CHASING THE RIPPLES (or, Same War… Different Warrior.)

Namaste, all.

I teach.  As a college instructor I have brought my long history of anti-racist values and facilitation with me, although in ways some find unorthodox. 

In 2018, when I was honoured to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural Canadian Theatre Educators’ Conference, I spoke about the way that I have chosen to approach teaching Contemporary Scene Study in a speech entitled The Apple Cart: This Constant Race and a Classroom In Colour.  The following year I was invited to the Got Your Back Canada Acting Educators’ Conference, and did a talk and workshop entitled Contemporary and In Colour: Culturally Integrated Scene Study for Today & Tomorrow.  Two years later, I was invited to give a digital address for the Dramatic Arts department at Brock University, which I called Consciousness In Colour: Intercultural Scene Study for Contemporary Classrooms.  

(I spend a lot of time titling things.  I actually love titling things.)  

But my penchant for naming stuff aside, it was incredible to see how what I had to share about teaching Acting in a cross-cultural way landed and resonated — and I was stunned to learn that there were people attempting to do the same in another parts of the country.  

To be clear, I know that I am NOT the pioneer here (I believe that Nina Lee Aquino has also been teaching this way for many years), but the list of theatre profs doing it was really short.  That was because there were not enough of us who are NOT WHITE, but also because Black educators didn’t feel sufficiently empowered.  Many of the older profs and program heads honestly didn’t think about non-white work, ever.  Those profs who were younger and more conscious didn’t feel ill-equipped to teach the work of playwrights of colour, much less to cast cross-racially.  But I’ve been doing it now in Contemporary Scene Study for nearly 8 years — the “it” being white students sometimes playing characters of colour.  

Why?  Well first of all, numbers.  As a Black teacher, I am 100% committed to bringing Black work into the classroom.  And not one token play.  A bunch of ‘em.  And plays by Asian writers, Indigenous writers, Latino writers, Arab writers.  Playwrights who do not walk the planet with white skin and whose experience is in large part shaped by their melanin levels.  I have made that commitment REGARDLESS OF THE RACIAL BREAKDOWN OF MY CLASS.  If I have a class of 20 and 4 of them are BIPOC, then it is what it is.  It’s still an acting class, and we’re still doing the work of those playwrights.  If there are NO kids of colour, we’re still doing the work of those playwrights.  Were I to base which plays would be worked on on the demographics of the room, we would never see more than 20% of plays performed in class being by writers of colour.  And that percentage, for me, doesn’t come anywhere close to what I believe that I need to do.  So it doesn’t matter if there are 16 white kids and 2 Black kids and 1 East Asian kid and 1 South Asian kid.  Just based on percentages, the cross-casting is going to happen.  

I do have rules.  Rule #1 is that students of colour will ALWAYS get roles of colour first followed by “no race specified” roles, because it’s important.  Most of them have never been cast as a character remotely looking like them or who even could.  After they have been cast, if there are BIPOC scenes I’ve chosen and the remainder of the class is white, then they get cast in those scenes.  Rule #2 is that white students will never get a scene in which they are talking about their race or in which the character’s colour is central, because two blonde kids addressing the Negro struggle would be both inappropriate and extremely stupid.  There are many stunning scenes in Black plays about aspects of life that are experienced by every human being.  So some of those white kids WILL be communing with Lynn Nottage or Dominique Morisseau or Tara Beagan or Djanet Sears or Branden Jacob-Jenkins or Marcus Youssef in an up-close-and-personal way.

There are some plays and some songs that I will not cross-cast ever, because I feel that their very blood would be drained by doing so.  I won’t do it for Topdog/Underdog.  Songs are the same.  I gave one of my white male students Let It Sing from Violet, but I would never have given him Make Them Make Hear You from Ragtime despite the fact that he’d sing it beautifully.  Meanwhile, if a Anishnaable young man asked to sing Make Them Hear You, I’d absolutely say yes.  So much of it is narrative.  Is racial identity or cultural residue baked into the song in way that is inextricable from the singer?  It is personal and individual and circumstantial.  I have to plug in to my gut and listen to it.  It will always make clear my rationale.  

I mentioned earlier the practical reasons why I cast this way.  In addition to those, there are more meaningful and deliberate reasons.  I teach the way I do in order to deepen and engrain empathy.  I tell my white students, who are often nervous at first, that they will never know what it is to be African-American or Chinese-American but they can use the most powerful tool at an actor’s disposal — their imagination — to play the given circumstances and then conceive of what it might feel like to carry the daily truth of bigotry and a loss of racial privilege ON TOP of those circumstances.  

I also believe it’s important to cast this way at times to provide experiential understanding of the scholastic reality faced by their non-white friends on a regular basis — being asked to play characters written as a race not their own.  This too strengthens the empathy gene, as students contemplate not only the lives of the characters they play, but the lived reality of their classmates of colour within the school setting.

