More than Just A Collective

Quill Wordsmith

Wordsmith@excapethematrix.com

After seeing the Kuumba Collective perform during Baltimore’s Annual Artscape festivities at the Theater Project, I was inspired, uplifted, and led to contact the director of the collective for an interview. This was so that I could find out the background of the collective and how under the leadership of Rosalind Cauthen this group of performers impact inner city Communities and the world.

QW: How did the collective get together and get started?

RC: I was a student here at Towson State University in the master of Fine Arts program and theater. And at the time I was the only African-American student in the entire program of about 15 students and it was pretty stressful. The work that I wanted to present was African American work. I came here because on the website they had a piece about diversity. So I’m thinking, “That means me! They want me!” I came and there was no diversity. So I started talking to professors and other people here like where I could find some black actors. There were about 4 to 5 theater majors who were African American that were studying here at Towson for the undergrad department. And we just started creating work together. They needed more shows and more productions because you know it may have been about 3 years since they had a black show here at Towson. So they were looking for stuff to do and I had all these ideas and as a master student I felt like it was apart of my responsibility as well to give something back to them and learn with them. So we started working. . . Kuumba was a name that was already here. There used to be an organization called Kuumba here several years ago – it died out as students left. I heard about it and just restarted it with the group of students that we have here. Our first show was the Colored Museum by George C. Wolf. Small show right here in the studio theater and that was in 2003. and since then, we’ve done about 11 productions together here at Towson, Morgan State, Center stage, the national black theater festival and did a workshop; we’ve been to the Black Theater network conference and did some stuff down there. We’re still creating work together now that most of us have graduated.

QW: That’s awesome. Okay now, for some of the readers that may not be familiar, can you give a background on what Kuumba means.

RC: Yes. Kuumba is a Swahili word it means creativity. And it’s also one of the principles of Kwanzaa. “Kuumba” is just a nice phonetically sounding word to me! I like the way it sounds and we just kept it and it stuck. It’s creativity and that’s what we do. Here at Towson we used to call it the Kuumba players and players are usually associated with college plays. And when we started going to the next level and noticing most of the work we did we’re like, we could be a Collective because we have a lot of individual artists that have their own career and their own thing that they do outside of Kuumba. But we come together collectively to try to put together about 4 shows in a year as a group; singers, dancers, poets, actors, all of that.

QW: The first person I saw – well actually I remember Black Root was sending out MySpace bulletins around the time of Baltimore’s Artscape in July saying “Come out! It’s Free!” I have a friend of mine that was performing in the Improv night at the Theater Project during artscape, I remember also seeing Ladies’ Verse during the spoken word night. Out of everything that I saw that weekend, the Kuumba collective is what stuck out to me the most was the Kuumba Collective. I appreciate it. Now is there a certain something the members need to understand upon them joining or before performing based off the productions that you do.

RC: Wow – what a great question. I’d have to say yes and no. Yes a certain understanding is about knowing that the work that you do is for the community. And it’s about sending a social message whether it’s something that’s funny and light or something that’s serious – it embodies everything that I do. Our community right now is in need. On an individual basis and a group basis, people are hungry for positive messages. The youth out there are hungry for positive things to get involved in and we look at our community and we think about all of the bad things going on in our community but when I run into people all I hear is people yearning for something better! So it’s really important that we use our artistic tool for uplifting our community. That is first and foremost in my mind. And also a creative discipline: we’re not out here to put on no chitlin’ circuit type of work. All of that is one genre and it’s fine but we all are disciplined artists and create a good artistic product yet we’re also very process oriented. When we’re in the rehearsal room I always tell them we are each other’s strength. For example, “you’re going through things, I’m going through things. You trying to make it on your job. I’m trying to make sure I make enough money to have food on my table.” But when we come into this room, we should be in Kuumba space a creative space a safe space where we all can express and learn from one another. Now that’s the philosophy of it……(laughs) but it’s not always the case. Ooooh we have come a long way. Just like everyone else, it has not been an easy process!! Really knowing each other’s growth level and being aware of where everyone is, is really important to me as a leader. We’ve lost people along the wayside because of that. Because different people have different understandings and ideas about things, and that’s okay. We continue to grow and do our thing. Also not so much expecting that everyone is going to be conscious and positive. I used to be like that. I wanted everybody to be “down for the cause”. And the more people that came into the group the more I realized, some people just want to do a play! But I feel like everyone in the group has a set responsibility of creating the artistic integrity.

