Interview with Tamara Coffey, company member

By Ann Kilkelly

Tamara Coffey: It is always good to hear people’s comments about the work. Especially if it is positive. We always do an evaluation with the people that we work with. I think time gives you a different perspective too. This is the first time I have heard any of these people afterwards.

Ann Kilkelly: Does that confirm your sense of what you wanted to happen, or what did happen?

TC: Yeah. I’m the newcomer at Roadside. When I came here Roadside was already up and running and doing all kinds of great work. I was really lucky to come to it because I really didn’t think that I would ever work in theatre, even though that is what I had always wanted to do. I was lucky to find people who were doing exactly what I wanted to do, and so much more than I had ever imagined. Hearing the folks talk about how far they’ve gone from where they started with us says what I believe to be true – as long as someone in the community believes in the work, and is connected to it, and dedicated to it, then it can go on and have a huge effect on a number of people. The community has to take it on and make that happen. Like what David [Raines, see interview] was saying this morning, he had that conviction until it kind of got kicked out of him. He made so much happen, even after we weren’t there, until all that happened.

AK: It sounds to me like he is gearing up to try and do it again.

TC: He was telling me that even in the gym classes that he has been teaching for the last few years, he would take his banjo into class and they would do Appalachian dance. It is something that he has continued to do, just on a much smaller scale. It is continuing, and that is always good to hear. It is like you said earlier – you never know, when you are the artist, if it has a lasting effect.

AK: How do people decide that something is really working? How does change happen in the community? You’ve got a case of a really powerful personality with David. Then you’ve got this group of women who have this great energy towards collaboration and don’t want to take credit for it. Want it to be out there.

TC: Nancy [Smith, see interview] refused to meet with you alone. She kept saying, "I can’t talk about everything that has happened. I have to bring all these other people in. I just know so little about the whole thing." She was the one who coordinated the whole thing.

AK: It was great though that they did that. This is what is so great about women, and also it is a problem. Although I don’t see it as a problem because the way they work seems really great.

TC: Yeah. But it can certainly be a problem.

AK: You understand, the problem that I am trying to figure out is what are the indicators. More people in art making? That is what we would like to think in some ways. That is only if we accept art making as something valuable in and of itself, which our culture will not confirm for us.

TC: Every year I go to an abbey for a retreat. There is a story about two hermits who live at the abbey. They have a vow of silence. They live in the hermitages away from the community and have very little interaction with anyone. These two hermits feel that their job is from morning to night, and even in their sleep, to pray that the world will continue. The world will survive and continue to be. That is their whole job as they see it. When you think about it, that is massive. When you think about it, it is ridiculous. And yet, would you ask them not to do it?

AK: What strikes me is the act of faith that takes to continue. There is a certain level of faith and belief that comes into the whole theatrical process. That is a hard one to sell to funders.

TC: When you have to quantify how the arts work, there is just some of it that you can’t.

AK: Just because you can’t put it on somebody’s graph, and you can’t show that you have 7,000 instances to prove it, does not mean that there isn’t really solid evidence and that there aren’t really substantial arguments. It is just more subtle. What is Roadside doing in terms of developing new work?

TC: We’ve been trying to develop a play that Ron has been working on. It has started out, now who knows where it is going to come out, but it started out as a song called "Two Sweethearts" that has been in his family for generations. I was in Ireland last year. They assumed that it probably came from Ireland. So, I went around to several archival places looking for this song. It turns out that it is an American song that has gone back to Ireland.

AK: What is the source of the song?

TC: It was written for a competition. I can’t remember the product it was for. Some place in Cincinnati. And it became a dance hall song.

AK: Where did you find this piece of information?

TC: At a little record shop in Dublin. I went to the traditional music archives in Dublin. They knew the song, but couldn’t find any documentation on it. I went to this record shop in this dingy little dive. I just said, "Have you ever heard this song." He said he thought it was a dance-hall song and went back through some CDs. He found it on a collection of dance-hall songs of the ’20s. I came back to Ron and said, "I hate to tell you this, but this song is American." He didn’t believe me, so we took the information this guy had given us and went on the Web. There was a library that listed it as a part of their collection in Missouri. They faxed us a whole thing, like a chapter in a book that they had collected on traditional music. That is how we tracked it down to Cincinnati. But anyhow, the story of the play is this song and how it has come down through the family. He has written this draft that is really wonderful.

Ann Kilkelly is a professor of theater arts and women's studies at Virginia Tech. She is recognized nationally as a scholar and performer of jazz-tap dancing and history, performance studies and interactive performance techniques. She has received Smithsonian Senior Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and performs and gives master classes in jazz tap around the country. At Virginia Tech she served as the director of Women's Studies for six years, she teaches and directs multimedia performance concerts, and she recently created the Diversity Training Laboratory to help students and faculty use performance techniques to examine diversity issues.

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