First year. First semester. First weeks. I had no idea what to expect. I was still settling into life at Swarthmore: adjusting to the campus environment, my new roommate, my dorm, all my classes, the hundreds of names I (for the life of me) couldn’t remember, and my professors. I didn’t even know them! What would they be like? Would they be boring? Would they be harsh graders? Would they think I was funny?
It was then I met Jude Sandy, associate professor of acting, in my acting I class that fall. At 1:15 on a late August Tuesday afternoon, a class of about fifteen people gathered in the small but spacious Kuharski Studio under the Matchbox. We gathered in a circle on the floor, barefoot and crisscross applesauce, starting class with a classic actors’ check in: a few words to describe your current state and then on to the next person.
Jude then instructed us to find space on the floor, on our backs, and close our eyes. I have to admit, I was skeptical of the exercise at first. “A meditation?” I thought, “I don’t like meditations.”
Boy, was I wrong.
“Release into the floor,” Jude repeated to the class in a calm, thoughtful, inviting tone. Never had I felt so grounded. I could feel every part of my being melt onto the wood floor of the studio. As my thoughts drifted across my limbs like a calm tide, I felt both perfectly comfortable and sharply visceral in my body — a beautiful and self-reflective sentiment. Breathing together as a class — experiencing a collective sigh of relief — was perhaps the most centralizing experience of my life.
Acting I immediately became my favorite class at Swarthmore. With every Tuesday afternoon, every meditation, every new joyous interaction with Jude, my love for the art of theater (and, simultaneously, my admiration of Jude) only grew. I had a class that was my escape from the real world, an expression of myself in an open, accepting, and euphoric place. And, as the semester progressed and we reached into more complex theater topics, I particularly fixated on the joy Jude carried with him to every lesson, every thought, every sentence, every movement.
I have the absolute pleasure of acting under the directorship of Jude this semester in “The Threepenny Opera.” The piece deals with incredibly heavy topics, especially for my character, Macheath; however, Jude does not waver in the face of these issues, creating space and time to care for our cast in moments of difficulty. And I am eternally grateful for that.
I am eternally grateful for the joy Jude provides to my life: the intentionality in his speech, his genuine laugh, his desire to truly know you, the way he cares so deeply for all around him. And I implore anyone and everyone to find time to meet him, to speak to him, to take a class with him. With complete calmness and strong breathing, Jude will change your life.
Associate Professor Jude Sandy: I became an actor because I was shy, and because I didn’t like attention, and as a way to force myself to be in a more naked relationship with people. It was a challenge that I set for myself to become a performer. And I also started in dance, actually, not as an actor.
James Shelton: So you started in dance as like, “I’m going to be more out in the world as me?” That’s fun. When was that?
Sandy: I was older. I grew up in Trinidad, in the Caribbean, in a devoutly Catholic military family, and I was always a creative child. [I was] a very effeminate child and always knew that I was queer in a society in which, as I was growing up, there wasn’t commonly shared language for queerness, and certainly not constructive language. There was derogatory language for it. When I became a teenager, as a way to try to shape me, I was discouraged from pursuing the arts. I had sung in choirs as a kid, I would draw and paint a lot as a kid, and then into adolescence, I was told I could not pursue those interests. My dad, whose friend was the managing editor of a local newspaper, said, “Well, you’re a good writer, so let’s see if we can get you an internship with this newspaper.”
They started me off in the news office. This was the summer I was seventeen, and it was not a good fit, so they sent me over to the features desk. And, accidentally, there was a Caribbean youth performing arts troupe that was touring our island, and no one wanted to go, and there were all these tickets for it, and I was like, “Okay, fine, I’ll go.” I went, and I was completely captivated. That day, at the age of eighteen, I became an arts reporter.
And with no history or experience in theater or dance or visual art, I started writing about all those things. And because I had no history, I would go to companies’ rehearsals, and I would interview the director. I’d write a preview article based on what the director had to say and what I observed in the rehearsal process, and then I’d write a review based on how much I thought they succeeded in what they articulated as being the goals of the work that they were doing. By doing that, I ended up becoming a theater and dance critic. And by the time I left Trinidad at the age of twenty to come to America, to go to college, I was one of the foremost arts critics in the country, by accident.
