Interview Summaries

By Linda Frye Burnham

All interviews were by Nayo Watkins. They took place between November 12 and 15, 2000 in Knoxville, Tennessee. All have been edited for length by CAN. The full, unedited transcripts are available on request.

Interview with Yawah Awala, parent and Carpetbag community supporter

Yawah Awala has lived in Knoxville for about 30 years, and sees it as "a place you would want to be if you were wealthy and you want to retire. It’s for the very few" and "everybody else is just standing looking in – unless you create something from your inner self, such as what Carpetbag has done." She sees Carpetbag as keeping "the live theater open." Awala has been aware of Carpetbag "from the very beginning," has attended and catered numerous productions. She believes her children and grandchildren have benefited from Carpetbag’s youth programs, which she sees as dealing with serious community issues like "alcohol, drugs, depression and just regular teen problems." She sees it as a place for the children of people like her, "black and vegetarian, a rarity in our community here in Knoxville." She says it "gives those children a sense of belonging."

Awala is vocal about Carpetbag’s play "Red Summer," because it "taught a lot of people, ’cause I think a lot of people didn’t know that Knoxville actually did have a radical side to it." She feels that "there are certain things that we still allow to go on as African Americans in this community, to allow it to be perpetuated tremendously without raising a voice against it." Awala says what Carpetbag does best is bring together a multicultural group community. In the future, she would like to see more theatrical and technical training and touring for young people and storytelling projects for local elders.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Yawah Awala, click here.

Interview with Dorothy Bennett, board member

Dorothy Bennett, who works in training and development in Knoxville, has been a supporter or board member of Carpetbag for many years, and works to help the theater take advantage of opportunities and resources she encounters in her own work. She sees Carpetbag’s work as "a different form of community organization or community education. An artistic form," she says. "I was always taught that education was one of the keys that you needed for survival and for progress." She believes their work offers "ways to produce direct results to individuals" and "new ways to explore and confirm maybe our humanity." She says participation in Carpetbag’s creative programs allows people from the community to "explore their circumstances and define solutions for themselves, assume responsibility for themselves, identify their issues, as opposed to Carpetbag’s issues."

Bennett worries that Carpetbag’s future relies too much on Linda Parris-Bailey’s skill and energy: "There is a time when you begin to realize that you just don’t want to go 24/7, and want is not the right word, you can’t go 24/7. Your mind may say ‘go,’ but your body says ‘hey. uh-uh.’" She also believes that Carpetbag’s limited salaries make it almost impossible to bring qualified young people in to the organizations: "You can’t even talk to work-study students about $6 an hour. Just not. If the money does not change we won’t make it. We will not make it." She does not believe Carpetbag will gain access to funding outside the arts as long as they are "on the fringes," and "the city doesn’t see Carpetbag as a value or a threat."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Dorothy Bennett, click here.

Interview with Linda Hill, company member

Linda Hill was drafted into Carpetbag in the 1970s as a student musician. Her experience in student shows and her first acting forays with Carpetbag led her to theater as a career and full integration into Carpetbag as a company member. She describes her own theatrical training under Parris-Bailey as an apprenticeship in an organic process of evolution "of allowing the emergence of character and ensemble and production. And the coalescence, or the kind of synergy of all those of elements of drama and theater. We became the Carpetbag Theatre that had a unique stamp that was recognizable and valued." Hill gives a detailed description of the collaborative creative process of the company and her own theories of communication and theater, including "the rule of three" and "the economy of being."

Hill also provides a capsule history of Carpetbag, from the early social-change work that proceeded from the "heart place of the founders" into "an umbrella organization to give voice to community people who just had something to say." Programs grew organically, such as Carpetbag Press, a street theater, the Summer Children’s Theatre, the dance company, alignment with other arts groups, such as Alternate ROOTS, jazz workshops. The drama group became the core company, and the children’s theater, along The Institute of the Whole Child evolved into the TRY Project (Theatre Renaissance for Youth). These community projects, rather than detracting from the theater mission, were, she says, "at the heart of the mission ... to create this sort of self-sustaining place that we could develop to reach out to young people especially and to community people especially.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Linda Hill, click here.

Interview with Robin Strickland, intern

Robin Strickland is a junior at Knoxville College, majoring in sociology and criminal justice, with a minor in political science. She hopes to be a judge. She interns with Carpetbag, performing general support duties and sometimes traveling with the company to conferences and workshops. She says she is learning "a whole bunch of skills whether it be technology or people skills." One example she gave is that she learned how to get a passport "so that I can go to Greece and be in one of these workshops that Linda goes to sometimes."

She attended a political conference in North Carolina with Carpetbag that provided new insights to the material she is learning at UT and inspired her to activism in her community. She took some of the conference materials back to her classes at UT. She talks about ways she is learning that the arts can influence political and social change. Her experience with Carpetbag's youth project has alerted her to ways she can help children. Strickland honors Carpetbag for its presence on campus, which has provided work-study jobs, brought the attention of certain black artists to the UT campus, and started Café Noir, a place for students to read their work and discuss a wide range of topics.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Robin Strickland, click here.

