Tomé Cousin leads Carver college students in a motion workshop.
Roshunda Jones-Koumba holds court docket within the classroom. She is a trainer, mentor, good friend, and generally therapist to almost 200 college students at G.W. Carver High School in Houston, the place she’s served because the drama trainer for 18 years. The magnet college is a historic landmark within the Acres Home neighborhood, a predominantly Black neighborhood within the metropolis’s northwest. Carver is thought for its expertise and engineering tracks, and, due to Jones-Koumba, a flourishing arts program with previous productions together with Hairspray, Memphis, Dreamgirls, and The Color Purple, which had a sprawling solid of 130. In January, G.W. Carver Magnet High School would be the first highschool within the nation to stage the jukebox tuner Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.
Jones-Koumba’s extraordinary efforts have been acknowledged in June on the Tony Awards with the Excellence in Theatre Education Award, offered by Carnegie Mellon University, which since 2015 has honored a highschool drama trainer who has made an outsized affect on their college students. The award got here not solely with the well-known spinning medallion but additionally a $10,000 money prize to help the drama program, and a grasp class with Carnegie Mellon University college on the successful trainer’s highschool.
The grasp class for G.W. Carver Magnet High School’s drama program on Nov. 28, which I used to be lucky to be available for, turned out to be an extra check of Jones-Koumba’s creativity and her college students’ can-do spirit; the night earlier than the occasion, town of Houston declared a “boil water” discover after an influence outage on the East Water Purification Plant. The citywide public well being directive included college closures, which left visiting CMU college with out a location for the grasp class, and the scholars with out bus transportation.
Jabari Collins, the drama program’s technical director, assured the visiting CMU staffers that the present would go on. “If anyone can figure this out, it’s Roshunda,” Collins mentioned calmly. Indeed, after numerous telephone calls and late-night textual content messages, Jones-Koumba labored her intensive community and located a close-by dance studio to carry the grasp class. She even organized for carpooling.
“I always call my students the Ever Ready Players,” mentioned Jones-Koumba. “If there’s something in the way, they’re not giving up—there’s a way to make it happen. And I love that spirit.”
It’s not onerous to see the place they get that spirit.
A gaggle of 15 college students spilled into HeartBeat Houston Dance and Fitness studio the subsequent morning singing “Seasons of Love” in concord, as highschool theatre children are apt to do. The schedule for the day included vocal workout routines, textual content evaluation, choreography, and discussions concerning the enterprise of performing to provide the scholars a preview of learning theatre on the collegiate stage.
CMU’s newly appointed head of the School of Drama, Robert Ramirez, set the tone for the grasp class. “No one is here to give you a grade,” he mentioned. “There’s not going to be an award handed out at the end of the day. Give yourself the room to be free as an artist without the fear of judgment and without the pressure to have to do it right.”
After settling into the area, CMU assistant professor of voice Lisa Velten Smith helped the energetic group discover area of their our bodies. The college students roamed across the room reciting the tongue tornado “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” a warm-up that doubled as an train in character growth and world-building. “I feel so free!” one teen chirped.
Next, assistant performing professor Kyle Haden paired the scholars off to establish beats in a scene from Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! The college students learn strains as Dick and Muriel, shifting across the studio to mark every emotional shift.
Velten Smith and Haden then spoke about their profession paths and doled out recommendation for locating casting notices, making ready for auditions, and managing funds between gigs. An overarching theme of the day was how the scholars may apply the abilities discovered in Jones-Koumba’s classroom past the stage.
“You will probably discover that you will be right for so many different careers because of the tools that you are learning,” Velten Smith mentioned. “You’re learning acting skills, but you are learning so much more than that. You’re learning how to negotiate, right? You’re learning how to speak with other people.”
Indeed, a couple of of Jones-Koumba’s senior college students shared their plans to check the pure sciences and speech pathology subsequent yr, to thunderous applause. And for college kids with their eyes on the stage, Haden supplied this: “There is now more room for people who look like us…I have much greater hope for you than I had for me coming out of school, you know? I didn’t have people who looked at me telling me I could do this. I’m a person who looks like you, and I’m telling you that you can do this. And I hope you do! I hope to be across the table from you at some point in time, holding the door open.”
After a lunch break, the rapt college students circled up for a dialogue between Ramirez and CMU alumni Antwayn Hopper, at present starring as Thought 6 in A Strange Loop on Broadway. The pair spoke concerning the profound affect their former lecturers had on their path within the theatre business and the world.