PART II

I know that some in anti-oppression circles disagree with me.  They find any white person playing a non-white person offensive.  I’ve heard people say “READ the works of playwrights of colour with white students, but don’t let them act them.”  Yeah… sorry… a big MISS ME WITH THAT.  Me as a Black college instructor reducing the number of works by writers of colour within my own class?  Telling the students of colour that because they are a small minority in the room, the work of the playwrights who look like them will also be the minority?  HELL NO.  It means so much to them to have that much focus on writers of colour in the room.  And you know who else is usually extremely excited?  The white kids.  Because they feel robbed by doing 90% white work too.  I know this because they tell me.  Over and over and over again.  

It is so deeply valuable for students to get the opportunity to put characters in their bodies and words in their mouths that they will never again be able to play outside of that classroom.  That goes in both directions.  If a Filipino student tells me that he’s aching to play Stanley Kowalski, I’m down because he’ll never have that chance after he graduates.  Once upon a time I may have agreed with the naysayers.  But there is a HUGE difference between acting in the educational and the career realms.  Professional theatre is a different conversation — no one is producing The Piano Lesson featuring a white family.  I know firsthand the impact that has been made and the imprint that has been left, and I stand firm that it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made as an educator.  (Gratitude and hugs to Lauren Merotto and Jack Copland, whom I cast as the Maxsons in Fences in 2018 on a strong internal hunch and whose from-the-soles-of-their-feet performances as Rose and Troy single-handedly cemented my approach to Scene Study, permanently.)

When I began teaching Acting Through Song at Sheridan, I dedicated one week with each group to a lesson/conversation called Race and Racism In Musical Theatre, and assigned a short research project asking everyone to discover and then share with the class a musical composer of non-European descent and/or a work that they had written.  To be thanked many times over for those lessons, by students of every colour, has meant a lot.

I’ve said this many times over the years in many different spaces — I do things this way for two overarching reasons, both equally obvious to me but one of which is less so to others.  The obvious: Non-white students need to see themselves portrayed in texts, on faculty, and on stage.  They need to understand that their cultural predecessors created greatness and that they stand on the shoulders of that greatness.  But it is *just* as important to counter the status quo of white domination in theatre school syllabi by teaching white kids to understand the following:

THAT EXCELLENCE DOES NOT ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THEM.  

That what is considered graduation-worthy curricula does not always look like them.  

That brilliant educators do not always look like them.  

That their most talented classmates do not always look like them.

That some of the most compelling characters to inhabit and beautiful written words that can dance on your tongue are penned by people who do not look like them.  

I raise a glass to the educators who are making this a priority.  There needs to be way more of them.

I write this tonight because white nationalism has been in the headlines a whole lot this week, and it made me start thinking about how in my own life I most consistently try to address this poison.  I’ve led the anti-oppression workshops and sat on a million DEI panels and walked in the marches.  I’ve heard the promises and pledges.  I was a louder activist then, with more in the tank.  As the years passed and change happened at a pace that made snails look quick, I morphed into perpetually exhausted both mentally and physically.  I would often leave those events, well-intentioned as they were, feeling hollow and unsure as to whether any of it would still mean anything tomorrow.  I now leave that mostly to the millennials and the Gen Zs.  To them I say that while you have the energy and strength, do it for all who preceded you and all who will follow.  I have run a few relay races; no one can or should be receiving the baton all of the time.  Sometimes it needs to be passed.  And so many people have been doing it, far further in the trenches, for SO MUCH LONGER than I.

Running a theatre company with the mandate that Cahoots has, I feel creatively and ideologically inspired, but often simultaneously curtailed by the inescapable dearth of resources.  As the world hurtles headlong into increasingly horrifying political times, I ask myself what I can really do within the circle of my life to shape a different future — to identify the puddle that I can actually create ripples in.  Seismic ripples.  That isn’t to say that the earlier manifestations of my activist self will never come to the fore again.  What it does mean is that I’m learning how to embed that part of me into a less hardened place.  When I’m with my students I FEEL the reverberations of social justice teachings and witness them almost immediately.  I truly do.  It’s entrenched in the endeavour.  I can hold the evolution of breathtaking human beings in real time — young people whom I know are going shake the tree hard and fast.

I will fight racism, bigotry and injustice as part of the mission of my life for the rest of my life.  Blown away am I by the older activists who simply do not stop.  I am at the age and the point in my trajectory, however, where I am wildly changing and life is wildly changing and I’m being changed by life.  The costs of half a century of being Black and female cannot be recouped.  There’s no emotional rebate for years and years of challenging the abyss and attempting to salve its wounds, first as an anti-violence against women activist and rape crisis counsellor, and then trying to do what I could as an anti-racism educator.  I know that I have made a small but real difference.  The fabric of me is both more warm and more worn than ever — and I now move in ways that bring me less hurt and more hope.  I did it the other way around for a long, long time.

There is no reimbursement, and there is barely relief.  There are only the ripples that I can create from here.

I know that the pulse of optimism feels weak and the prospect of healing faint.  I want to wish each and every one you peace, but that is both too easy and too hard to do in a world that is so very far from peace.

I wish you progress… passion… power… purpose.

Much love,

Tanisha