INTRO
Claire: In 2021, Payton Rhyan was living her dream. She was studying theater at Salt Lake Community College where she landed an internship with a local arts group where she would be stage managing and working as an on-call technical director.
Payton: And it allowed me this opportunity to engage with theater in a way I never have. This is on the scale of Utah Opera, Ballet West, and traveling Broadway shows. I was working the first tour of Dear Evan Hansen. So imagine being 20, just starting off your career, and you're thinking, “if this is the next thing I can get, what else can I do?”
Claire: She took on more and more responsibilities, booking stage managing gigs at other theaters in the region. And soon, she was working a full-time theater schedule, while also finishing her undergrad degree and working the early morning shift receiving shipments at a local department store.
Payton: But at that point I was awake from about 2:30 a.m. until you know 1 a.m. give or take because you have to send the rehearsal report, and I remember it was one of the community shows I was working on the technical director at the time came up to me and said, “Payton, you're sending the rehearsal report at 11 a.m. not immediately after rehearsal as a stage manager should.”
And I had to explain, “Oh, I don't do that because I'm sleeping in my car. And I'm sleeping in my car, so I'm not late to any of these things.” And I was afraid that if I slowed down even a minute, I would completely lose all these opportunities.
Claire: Over the next couple of years, her life was defined by periods of high energy and stress – fueled by caffeine and adderall. Then, she would crash, her low periods marked by alcohol abuse.
Payton: A doctor talked to me, looked at my whole case history and said, “Has anyone ever told you that you might have bipolar?” And I said, “No, actually nobody's ever brought that up.” Everything in my life kind of came to a head where I went, “Oh no, I've been in a hypomanic state or a true manic state for several years now.”
Then those crashes wasn't from necessarily caffeine or lack of drugs, though that does help, you know, um, that was me experiencing a severe depressive episode because it's not normal to work from 2:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. for a month and then the next month want to die. Like that's not the two ranges of human emotions.
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Payton: I realized I needed to take a year off. And that was horrifying. For any arts professional to take a year off, it feels like career murder.
And I remember just sobbing and having a meltdown because I thought I had, I had just effectively ruined my career at the age of 22.
We have a huge culture, especially within the, you know, stage manager, technical director, production manager, and arts admin roles. We have a culture that really, really values that grind. So we are over-productive. And then of course, what happens when you're over-productive, the people that are giving you these assignments, they, they expect more and that cycle continues.
Claire: She broke that cycle and moved home, feeling defeated and empty.
Payton: And I was in the recovery stage, not wanting to get out of bed.
I couldn't be bothered to brush my hair at that point. My hair was falling out in clumps because I either ripped it out, or I wasn't eating, or I was eating too much. Like, it was just so bad.
Claire: It's then that her mom suggested Payton check out a horse therapy program in a nearby town that specializes in helping young women and girls overcome trauma.
Payton: And obviously, I'm in detox. I have, you know, no substances in my system. But Darn, do I want them. [laugh]
And I drove like an hour out of my way to this barn.
It's really beautiful. There is stained glass everywhere of horses. And I've always wanted to work with horses.
And the executive director, came out and she said, “Hey, I know we're supposed to meet.I just have this feeling. in my body that you were supposed to be here.”
And I'm gonna cry and I looked at her and said, “I think so, too.”
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Payton: When you work with horses, they don't let you touch them unless you're confident. So when I got into the ring with the largest horse at the barn, I realized that I had lost all sense of confidence in myself.
I'm sitting on his back and I'm horrified. I'm so high off the ground.
So I was looking down. I wasn't looking up. And my instructor, she said, “Payton, just look, just look up, everywhere you look, you need to imagine what you want your future to be.”
And that was very powerful because for about a year I didn't think I had one. I didn't think I would even live to see and even think about one.
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Payton: So I started going consistently to therapy. I went to group therapy. I saw a dietitian. I, I worked with those horses multiple times a week, and there were days I could not get out of bed. Genuinely just wanted to die, still couldn't move, and I would go to the barn and I would feel so much better.
