Mike Lueger: Welcome to the Theatre History Podcast, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatre-makers worldwide.
Hey, everyone. I'm Mike Lueger, host of the Theatre History Podcast. Just a quick note before we get started: the following episode was originally recorded in the fall of 2019.
Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Lueger. There are innumerable approaches to the craft of acting, and no one system works for everyone. Today, we're going to discuss the life and work of Ernie McClintock, who worked to develop a system that could serve the specific needs of African American actors in the mid-twentieth century. We're joined by Dr. Ibby Cizmar whose research on McClintock led to her essay “Ernie McClintock's Jazz Acting: A Theatre of Common Sense,” which appears in the Routledge Companion to African-American Theatre and Performance. Ibby is an assistant professor of acting and directing at Vanderbilt University. She's currently working on a full-length book project about McClintock entitled Explicit Images and Inclusive Practices: Reviving the Legacy of Ernie McClintock. Ibby, thank you so much for joining us.
Ibby Cizmar: Thanks very much. Happy to be here.
Mike: Let's begin by talking about Ernie McClintock himself. Who was he, and what distinguished his theatrical career?
Ibby: Yeah. So Ernie Claude McClintock was born in 1937 on the South Side of Chicago. And he basically—what distinguishes his career is that he established all these different training schools and companies through 2003. So, there's the Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech, established in 1966 in Harlem. Then he was the artistic director of the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble, 1973, the Harlem Jazz Theatre in 1986, and the Jazz Actors Theatre in Richmond in 1991.
And so, over the course of his career he pioneered a genre of actor training initially called common sense acting, which became jazz acting. The tenets were always there, but the name just eventually kind of developed. He also directed over 200 productions. He won numerous AUDELCOs. For those that don't know what AUDELCOs are, it's the Audience Development Committee Awards for Excellence in Black Theater that are presented annually in New York. And he won the 1997 recipient, or he was the 1997 recipient, of the Living Legend Award at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina.
His students are still performing. Just because he passed in 2003, it doesn't mean that his legacy is not still living on. So students are still performing, applying the technique today in regional spaces, in classrooms, in dance studios, on the Broadway stage, in television, in Hollywood. Once you start mentioning his name, pull that thread, all these actors and artists start to emerge, and you realize what an impact he had.
Mike: You mentioned a few of the institutions where McClintock worked, including the Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech and the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble. Could you tell us a little bit more about those institutions and why they were so important?
Ibby: Sure. So the Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech, that was his initial studio established in 1966. He had previously worked with Louis Gossett Jr. downtown in Manhattan, and then really wanted to establish his own school. What he observed in mainstream acting methods was that Black actors were not being authentically themselves or what he said, imitating the imitation. And so what he did was create a curriculum where there were scene study classes, Black history and culture classes, karate, yoga, movement, dance, all within sort of this Afrocentric worldview. Marc Primus—who is the historian of the Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech, and is now living in Atlanta—I had the chance to interview him, and he said that it was a temple of healing. So essentially, these Black actors went to the studio to learn about themselves, to learn about their ancestors, to learn about a collective history and a collective memory because their histories had been taken from them since they were captured on the shores of Africa.
Then with the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble, that became the professional sort of repertory company of the Afro-American Studio. The Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech did have the advanced theatre workshop, which they had workshop performances, but the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble really took what that English repertory model is that we may be familiar with, and what he did in the jazz tradition was subvert that. So he messed with a white acting tradition and infused it with Afrocentric stories, street theatre performances, and plays that span a multitude of perspectives from the Black experience. I think what's so extraordinary about his work is that it really punctuates the fact that there is not one Black experience. There's a multiplicity of experiences, whether we're talking about Black revolutionaries, womanist points of view, queer experiences, Caribbean American immigrants. So he really was quite inclusive. And I think that's what really distinguishes him from his peers within the Black Arts Movement.
Mike: You mentioned the Black Arts Movement. Could you briefly explain for listeners kind of what that was and how McClintock fit into the larger context of this movement?
Ibby: Absolutely. So I think in order to understand the Black Arts Movement, we really have to kind of acknowledge the Black Power Movement because Larry Neal, who is a theorist and a scholar, coined the Black Arts Movement and said that it was the spiritual sister of the Black Power Movement. So the Black Power Movement might conjure up images of sort of militant machismo, but it's much more nuanced than that. The way that we can understand it is that if we think about it, historically, post-World War II, we have soldiers, Black soldiers, coming back from fighting for democracy. They come back to the United States, and they're not afforded this democracy that they're fighting for abroad, right? So this is sort of part of a much larger melting frustration or frustrations within Black communities. Then, what starts to happen is that there are these diplomatic efforts within government, but there's a slow burn of progress.