Interview with Starr C. Releford, company member

Starr Carlton Releford is a sophomore at Knoxville College , with a major in psychology and a minor in music. At 22, he is younger than the other members, and sees the value of Carpetbag’s work for young people, "just getting them to be aware of their culture, what their culture and their heritage is about." He also wants the work to "bridge the gap between young people and old people. Try to find out what went wrong and how we can get back to the balance that we had back when I was young."

He describes in detail his work in the current production, "Nothin’Nice," which focuses on a young father’s coming to adulthood. He hopes it will teach the value of "family ties." He values working with Carpetbag because it gives him a chance to meet different people – ex: someone he is still in touch with from a North Carolina conference, and someone "from another nationality" in California, with whom he exchanges ideas and cultures. He details the open-mic Café Noir, which he and other young Carpetbaggers facilitate. He says it "brings another mood to the campus ’cause there’s a lot of ‘thugs’ that go to school here. Wannabe thugs …"

To read the entire (edited) interview with Starr Releford, click here.

Interview with Zakiyyah Modeste, special projects director, company member

Zakiyyah Modeste is an actress who trained in New York, and came to Carpetbag because "as an actress in New York it’s kind of hard to get this grassroots feeling." She discusses the difference in developmental processes. "There are a lot of institutional companies and corporations that are kinda hard to tap into unless you have been paying them X amount of fees. … Down here you have time to grow and there’s people that need you. So, you are able to put your talents to working on different projects, gaining experience. It helps you grow, rather than paying a fee to be instructed."

Modeste has not yet acted with the company, but does program coordination and directing for the youth program. Currently she is working on the "Voices" project, a national touring Appalshop project that Carpetbag is tapping into in Tennessee to honor the company’s 30th anniversary. She talks about how much she enjoys doing small choreography projects with the young girls from the youth program and mentions she is hoping to add a dance component to Carpetbag. She enjoys working with kids because "just seeing kids that aren’t used to being in the artistic realm to openly express some of their feelings and some of the art that they have within them. Pulling that out of them, that was really rewarding. A lot of kids might not have gotten the opportunity to sit around and play a game, a theater game, or charades or just to act as if they were an actor or actress."

To read the entire (edited) interview Zakiyyah Modeste, click here.

Telephone interview with Linda Parris-Bailey, company artistic director

Bailey begins with a history of Carpetbag, founded in 1969 by writer Wilmer Lucas and colleagues "to train young artists and have activities in the community" as "an umbrella for the development of all of the allied arts" and "to develop new work" with " a voice that is uniquely from this community." Parris-Bailey joined in 1974, with actor training at SUNY New Paltz and Howard University. Her ideas about theater were "tied to action and activism," influenced by an activist movement around the U.S. She describes the foundation, growth and methods of the ensemble through a discussion of each of their major plays and their evolution. Ideas and direction came from both inside and outside the company.

Parris-Bailey talks about the company’s need for younger members to play the younger roles, and the difficulty of bringing in new voices with new kinds of goals and commitments. "The one lesson that we have learned," she says, "is that if you are going to maintain an ensemble, you have to involve people in all of the work" and "from the beginning on all levels." She explores the company’s theory of social change through a detailed discussion of "Red Summer," the play about Knoxville’s historical "race riots." The guiding questions, she says, were: "How do we change the balance of power internally and externally? And how do we get individuals in the community as a whole to understand what power they hold?" Their goal was "to get people to change their minds about what was possible." This was her most satisfying work so far, she says. " I will never forget looking up into the packed house, 750 full seats, and watching people on their feet standing and shouting and understanding that it was their story that was being told."

The role of the company as "a group of people who help people look at things slightly differently" holds true in their community collaborations with activist nonarts groups as well. "I think that we are often used as a tool, and that is not a bad thing." Parris-Bailey’s biggest obstacles are "describing the work … articulating what it is and trying to at least package it enough so that people can understand it and take advantage of what it is" and making room for nonarts partners’ time schedules and methods and realities. "Everybody thinks that we are operating in the same here and now, and that is not true," she says. "Those of us who do the community work need to learn a whole lot about a community before we start jumping around in it in our black clothes and big boots." The lesson, she says, is "whatever you do in communities everybody else still lives there and you go home. You have to think and choose -- and I’m not saying don’t start fires, you have to start fires with some notion of who the fire department is. "

She views their community partners who are activist or service organizations as their best critics. "I think we really need to listen to people who have done research in the field," she says, admitting that the company’s methods of self-evaluation are not good. She sees their work in the development of collaboration and cultural and community development as "pushing the envelope a little bit … we are working so much with adult learners and trying to look at alternative ways to keep people kind of self driven and in control of that process, the education process."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Linda Parris-Bailey, click here.