Shelton: That is awesome. Oh my God, what? How did I not know this?
Sandy: But you know, the access points were fairly easy because it’s a small society. I came to America. I had gotten a scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, with the intention that I was going to study international relations and either join my country’s foreign service or join the [United Nations] because my family and I agreed that that would be a respectable use of my capacities. Very quickly it became clear that it would not work. I would try to apply myself to things that weren’t artistic and creative, and I would fail, and I would fail miserably.
It was not until after a long, circuitous experience in which I did everything from working retail at a Banana Republic store, working in the accounting department of a corporate real estate firm in Washington, D.C., and then ending up moving to California because a dear friend asked me to help him. He had been hired to start and lead a free charter high school for the arts in Oakland, CA, and he called me and asked me to come and help him start the school.
While I was there — I had been to Brown [University] once before as a visiting student from Morehouse — Craig [Maravich] encouraged me to apply to a Brown program called Resumed Undergraduate Education. By this point, I was 25, and if you were either 25 or had been out of school for three years, you could apply to this program. I applied, and I got in. I had promised myself that if I got in, I would take a dance class, because when I was there as a visiting student, a friend had encouraged me to take it and I chickened out. With so much of the fear of having been a queer kid in Trinidad who was severely bullied — both for my own identity but also for my engagement with the arts — I thought I didn’t have room for that kind of engagement, and so I made this promise to myself. I got in, and I went there, and I took a dance class.
I took my first dance class a couple of weeks before my 26th birthday, with a woman by the name of Julie Adams Strandberg. I took a class with her for a week, and at the end of the week, she called me over and she said, “What’s going on with you? What is your story?” And I said, “Well, I’m a Resumed Undergraduate Education student.” I thought that I was going to go to Providence, RI, go to Brown, to be a philosopher. That was my intention. I was like, “I’m going to become an Africana philosopher.”
And so I told her that’s what I’m here to do. At the end of the semester, I said to her, “Julie, I need to talk to you,” and she brought me to her office, and I said, “I told you at the beginning of the semester that I came here to be an Africana philosopher.” She said, “Mm-hmm, and now you want to dance?” I said, “Yes.” And she pushed me for three years and sent me to the American Dance Festival. She and her sister Carolyn Adams ran the New York State Summer Schools for the Arts School of Dance Program, and they would make me come every year, and I would work there and take classes there and perform there. So I really thought dance was going to be my life.
My last year of college, one of my other dance teachers, Michelle Bach-Coulibaly, said to me, “You should take an acting class. It’ll be great for your dancing.” So, my last year of undergrad, at the age of 28, I took a class with a woman, my first acting teacher, Lowry Marshall. At the end of it, she said to me, “Look, this dance thing is great. But you’re about to turn 29 years old. You’ll have ten more years to dance, and then your dance career will be over. You’ve got the chops for acting. You should act, and there are grad programs that would love to have you and would support your presence.” I, at that point, had gotten into [New York University Tisch School of the Arts] for dance and Sarah Lawrence [College] for MFA programs there. So I deferred acceptance of both of those and moved to New York and decided I would dance for a year. And within two months of getting to New York, I realized, “Oh, no, this is not it,” and applied to grad programs in theater, and got back into the Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA program.
I had almost no experience as an actor in class with all of these other young, talented people who all had tremendous experience. But I also happened to be the oldest person at the age of 30, and the first year of grad school, I thought they had made a mistake. The whole first year, I thought, “Oh, this should not have happened. You should not have accepted me. I am not equipped to do this work.”
And it was a really challenging year.
But then things slowly started turning around, and I started to breathe more into the work.
Shelton: This is all really awesome. I know there’s a lot of history in between grad school and now. I think one thing that stuck out to me during rehearsal, I think you mentioned at some point that theater, or acting, saved your life. And I’m curious if you would want to expand upon that idea and just what theater really means to you. We’ve already kind of talked about this a little bit, but I think asking the question is nice.