QW: Now I know you mentioned various social issues and things like that. Have you ever had any “red tape” because of your messages or experienced any uncomfortable atmospheres (even in rehearsals) based off of some of the issues you’ve addressed?

RC: Oh yes. Oh yeah. More than once. And I welcome it. I take the controversy head-on. You know it’s not always easy. One thing is - - well can I give you two examples?

QW: Yeah! Absolutely.

RC: One in the rehearsal room and one from outside. In the rehearsal room is a lot of us like to do original work. We’re in the middle of this right now. We came in the room one time for rehearsal and we were about to start rehearsing. So we went to get pizza because everyone was hungry so we decided to eat before rehearsal. So as we’re talking and eating we started talking about Don Imus. It was right around the time Don Imus had made the ‘nappy headed hoes’ comment. And we could not stop talking about that. So I said, “Okay guys – it’s to start rehearsal”. But we could not stop talking about the Don Imus controversy. So at the end of the whole thing I looked at the time and I’m like rehearsal is almost over so I said, “Looks like we’re going to have to create a show out of this”. Everyone laughed but then said, “Hmm….WE SHOULD CREATE A SHOW OUT OF THIS.” So we started putting all these different scene ideas together and it grouped to more than just Don Imus. It grouped into what are the media statements and media messages about our culture and about African American people. What are the various stereotypes we feed into what does the media feed us. All this stuff we started to question and create scenes. It was a lot of fun but it’s a lot of work to do original work. We’ve done 4 or 5 other productions as well. My degree that I was studying for here at Towson was for creating original works. So I love to do it as well, but at the same time we like to do scripted work. Stuff like august Wilson, George C Wolf, Douglas Turner Ward, Alice Childress, other strong black structural plays that we feel like people need to see and people need to know about. And sometimes we have a push and pull on wanting to create something original using singing and dancing and spoken word and monologues – it’s all theater. Or whether we need to legitimize ourselves and do what has been told to us is a play. What is a play: This is having a script, learning your lines, rehearsing it over and over again until you get the character. Those are two different ways of creating and sometimes those two ideologies come up in a rehearsal room and we work through it. My plan has been to do one original, one scripted [back and forth].

With the outside red tape: Towson was a difficult thing. Having the administration realize that we were serious about what we were doing and that we expected the same thing as everybody else and wouldn’t be treated any other way…I still feel like Towson University has issues with diversity. There’s no African American on the theater staff. That’s what I think is a big deal. If you had someone in their on the faculty and staff that could represent the African American student body, that would help. But that’s not there. I don’t really concentrate on that anymore because most of us have graduated, we still use the facilities. I teach class here but the hardest thing has been trying to get us space and how to get resources here in the city of Baltimore. Like we’ve had small local theaters like Theater Project. Theater Project? If it wasn’t for them the local artists wouldn’t even have . . . A LOT. Because Ann is very supportive. She let us rent the space twice a year and for a small fee….well not so small. But she’s very supportive in that way. The Eubie Blake Center has been supportive. We’ve used their space but it’s been difficult to get a crowd in that space for some reason. I’m not sure why – other artists have told me that too. There’s another space on North Avenue. But I really would like to learn how to go about getting into the process of applying for funding , finding a space, I want to do youth programming and all that type of stuff. I think that’s the biggest red tape is knowing or having the knowledge on how to go through the whole system to get spacing in Baltimore City.