Claire: Payton ended up taking on a leadership role at this organization.
Payton: And I had a soft spot for working with the girls and the women who were experiencing significant mental health issues and supporting them in the ways that I felt I could. And for me, that comes from doing theater.
Everything I know about leading a room, being confident and making friends and appearing like I have everything under control comes from working in the theater. So I would work with some of these women, and I would coach them through how do you, how do you hold a room by using your voice?
Or how do you give yourself more confidence and give your team more
confidence by how you say your words? And my favorite theater activity is to create a rainstorm together.
Where you turn all the lights off and you make everything silent. No one is allowed to speak.
And you can sit in silence until someone starts because someone has to be brave enough to start it.
>>sounds of snapping, tapping, and shuffling feet to sound like rain
Payton: And your goal is to start and stop a rainstorm together.
And you do that by making all kinds of sounds, but not using your voice.
>>sounds of snapping, tapping, and shuffling feet to sound like rain
Payton: And once you hear the taps, oh, it's the rain starting. And then it gets heavier. as they all embrace the energy of the room, it stops.
You realize everyone's in sync and it, you turn the lights back on and you talk about it.
You say, “Hey, Yeah. That's creating a space. For you and your team.”
It's a really gorgeous thing.
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Payton: Um, and of course working with, uh, women, working with the girls, We were shoveling horse poop and battling sobriety and battling severe depression.
And I'd say, “Hey, how can, how can I support you? What can we do to be kinder to ourselves today?” And I think that's another thing that I think I've learned from working in the theater as a whole, It's the fact that people in the theater are first and foremost people-oriented.
Claire: Once Payton found her own voice, she realized she could help others find theirs. She recently moved to New York, where she founded a nonprofit to raise awareness and give support to artists facing mental illness.
Payton: There's this overall idea in the theater that you can have empathy. I don't think even with chemical imbalances that I have lived with my whole life and bad genetics, I can't unlearn the amount of empathy that the theater taught me.
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Claire: You’re listening to ARTS. WORK. LIFE., a podcast from the Association of Performing Arts Professionals.
I’m Claire Caulfield and today’s episode: My Story To Tell
Finding your voice, and then summoning the courage to use it, can change your life.
Whether it’s helping others heal, how advocating for yourself becomes advocating for those like you, or re-claiming a harmful narrative, today's episode is all about the power of your personal story. And the beautiful things that can come from speaking out.
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ACT ONE
Claire: Act One: Leaps and Bounds
A couple years ago, Tristan Grannum was a professional dancer for a ballet company in the Midwest. He was the only Black dancer in the company. During his first season, people in leadership were constantly messing up his name and regularly calling him Demarcus.
Tristan didn’t speak up though – he felt that he was lucky to have a job – any job – as a professional dancer and didn’t want to make waves.
Then as the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam in the summer of 2020, Tristan noticed that his dance company wasn’t speaking up about Black rights.
Tristan: I reached out to the leadership team at the company that I dance for. And I said, you guys basically need to do better. And then their response to me was, we will speak amongst each other and then get back to you. They never got back to me still to this day, four years later, they never got back to me.
Um, and that really pushed me to look internally, on past situations in regards to microaggressions, racial profiling, and my experience as a professional dancer with that company, too. Did I advocate for myself? Did I stand up for myself? And that really led me to feel, “What can I do more?”
I had all these years of training, in a pre-professional setting as a professional dancer, not really knowing the importance that I had being the only Black dancer, or one of the only Black dancers in an institution, and now realizing that now I'm back at home due to the pandemic. I have a network of community individuals, from teachers to friends to family members that can support what I want to do in terms of bringing ballet back home to Brooklyn.
Claire: Tristan started teaching classes at Brooklyn Ballet, a nonprofit in the city. The more he worked with the creative team, the more he started seeing opportunities for the organization to grow.
Tristan: They had a mission to further the arts in the community. However, they did not have the financial support. They did not have the capacity to uplift their mission. So I saw that, and I basically just kept pushing myself.