And so then what starts to happen is the slew of assassinations. 1961, we have Patrice Lumumba who is the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, who appeals to the United States, the United Nations, for support against the rebel forces within the Congo. One would think that the United Nations, the United States, would support that as a democratically elected prime minister. United States didn't find it economically or financially viable, Lumumba was assassinated. Fast forward to 1965. Malcolm X was assassinated, 1966 Stokely Carmichael, who was often also left out of the narrative, has his speech where he coins Black Power as sort of an ideology. 1968, Martin Luther King is assassinated in the same year RFK is assassinated. So there's this hope that's riddled with these assassinations. So that's what's happening from on the political front, right?
With the Black Arts Movement, it's that cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. So within that, we have—so Black Arts Movement includes poetry, visual art, theatre. And so the Black Theatre Movement is sort of a subset of the Black Arts Movement. When Malcolm X was shot, Amiri Baraka—who was living in the Lower East Side—the story goes that he moved to Harlem. He wants to be among his people. He created the Black Arts Repertory School, which lasted just a year, but nonetheless, it's a powerful marker of this movement, creating theatre by, for, and about Black people with Black people. And so it's this radical call for justice and equality through theatre, through theatre artists and social activism. So other theatres within the Black Theater Movement at this time starts to come up. As you know, Afro American Studio for Acting and Speech in 1966. Then we have the New Lafayette Theatre, which was Ed Bullins and Robert Macbeth's theatre; the Negro Ensemble Company—Douglas Turner Ward, Happy Ending and Day of Absence, some of the best known plays from them.
And there's also—there are three theatres today that are still in existence. So the Black Arts Movement did not die as many may assume. There's the New Federal Theatre in downtown Manhattan. Woody King Jr. established that; he's one of the most prolific producers directors of our time, I think. The National Black Theater was started by Dr. Barbara Ann Tear, which is more of a ritualistic spiritual center. And then also lastly at the Billie Holiday Theater, which is now run by Dr. Indira Etwaroo, who was a pupil of Ernie McClintock. So we see this legacy being pulled forward, right, through the next generations. Again, what distinguishes McClintock in his career and among his peers, there's an overlap where the self-determination of a call for equality and social activism, but really having this technique that's rooted in community building, in self-determination, with scripted and unscripted work.
There were other techniques Barbara Ann Tear talks about ritualistic approaches within her theatre, but McClintock dealt with scripted work and dealt with white playwrights as well. But really what the focus was, it was on that ensemble building, which connects to community building and the artist's individual creative agency, which relates to Malcolm X's notion of self-determination.
Mike: You talk about McClintock's techniques and use the term “jazz acting.” Could you explain what that means? And maybe talk a little bit about how it differs from other approaches to acting that listeners might be familiar with.
Ibby: Sure. Yeah. So jazz acting—if we think about it musical namesake also—it's not chaotic, much to their… there's lots of misunderstandings about jazz “Is just this sort of chaos.” It's a very disciplined form. And once one reaches sort of that level of discipline and sophistication, then one can riff, and the same goes for jazz acting. It requires discipline and ensemble building for artists to riff in performance. There's a play between the collective ensemble and that individual artistic expression, right? So when there is a riff, when we hear one musician, a saxophonist come out and play a riff, right? There's sort of that primacy on that one artist, but you can feel that ensemble supporting that one artist. The technique is rooted in the inclusion of multiple Black identities and experiences. And so, again, it equips actors to play anything from Shakespeare to Amiri Baraka to what we now call devised performance, which McClintock was doing in the mid-sixties.
And so, yeah, so it's really focused on that ensemble building and that individual artistic expression. The way that we can think about how it's different from other maybe mainstream approaches is that there's a lot of work going on in terms of Black acting methods. I know that you had Sharrell Luckett on your show, right? There's Shawnee Anello and Monica White Ndounou, just to name a couple. And so there are all these conversations within Black acting scholarship, right? That acting techniques are just as culturally rooted as a canon of plays or as a movement is, right, it's subjective. We have to understand that as artists. So the difference is that it is again rooted in this Afrocentricity, this Afrocentric worldview. And by that I mean—I'm hearkening to Molefi Kete Asante who wrote The Afrocentric Idea, who's placing African ideals at the center of any study.
So in this case, in the study of theatre that involves African-centric culture and behavior. And so Afrocentricity is a moral project as well as an intellectual project that posits Africans as subjects, rather than objects, in human history. So as we, I hope we all know, right, within sort of skewed histories history is theory. History is not necessarily fact, right? So Black bodies have been placed not as objects, but as subjects. So Afrocentricity really relates not just to theatre, right, but so sort of all intellectual inquiries and discourses. So what McClintock is doing is placing the Black experience at the center, as opposed to on the periphery.
Mike: You've mentioned the playwright Amiri Baraka a few times, and you have a really striking anecdote about how McClintock's approach to what he called jazz acting worked with one of Baraka's plays called Slave Ship. Could you tell us about that particular production and what was so unique about it?
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