We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ibby Cizmar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ibby below.
Hi Ibby, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
Using creativity as a mode of change has always been in my DNA. I am a first generation Eastern European cis-woman – my mother is Slovak and my father is is Hungarian. My father was a refugee and the story I hear growing up, at its core, is connected to arts and activism. My grandfather, Nagyapa, was imprisoned in communist/Russian occupied Hungary where he was a priest. He refused to convert to the government sanctioned Russian Orthodoxy. My grandmother, Babči, was a classical opera singer but due to practicalities she became a schoolteacher and had five children. As luck would have it, the prison was situated right next to the preschool where Babči taught. With the children she would sing songs in Ruthenian, an Eastern European dialect unfamiliar to the Russian soldiers. These songs would be coded messages to Nagyapa where sometimes the messages would give instructions of how to meet after hours by the prison fence to have time together.
From a small age hearing this story, I realized the incredible power of performance. And even though my grandparents may not have considered themselves activist artists, they used the power of music, performance, and community to subvert the system. I always am drawn to overlooked histories, stories, and figures who have, despite oppression, created art as not just a means of survival, but a source of joy. My book, ERNIE MCCLINTOCK AND THE JAZZ ACTORS FAMILY, unearths a story about a queer Black man in the 1960s who did just that and has created a legacy of artists that continues to impact our contemporary moment.
Ibby, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As far as my professional career, I am a trained actor: MFA from the Actors Studio Drama School/New School, NYU’s Atlantic Theatre Company, and a PhD in Drama from Tufts University. Up to my PhD, everything was based on Stanislavsky-based techniques and white western Eurocentric stories – subaltern approaches and narratives were left on the periphery. In 2012 I started at Tufts and enrolled in the Theoretical and Historical Development of African American Theatre with Dr. Monica White Ndounou – something inside me was ignited. First, it was a lot of frustration and anger – “Why had I never been exposed to this rich American tradition which IS American history?” (I had read boiler-plate Black plays like RAISIN IN THE SUN and DUTCHMAN, but that was not sufficient!) A whole world opened up to me – subversion, fighting the oppression system through art, art as protest, art as survival, and JOY.
When I was preparing for my oral comprehensive exams this name “Ernie McClintock” kept appearing in passing comments and/or footnotes. Curiosity called to me – who was this enigmatic figure who created the Jazz Acting technique? And what was this technique that could be seamlessly applied to anything from Shakespeare to Baraka to Bullins to Molière to devised work? I decided, not knowing how, I would write my dissertation on Ernie McClintock. So my quest began where I became a Facebook sleuth searching for his students and combing pages and pages of google pages for an archive. Before my work on McClintock, one would have to go to at least page 10 of google to find any information on McClintock. Eventually I found my way to Richmond, Virginia, where Geno Brantley (Ernie McClintock and Ronald Walker’s surrogate son) and Donna Pendarvis opened their home to me. In their basement for about a decade, the private collection of Ernie McClintock was sleeping. I had some access to pieces of the archive, but my main source of research was in the interviews with McClintock’s former students and colleagues. Once my dissertation was published I gained access to the basement. The journey, which started in 2015 culminated in my book ERNIE MCCLINTOCK AND THE JAZZ ACTORS FAMILY: REVIVING THE LEGACY was published by Routledge in January 2023. But…this is just the beginning. I am co-editing THE JAZZ ACTING HANDBOOK with Jazz Actor Mary Hodges and co-producing the documentary SEARCHING FOR ERNIE with Jazz Actor Derome Scott Smith. I am so proud to say that the University of Virginia has acquired the Ernie McClintock Archive – which consists of over two dozen boxes of photographs, reel-to-reels, correspondences, and personal writings. These will be available to the public at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in spring 2024.
So if you aren’t famliar with Ernie McClintock or Jazz Acting, here is the VERY truncated version: Ernie McClintock was the founder of the Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech (est. 1966) in Harlem, the artistic director of the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble (est. 1968) in Harlem, and the founder of the Jazz Actors Theatre (est. 1991) in Richmond. McClintock’s Jazz Acting technique infused self-determination and community building—tenets of Black Power—in his actor training and productions. Based on the principles of jazz, McClintock’s groundbreaking productions and innovative acting technique conceived a script as a melody and the actors as musicians who riff “in the moment,” resulting in dynamic and electrifying performances.
Based on my experience as an actor, a scholar, and my education from the work of Ernie McClintock, I offer my students alternative ways to approaching character creation. I also offer choice. There is not one right way to approach a character. But the most important thing is for the actor to be authentic and true to themselves, without compromising their physical or mental health. I feel so lucky to do the work that I do. At the end of every semester, with my acting students I tell them to follow their joy. Do I love what I do 24 hours a day? Of course not! But I can honestly say, at least once a day I am grateful for the work that I do.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I never imagined that would be a theatre professor. I never imagined that I would have received a PhD. From the time I was a little girl the only thing I ever wanted to be was on stage – it was this place where I could do or say things in an imagined world that I couldn’t do or say in real life. As a 12-year old, living 30 minutes outside of Manhattan, I had an agent, a manger – something that I BEGGED my parents for. They agreed and I thought “Now I am a REAL actor.” I became so fixated on being AN ACTOR that it was an obsession where I would place my self-worth in getting cast, not getting cast, what the reviews said or didn’t say – and putting my self-worth in what I love based on other people’s opinions is always a moving target. I wish that I could tell that little girl that her self-worth as an artist does not lie in other people’s opinions.
After I went to the Actors Studio and was a working actor I had to pay the bills! So I worked in advertising and then all the sudden 4 years were gone – I realized I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t living what I love – I wasn’t in joy. So I thought okay, I will take graduate classes at Hunter College and SEE if I have what it takes to get a PhD. Turns out, I realized that not only did I have what it took, but I was lit up again. My heart was full and my joy was revived.
Now as a professor at Vanderbilt, I tell my students ALL the time – you don’t have to be ONE thing. I think in our capitalist driven system where we are always asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” there is this pressure to be one thing – a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an actor, etc. However, we can be as many things as we choose. I am an actor. I am a scholar. I am an acting coach. I am a professor. I am a director. The pivot into advertising it just seemed like it “happened” to me – but it was a necessary happening in order for me to find my way back to myself.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
As a scholar of Black theatre it is important for me to note that my work is in conversation with former and contemporary scholar-artists. Some of those works include:
– Shonni Ennelow’s Method Acting and Its Discontents
– E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness
– La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers; Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement
– Marc Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
– Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer’s Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches
I also highly recommend the documentary BLACK THEATER THE MAKING OF A MOVEMENT about the Black Arts Movement.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ibbycizmar.com
- Instagram: @ibbified
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ibby.cizmar/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibby-cizmar-phd-93872212/
- Other: https://a.co/d/61qkurx https://www.routledge.com/Ernie-McClintock-and-the-Jazz-Actors-Family-Reviving-the-Legacy/Cizmar/p/book/9781032034669
Image Credits
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, University of Virginia.