worldwide online audience. It will be an attempt to communicate in a universal and profound way. I hope to explore what forms such communication may take in the future." After HBS, Hoegh plans to establish a London-based company called Arts Alliance, "a creative cradle," he says, that will provide venture capital, consulting, and multimedia production expertise to the performing arts community - thereby serving as an institutional catalyst for others' creative endeavors as well as a base for his own.

But before that happens, Hoegh and some HBS friends will embark on an "Expedition for Education" to Latin America, where they have joined forces with Childreach, the U.S. member of PLAN International, a global, child-focused development organization. The Expedition for Education has secured backing for Childreach's school-support efforts from regional companies and HBS alumni. In return, Hoegh and other "cyberexperts" on the HBS team will conduct seminars about the Internet for Childreach supporters in eleven countries.

Hoegh explains that he always tries to include a philanthropic side to his artistic endeavors: "Among those employed in my productions in Norway were rehabilitated drug addicts from a special jobs program. Having this kind of social service component to my professional activity is something I'd like to do more of, and do better." For notwithstanding his global vision and acclaimed achievements, Thomas Hoegh knows that any artistic triumph is diminished if some of the audience is left on the outside looking in.

- Garry Emmons