Interview with Linda Hill, company member

By Nayo Watkins

Nayo Watkins: In the 1970s, you were a student?

Linda Hill: I was a music major, and my early training is in classical bass. Linda recruited me to do some incidental music for a play called "Celebration." I did a little bass work, a little guitar work for some of the characters’ movement music. I was excited, like whoa! And just before that the music and art departments — the vocal music, the orchestra band and the art department — had decided to collaborate on a production of "West Side Story," and in that piece I was dancing, I got to help with a little bit of the choreography and stage manage just a little touch. But I played a character and that was really my first sort of dramatic role thing.

And I didn’t go to sleep. I had just gotten a job. I had decided that I needed to take a break from school because I was going to do damage to my transcript if I didn’t get focused. I had gotten a job at Krispy Kreme Donut Company on the night shift, so that the first night of performance I had to go straight to work, work through the day. I never went to sleep. I had a milkshake for my meal, that was the only sustenance that I had until the next show. And I realized nobody had gotten gifts for the guest tenor and stuff like that. And at that time somebody was silly enough to let me have a credit card, so I went to get roses and stuff and stuff and stuff — When we finished the last performance, I stepped off stage and I was like, "We did it! And this is it, this is what I can do. This is what I can do right on the planet."

And just prior to that production Linda had invited me to do the music, so that show closed and we started deep rehearsals for the Carpetbag piece. The next time we did a show, I had a line and that began, really, my apprenticeship with Carpetbag. I guess that was about ’76. So yeah, that’s the story.

NW: You’ve been with Carpetbag in some way or another for 25 years. I would imagine you’ve seen the ensemble group go through a lot of configurations.

LH: That’s a very apropos word for it, because each personality brought something to the table, naturally. Depending on the skills, level of maturity in the craft, the interest, the focus of the performers, the personalities — the dynamic of the company would shape differently. I guess that’s just common sense. But it always sort of startled me, when we would have a new grouping, at how new the dynamic of the company could become. And how you meet with each group. Linda Parris-Bailey has brought a process of holistic approach to character development, creating ensemble, to bringing life to the stage and a very big commitment to collaborative development of both the written work and the performance pieces — the blocking, the relationships, everything. So everything evolved into where it was going to go. It was guided by these emergent presence moments. I’ll just make it up, coin a new term.

NW: What do you mean by that?

LH: What I mean is that by the time a piece was ready to be performed, it was in that place of polish through stages of development. Much the way a baby grows into a different-looking person as they get older. And I remember there was one piece in particular, a piece by Samm-Art Williams called "Home," where I had to manage three personalities, I think it was. Three character personas. One of them was a character with whom I could not relate. What I mean by that is I didn’t have any experiential base to draw from. I hadn’t been around someone like that. I hadn’t observed it. I hadn’t done it. And I was self -conscious about it. Linda wouldn’t give me a line reading. I’m like, "Give me something, tell me what to do." And of course, at that point I was still growing out of looking for approval, the way kids in school do. I won’t take a step if I’m not sure this is what you want me to do — that kind of wait-and-see looking for approval. But there was no way to do that because she would simply wait. By allowing that process — the community-theater-cause-I-want-to place — to have artistic voice, the company soon molded itself into a fairly respected professional touring company.

NW: Did you ever take any theater classes, drama classes?

LH: Not until I had been with Carpetbag for about five years.

NW: So the learning — obviously you probably brought some natural stuff —

LH: Yeah. I think there’s some meanness that I had to contribute that was a dynamic of presence and communication and interpretation that I had a knack for. I would say there was some instinct that I brought to the table, sure.

NW: What you’re describing is Linda’s forcing you to —

LH: Work.

NW: Is it the training method that she used?

LH: That’s why earlier I named it an apprenticeship, because it was in that old school of training, you know, before colleges and universities and public schools existed. A family did their best to get that child that showed some propensity for a skill and developed that as an expertise and let them grow up under that, in the guild system, you could say. In that organic way 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.

NW: Within that framework, what decisions did the ensemble members make? Or how did they contribute to that?

LH: Well, some of it was kind of like our democratic republic under which we live now, where we drew on the structures of sort of hierarchical decision-making process just for functionality, integrated with a welcomed input from all cast members. We would talk about a character’s history. What do we think? I call this the rule of three that I learned that with Carpetbag, and that’s to read the script with three goals in mind: The first time see what it says, just get a sense of it. The second time to discover what your character says about him- or herself. And the third time to discover who your character is by how others see the character — what information they express about the character, attitudes, etc. And in that way, with what they call a triangulation, then you can home in on the dynamics and the facets and assets of that character’s personality. The nuances of their response to dilemma. You could envision a history and background that would bring a person to a place where they would make these choices.

It added a kind of rich context to be shared, and you know, the thing I love about acting as a medium of communication is that there is an economy of being. And what I mean by that is that every gesture, every time your muscle twitches, every position you assume is part of a communication. Every expression is part of the communication. The words of course, but then the inflection and the intonation — all that comes together to make it what it is. You only have about an hour-and-a-half or two hours to create, to snapshot a moment in a whole life, but it needs a context for you to understand why this moment could possibly happen — in this way. So, everybody’s creating that communication for the individual characters, but everybody together is doing that for the collective event on the stage — the town, whatever.