Sandy: I’m going to take my time.
As a queer, sensitive, creative, deeply devout kid, a relationship to creativity was inherently central to who I was. I think a lot of young people who are misfits — and I think we all are in one way or another — desperately need spaces that tell us it’s okay to just be who we are, and that invest in the in the work of young people mining their identity, their capacity, their orientations, their points of view, their talent, their voice, to really grow into themselves in ways that are full, self-empowered, generous, communicative — that allows them to be a light unto the world.
Having experienced that engagement taken away from me as a young person, it’s become central to my life’s work to make space for young people to find themselves in relationship to their own history, their own community, their own ancestry, and the socio-politics of the world around them so that they can be powerful, engaged and accountable to the cultures of which they are a part. I do believe that if my father had not sent me to that internship — which I think he regretted, by the way, because it led me into the arts in a way my family hoped I’d never venture — I can’t say with confidence that I would be alive today.
I think there are ways for us to be engaged with the world around us that can be embracing of all that we are and all that we can be, all the nooks and crannies of what is possible in our being.
I believe that art, and specifically the art of the theater, is a space in which every kind of deep opening of the spirit of a human being is possible. And so that’s why I do it, and that’s why I teach it.
That same woman, Julie Strandberg, after I had danced for a semester, made me join a program that she had created called the American Dance Legacy Initiative, and its teaching and performing company called Dancing Legacy. I remember saying to her, “I don’t know anything yet. Why are you asking me to do this? I don’t have the skill.” And she said to me, and I will never forget it, “As you learn, teach.”
She was asserting that as soon as we receive a gift that enriches us in some way or the other, it is our responsibility to share it with other people. That none of it is meant to just reside in us, that we’re not lakes, we’re rivers. We’re supposed to pass it on.
So in a way, Julie Adams Strandberg gave me my life’s work, because she made it possible for me to be an artist, but then she also made it inevitable for me to be a teacher as well.
Shelton: You’re covering all my questions so beautifully. I was curious if you could expand a little bit more on what ways and practices you implement as a teacher to create those spaces of openness and acceptance that you were just talking about, and what that looks like to you and how you think other teachers or spaces could implement these ways in classes that aren’t acting classes.
Sandy: Before I came to Swat, I worked with a program at Middlebury College founded by a man named Craig Maravich. Craig and I had become colleagues and friends at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English, which is a summer master’s program in English and teaching that also houses its own acting ensemble. And out of approaches that were developed there, he created a program called Beyond the Page, an applied theater program in which we take the practices of the theater into other academic spaces. It was defining for me to work with him in developing that program, because we got to see what people in other academic spaces — and that included students and faculty members, staff, and administrators — we got to see how powerfully people responded to the work of the theater in settings that weren’t of the theater itself, how their sense of community and belonging was transformed. And that profoundly influenced the way I teach in theater spaces as well.
You’ve experienced this. For me, I think what the work of the theater gives us the opportunity to do is to connect all of our intelligence deeply into the body, and actually to unleash the body as an integral part of our multi-dimensional, intelligent engagement with the world, with ideas, with conflict, with our community, and with people who may appear to be completely different from us.
What that kind of intellectual engagement demands is a deep knowing of the self, a deep centering in the self. The generosity it takes to project one’s imagination into the ideation and points of view of others demands a deep foundation in your own reality that becomes the springboard into an understanding of the other. So for me, all of the work of the theater comes back to a connection to an embodied intelligence that is, yes, informed by my experience of dance, but really is even more simple and elemental.
It’s just about the breath.
How are we activating our multi-dimensional intelligence through a deep, intentional, generous relationship to our own breathing that in turn unlocks an equally deep, generous, expressive, powerful connection to our expressive and communicative selves? And yes, that is a corporeal experience. I think our intelligence is corporeal, and so much of the world that we live in works to, intentionally or unintentionally, divorce us from the body. But in reality, the body is all we have. It’s the beginning and the end of what we have in our engagement with the world. So no real, full, genuine engagement with the world is possible without a deep integration of the mind with the body. And so for me, that’s what our theater work is about. How do we create a space for reunion that displaces this false dichotomy between mind and body, so that we can be whole, first in ourselves and then in communication and in congress with other people around big ideas, big problems, big possibilities, all the big stories that reflect our humanity?