“Y’all are very blessed to have Ms. Jones,” Hopper mentioned. “Nancy Scrinopskie Epoch was my Ms. Jones, and she saw something in me and heard something in me that I had not recognized.”
Likewise, Ramirez’s journey to changing into a theatre educator was kickstarted by a highschool theatre trainer.
“The most exciting thing to me in the world,” he mentioned, “is to watch a young person in a room have a spark of an idea and discover the power in themselves, and then to help them to access it. I don’t think teachers give you something you didn’t have before. What they do is they direct you and they guide you in the direction of your power and your talent and your gifts—they give you some tools along the way of accessing.”
Perhaps the most important theme of the day was the significance of utilizing these instruments for the better good. “Art is essential to life,” mentioned Ramirez. “I don’t think there’s any real living without art…If you don’t have a life where you’re experiencing art, making art, admiring it or supporting it, how do you really access yourself and your humanity?”
The college students, sensible past their years, requested how one can discover a help community outdoors their households, how one can change into extra comfy with themselves, and how one can keep psychological wellness. “I wanted to take a minute to appreciate you two,” a small voice mentioned from the group. “This is really inspirational and heartfelt to me being a minority, and also being a part of the LGBTQ+ community. You being here is really helpful for me.”
In the afternoon, professor of dance Tomé Cousin introduced the cohort to their toes. “Choreography is about telling a story—or not,” mentioned Cousin over a booming beat. “If you don’t tell a story, you’re going to represent something like emotions or colors.” The college students took locations on the ballet barre and adopted Cousin’s lead via numerous warm-ups.
The session culminated in “Monster,” an train impressed by the work of the Alvin Ailey firm, which inspired the scholars to let unfastened in a full-body explosion. “Inside every actor is a monster!” shouted Cousin as the scholars fashioned clawed arms and stomped across the studio.
The grasp class ended with an vitality circle conspired by the bubbling Hopper, with college students holding arms and leaping within the air.
“I’m very thankful to you all for showing up today, even when we had no water,” mentioned Hopper with amusing. “Showing up today, not knowing what the answer or question may be, showing up and showing out, because that’s what we do, right?”
Around the circle, the scholars every shouted out one phrase to summarize the day: “inspiring,” “enlightening,” “empowering,” “thrilling,” “meaningful,” “rebirth.” For tenth grader Cora Frazier, the massive takeaway was that artwork is for everyone. “One thing I got from this experience is that theatre is everywhere.”
For Trinity Jones, a ninth-grader, the spotlight was Cousin’s motion workshop. “We all got a chance to get away from our stress and worries,” she mentioned. “We learned to express ourselves through freestyling and had a chance to live in the moment, and we created something very powerful from that.”
For her half, Jones-Koumba selected the phrase “heartfelt” to explain the grasp class. “The students were all engaged, and you can tell that they were inspired to go out and do anything—the sky’s the limit,” she mentioned. “Just to have that representation there was so important for them.”
Since the 2022 Tony Awards, Jones-Koumba’s highlight has been shining even brighter. Just final month, she was named on Ebony’s Power 100 List and attended a star-studded occasion in Los Angeles with fellow artwork awardees Michael R. Jackson, Myles Frost, and Jeremy O. Harris. Her accolades additionally embody the 2021 Stephen Schwartz Musical Theatre Teacher of the Year Award, the International Thespian Society Inspirational Theatre Educator Award, and induction into the Texas Thespians Hall of Fame. The metropolis of Wharton, Texas, her hometown, declared June twenty eighth as a day to honor her.
But her greatest reward, she mentioned, is seeing her college students achieve numerous fields.
“It’s just beautiful to see my students blossom,” she effused, rattling off a listing of former college students now pursuing careers as nurses, entrepreneurs, and attorneys. Actors too: Fernell Hogan, certainly one of her former college students on the Theatre Under the Stars Humphreys School of Musical Theatre, is at present in Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway.
“This award has really opened my students’ eyes on how important the arts are globally,” mentioned Jones-Koumba. “They have become advocates for arts education and will tell whoever will listen about how important it is for arts to be at every single school.”
Allison Considine (she/her) is a former senior editor of this journal.
*Carnegie Mellon University supported our reporter’s journey to Houston to cowl the grasp class.
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