I kept on looking up more opportunities.
So I think the best way to get into arts administration, it's really seeing an organization that you align yourself with, seeing how can you better help them? Arts organizations always need help, especially the smaller ones, especially the nonprofits.
And a lot of them are doing such great work, but sometimes they just need these individuals who have this belief in their mission to keep pushing the mission. So I think that's where I came into play. That's how I then became a director.
Claire: He was named director of community engagement and rehearsal director. He now oversees the teaching artists as well as fundraising, writing grants, and connecting with schools and community groups to spread the word about ballet.
Tristan: I think the scariest thing about stepping into the new role was, am I going to do it well? [laugh] I danced professionally basically since out of high school. And, I had about, one year of academic studies in college however I had to teach myself. I reached out to a lot of former directors, that I did have positive relationships with, and asked them, "How do I get funding for a non profit organization? How do I go about this?"
I had to research constantly, trial and error, doing grant applications that I got rejected, and then doing it again, and then getting it approved, So it was many of those things that pushed me, but in a sense, I just wanted to do the job to the best of my ability with the knowledge that I had at the moment.
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Tristan: One thing I struggled with is imposter syndrome. And I struggled with imposter syndrome a lot because I was young and I did not look like a normal director. Like I'm coming in a tight tank top, [laugh] tight pants and a Chelsea boot. Wearing earrings and things of that nature, which again, I wasn't used to growing up directors looking like that. and I felt at times I had to change who I was, what I was innately as Tristan in order to feel comfortable in these spaces. So I think transitioning to a leadership role, I would tell myself, “Be you!” I'm being myself now, but it was something I struggled with, especially in the first two years.
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Tristan: So a big part of my job now is public speaking, but I had the lucky opportunity to speak at the middle school where I started to dance, which was very emotional.
The dance students, a lot of them were boys, and I'm presenting different slides of me being a dancer and doing community work.
I'm teaching class and things like that. And some of the boys were in such awe.
And they were so shocked. They was like, “What? You traveled to China? You won a competition in China? You were able to dance with these different companies?”
And sometimes these achievements seem so minuscule to you as a dancer, because again, you're like, I wish I danced for American Ballet Theater, but to them, to just even have the opportunity to make dance a career it enlightened them.
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Tristan: One boy said, “I really want to be a dancer. I want to be a dancer like you.” And he now can see himself as a dancer because I was able to showcase, yes, the opportunities I had and the opportunities as a teaching artist, as a director, as a leader.
It's like, it's possible. And I get, again, I get super emotional because, You go in, you're just talking about yourself, and you're just trying, you're hoping that you're shedding light. I was honestly hoping to just shed light more on, there are Black dancers, there are Black male dancers, and now there are more leaders that look like us.
But to have people actually come up to me and say, “Now I want to be a dancer,” and then, I enlighten them on you can also, besides having a professional career, you can have a career as an arts administrator that ties in your academic experiences as well as your artistic experience, I think brought a lot of value to them because a lot of them feel like you only can choose one.
I'm like, "No, you can still go to college. You can still major in writing and liberal arts, and then still end up back at an arts organization because you have had that experience as training as a dancer. And what you have is also just as valuable."
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Tristan: You don't do it for the, the acclaim and the shine and all of, I mean obviously it's lovely, but you don't do the work for that very reason. And it was just honestly so touching because I do the work because I love to do the work.
And then to have people celebrate you as if you're like a celebrity more or less, like a notable alumni, just feels so beautiful.
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Tristan: As a dancer, I never advocated for myself. And then in a leadership role, I'm able to advocate for others whilst advocating for myself. And I think now I'm seeing more and more dancers advocate for themselves in terms of pay rates, in terms of environment that they're working in.
So I think just, don't shun yourself because you received a job. Do not suppress how you're feeling. Be able to vocalize how you're feeling because you have trained for this.
As leaders, we have to then step forward and advocate for them.