So for me, we breathe, and then we move, and then we connect, and then we engage text and monologue and dialogue and ideas and immense intellectual problems. But you can’t do any of that if you’re not breathing deep into the body.
Not effectively anyway.
Shelton: You are a quote machine. The only other question I have is very different from what we’ve been talking about, but “The Threepenny Opera” is, I know you mentioned, maybe one of two musicals that the theater department has endeavored to put on for production ensemble. I’m curious: why a musical? And in what ways does a musical express differently as an art than a play would?
Sandy: I’ll be transparent.
Why a musical?
Because the students have been hungry for one.
Why not a musical more often?
Because they’re really hard.
What is special about musical theater is what I discovered the first time [“The Threepenny Opera” cast] all sang together in rehearsal. Once again, for someone who did not get to experience theater, and particularly musical theater, in this age range of my life, the first time we all sang together in the room, it revealed a purity and a power of connection that felt so much more immense than the sum of our individualities.
It’s the kind of thing that only happens when people make music together. And I didn’t quite understand that before going into the project, not viscerally. What I knew going into the project was that Swat students desperately wanted to do a musical, and it’s been hard for us to do it. What would happen if we chose to do one as a way to begin a conversation about what it takes to do musical theater more sustainably on campus?
What I’ve been discovering about the power of musical theater as we’ve been doing this, even as we’re doing an “opera,” or a “play with music,” or a “musical,” created in the 1920s by German artists, is that, in fact, the musical really is quintessentially American. There is a kind of completeness and exuberance of expression that happens through a musical that doesn’t happen through any other form of performance that to me, captures the American spirit so completely, like nothing else does. I actually don’t think there’s anything more American than the musical. Yes, we’re not doing an American musical, but we are setting our musical in America. And I do think it is the quintessential American performing art.
So I feel like you can’t have a full theater education without grappling with the demands and the opportunities that a work of musical theater offers. And I may be getting myself in trouble here by saying this, but I think we have an obligation to figure out how we can make it a more significant part of what we are offering to our students. So what I’m hoping is that through this experiment — and it has been tried before, right? It’s not like no one ever does a musical, but it’s rare, and it’s been hard, and it’s been hard because musicals take so many different contributions to happen. My dream is that doing this this round will give us a case study that allows us to begin a constructive conversation about the kind of inter-departmental collaboration that can make musical theater happen more regularly, and in more fully realized form as part of the creative educational experience that we offer at Swat.
What would it look like for theater and music and dance to really collaborate to create a kind of marquee musical theater production? Not every year, but often enough that every single student who is deeply involved in the theater at Swat gets that experience before they leave.
I’m not sure if I answered the question, because I think I may have forgotten part of it.
Shelton: I disagree. I personally love that answer. And it covered everything I was asking. It covered what makes a musical more different than a play expression-wise, you’re saying it’s a more authentic expression of an American art. I think I also said, what challenges have you faced? It’s massive. It’s a musical. There’s a ton of coordination between departments. And, I think, also what I really love is that you connected it back to your earlier topic of, “Well, we want to make sure all students get this experience, because it’s so valuable to have such a wide range of expression in class.”
Sandy: It’s also quintessentially Swat. Because musical theater is multi-disciplinary, it demands all your faculties as a creative person. And so to me, that’s the profile of the Swat student. Everyone has such rich, often seemingly incongruent interests, that I can think of no better place, at least within the performing arts, in which our students, who have such a diversity of passions, get to come in and create within a container that asks them to work multi-dimensionally. And theater is already, by its nature, multi-dimensional, but I do think musical theater takes that to its fullest expression in a way that I think is representative of Swat at its most exuberant, and our country at its most exuberant and promising.
That musical theater is actually kind of the best of us.
It holds the best of us, when we do it right. It really offers us the best of ourselves, both individually and communally.