NW: In terms of the kinds of materials that you all chose to do and the leaning toward materials that would seem to be about making some kind of change in community or making some statement on a social issue —.how did the theater evolve to choosing that kind of material?

LH: Well, I think that a lot of the earlier work set things in motion in a direction one would have to say grew out of the heart place of the founders. Wilmer Lucus as a writer cared about the human condition and he gave voice to the experiences of people from his culture and his racial background in his writing. That was a choice that he made in his personal life, but he brought himself to the group. I think that Linda Parris-Bailey had always been about empowerment, whether it was the buzzword of the day or not. About somehow participating in someone else’s success. On many levels — whether it is the individual, the community, whatever — I think her point of view resonated well with Wilmer Lucus’ point of view. So there’s a foundation.

Carpetbag was created as an umbrella organization to give voice to community of people who just had something to say. So there’s been a Carpetbag Press that’s published a book "Bottom Fishing" by Lucus. There was the street theater that had several years running. There was the Summer Children’s Theatre where the performances were for children by the company members. There was the dance company, so there was some African dance, and people were brought in to do workshops. And somewhere in there after the Summer Children’s Theatre had run for a number of years and we became affiliated with ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South), a collective of performing artists and performing-arts aficionados who bonded together to empower each other and enable each other to grow. If it meant people wanted to develop along the lines of a commercial bent or continue to do regional work or whatever that was, they came together to do that. And I only say that because that philosophy was sort of our philosophy that was happening with Carpetbag all along. Anyhow, all the jazz workshops! Goodness gracious! The Duke Ellington Jazz workshops were dynamic.

And in all of that doing and doing and doing, the interest area of the most individuals who were involved tended to be drama. And so that group became the core company and the traveling company began to finance the community-based activities. It was always our intention to help our community be all that it could be. And to look at young people in particular, and at some point the Institute of the Whole Child came into place. Out of that initiative we now have the TRY Project (Theatre Renaissance for Youth). One summer, we kind of looked at it and said, "We do this for a living." You know, kids could do a summer job. It would be nice to have a place for kids who are showing an interest or wanting to explore theater arts to have a summer job in theater arts, like swimmers and athletes try to find jobs in their area. We hooked up with the Summer Youth Employment Training Program that the city runs. And I think it is a state-funded program to provide employment and create employment for youth in the summer. We became one of their sanctioned work sites. And from there we had the summer youth troop, which again evolved into the TRY Project youth theater.

NW: In the way that the Carpetbag has moved not only as a theater of professional performers who perform here and on tour and have all the trimmings of lighting and sound and costume and all that, and has also developed to have these projects, some of which don’t even look like theater per se — do you think that has added to or detracted from the mission?

LH: Oh, I think that was at the heart of the mission. Again the whole idea was to create this sort of self-sustaining place that we could develop to reach out to young people especially and to community people especially. And you know, the other thing that is interesting: As performing artists we have many different anchor places, I’ll call it. I began as a musician exclusively and evolved into an actress and storyteller. Jeff Cody and I were in band and orchestra together at KC. and doing road tours with that and playing jazz band together. Jeffrey is also a visual artist. He does some sculpting. He works in watercolor and oil quite a bit. Linda Parris-Bailey would never tell anyone that she plays French horn, banjo, percussion instruments. I think her favorite place to settle down is with the percussion and rhythm.

Linda is a writer. Part of the process would be that we would get together — sometimes we would go separately and write out sections and bring it back. Linda would then take those ideas either from the brainstorming or from the improvisation - where we would take a kernel of a scenario put it on its feet and see where it would go, or in some pieces we would have folks write a scene and then it would go to the core writer who would then assimilate all of that into a single piece. We would talk about it. Time, time, time and time — many different evolutions.

And another fundamental — I don’t know, how should I say — commitment of Carpetbag was to create a place for new work to have a venue. So, sometimes we would take a piece that was written by someone and perform it. Sometimes we would develop a piece. And sometimes, for example with "Dark Cowgirls and Prairie Queens," it evolved from a few portraits into an entire performance piece over time. It’s been very exciting to do that. I remember some of the early work we did: "Mars" and "Circus Maxim," "Papa G and the B Train," "The Incarnations of Reverend Gooddress."

Nayo Watkins is an arts and community consultant who lives in Durham, N.C. She is sole proprietor of Bodacious Consulting and Organizing. Her work has included helping to build collaborations and partnerships between artists and communities that explore the relationship between art, culture, activism and empowerment. She served as coordinator for the Mississippi American Festival Project and for the N.C.-based Alternate ROOTS Community Artist Partnership Project. She was writer/facilitator for "Parables to Policy," an Internet project of Southern Rural Development Initiative and was consultant to the Mississippi Young Person’s Cultural Exchange. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, she served as executive director of the African American Dance Ensemble (Durham), At the Foot of the Mountain Theatre (Minneapolis), and the Mississippi Cultural Arts Coalition (Jackson), and as program assistant for the Afro-American Studies Program of the University of Mississippi. As an artist, Watkins is a poet, essayist, playwright and performer. Her poems and essays have appeared in literary anthologies and journals. As a playwright, she draws upon oral histories and participatory research to create plays rooted in place, people, culture and community. Productions of her commissioned plays have been staged in Port Gibson, Itta Bena and Oxford, Mississippi, and in Durham and Wake Forest, North Carolina. Her work is included in the repertory of actors John O’Neal, Cynthia Watts and Yolanda King.

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