Interview with Zakiyyah Modeste, Carpetbag special projects director; Nancy Brennan-Strange, musician/storyteller; and Linda Parris-Bailey, Carpetbag artistic director

In this group interview, the participants talked about their experiences in doing community work with the company, particularly with the youth theater ensemble and adult literacy program. Often, they observe, they are working with teens who "just want to act" or adults who don’t want to be there (because they are participants in a mandatory welfare-to-work training program). They find they were challenged to develop new tools to work with, particularly in the case of the adult-ed program, where they were working with people who had "incredibly difficult life stories" and a "failing experience" with education already. The team had to do a lot of planning and communicating about this work. They tried tools they had acquired in the Wolftrap Early Learning Through the Arts program (a rural program for families) and the street law program for juvenile offenders out of Howard University in Washington, D.C., which dealt with juvenile-justice issues. They discuss in detail how these tools helped them in Carpetbag’s community arts programs. Says Linda Parris-Bailey: "It wasn’t until I got the street law information at the program that a lot of things became clear to me."

They also have an involved discussion of the impact of community work on theater work. Says Parris-Bailey: "It is the foundation of theater. Unlike any other medium in terms of the written word, theater is designed to be performed. So, in order to return to your audience, your community, whatever -- in order to return the information, what you are looking for is a reality of the experiences. That’s the foundation of all the dialogue. That’s the foundation of the story. … We say very deliberately in our statements about who we are that what we are trying to do is return stories to the community. We are the vehicle through which those stories come back. What we try to do is to seek out the lessons in the story for ourselves and for the community, too."

She reflects on the character of this mission: "Our theater has been accused of being celebratory. If you don’t show people the way to the victory, then what are you doing retelling the story? It’s like John said about telling the story to make oneself better, or telling the story to make the community better. There is a difference between a storyteller and a liar. … Now, the community sometimes is challenged and needs to be challenged, and sometimes they don’t like that. But that’s all a part of how we all grow."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Modeste, Brenna-Strange and Parris-Bailey, click here.

Interview with Jeffrey Cody, technical director, company member

Jeff Cody handles "all the tech stuff and office stuff." The interview demonstrates his deep familiarity with bookkeeping and grant processing. In reflecting on Carpetbag he says, "Initially, there wasn’t an entity in the city that did do it for African-Americans" in Knoxville, just "old-school type of African-American stuff, like ‘Porgy and Bess,’ which spoke to Old Glory and not really speaking to the economic classes below them. Carpetbag stepped in to do all of that, to give the ‘voice’ to those folks, and to help them move up that ladder." He describes the Carpetbag community as ‘multicommunities,’ including subdivisions of both the African-American and European-American communities that focus on education, crime prevention and the arts. He sees Carpetbag "plugging into" those communities and vice versa.

Cody sees the organization "someplace between a cultural group, an artistic group and an empowerment group." Choices, says Cody, are dictated by the mission statement and the availability of funding. Cody is a visual artist describes himself as "an information junkie" who likes solving the physical problems of production and doing research as his part in the creative process, as he did for "Red Summer." He is inspired by the company’s flexibility and inventiveness and sees survival as its greatest achievement. He sees the greatest change the company has faced as the reduction of its touring program, which he attributes to the cuts in funding by politicians, especially funding to individual artists, which allowed the artists freedom to explore their own work, "So now, that other part, the individual part, is sort of crippled in art so that you can fulfill the social part of your mission." He also feels the funding cuts will lead to Carpetbag’s work being "less centered towards the African-American community and more centered towards the center of the communities." He believes artists are punished for doing "not safe stuff" using "four-letter words" and says he and other Carpetbaggers are going to start a "for-profit" artistic company not connected to Carpetbag to do more challenging work.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Jeffrey Cody, click here.

Interview with Donna Shores, audience member and associate professor of English, Knoxville College

Donna shores is most familiar with Carpetbag from her encounters with them at Knoxville College, where they have performed their repertory in the campus theater, visited various classes, used facilities for their children’s programs and for community organizing, engaged students as actors and in "community-service projects," as she puts it. Personally, she is more familiar with Carpetbag works from the last decade or before, and doesn’t attend much theater locally. She identifies Carpetbag as Linda Parris-Bailey, and says, "She enriches everything here. That program gives us a component we’ve been lacking." The college theater program has been cut, but Shores feels Carpetbag challenges the students more than the previous productions did: " I think Linda gives us a little more range and presents students with some serious things to think about." She also appreciates Café Noir and see it as "lively" and "their warmest connection … And the students would miss it terribly if it went away now." She feels Carpetbag is truly active on campus and "that kind of cooperation and investedness is what we need here."

They may "do some film and talk" about local environmental issues, she says, bringing in lots of research and many of their community connections, such as the man who set up the first recycling center in the projects. Shores is most interested in women’s issues, and feels Parris-Bailey is a good role model for her students, as someone who "has handled every little glitch and catch she’s found here with grace" and "has been able to negotiate a marriage, a family and a career all this time and keep their support. And I think that in itself is a profound statement about what women can do if their family is cooperating,."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Donna Shores, click here.

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