The leadership of the dance world needs to be obviously more diverse,[laugh] more equitable, more inclusive, but then also see yourselves as a dancer as well.
I think there needs to be more connection between leadership and the professional dancers, because I think that creates a more healthy and sustainable environment.
It's beautiful to see and hear when some of my teaching artists and dancers write me messages where they're like, “Tristan, I love working for you.” And I'm like, “Oh my god, that is amazing!” It's touching. It's touching because I've never written that to a director before.
I never felt inclined to write that because I did not feel valued.
When you have a leader that supports you and values you, you actually are more confident as a dancer,
And I feel if I was my director, I would have created an environment where I would even still speak up as the dancer. I would feel comfortable.
I would not feel ostracized. I wouldn't feel like, okay, Tristan, you have to hold this in or you may lose your job.
And I have created the environment where you don't feel shunned and you feel of value as an adult and as a professional dancer, as a major essential element to the organization.
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Tristan: I want people to understand it is okay to feel the pain and the hurt from getting rejected for something that you have auditioned for, you may have paid for, you may have traveled to do this audition, you may have put time into this.
But again, there are other opportunities.
When I reached out to Brooklyn Ballet saying that I wanted to do more, was in a way advocating for myself. Advocating for myself as a leader.
They did not have to see me as a director of community engagement. Again, this was not a role that they had. And I advocated for myself, seeking more opportunities. I created that lane for myself. I created that role for myself. So I think at times, knowing what are your strong suits, what are your attributes, knowing what you're good at and being able to vocalize that to organizations and to different companies and knowing that you can also create space for yourself because if there's no space for you at an organization, create it yourself.
Claire: Tristan Grannum is the Director of Community Engagement and Rehearsal Director for Brooklyn Ballet. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
CROSS PROMO
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Claire: Before our next story, I want to take a moment to tell you about another podcast: The Art of Mass Gatherings.
The Art of Mass Gatherings Podcast flips the script on festivals, transforming community events into hubs for disaster preparedness.
Artists and event workers already play a vital role in their communities, and are a powerful latent force when it comes to building climate resilience. Since 2017, the Art of Mass Gatherings has turned beloved festivals and venues across the country into hands-on classrooms where people could come together to plan for the best and worst of times through the four pillars of safety, accessibility, sustainability, and community engagement.
Now, they're bringing top luminaries, fresh tips, and groundbreaking ideas of 'creative resilience' straight to your feed. Tune in for inspiring interviews and to share your own stories.
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ACT TWO
Claire: Act Two: Strings Attached
Sheila: Look at this.
Claire: Most people would call a pile of toilet paper rolls, tangled string, and broken can openers “trash”
Sheila: This is one of my favorites. This is a broken can opener.
Claire: But to Sheila Gaskins, these are the building blocks of magic
Sheila: Get yourself some googly eyes! And you can definitely make a puppet. And there you go, there you have it. The teeth are made from a plastic bowl.
I like to call what I do kitchen sink puppetry. Because I use things that you would have around your house.
But yeah, googly eyes is the secret.
Claire: Sheila is a puppeteer, and has hundreds of stories of how her puppets have touched people’s lives – from adult and senior classes to breakthroughs with troubled elementary school kids.
Sheila: And, and I get teary eyed every time I tell this story because one student, he was really off the chain. He, he didn't listen. He couldn't keep still. And I noticed while we were doing the puppetry. I was like, “Hey, You have been listening. You've been doing your homework. You haven't been talking back. What's going on?” And he said, and I, again, I get teary eyed. He said, “Ms. Sheila, I just didn't think I would ever be doing anything like this, making a puppet.”
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Claire: Last year, Sheila was the artist in residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art – working on her next puppet show. Part of her academic work focused on the history of blackface puppets in America-- that is puppets that were made by white performers to mock and belittle Black people – often portraying Black people as violent, dangerous and stupid.
Sheila: It's the step brother or sister to blackface minstrels.
Some of them had music that accompanied them, and they would tour all around the country, making a lot of money. with this negative image of the Black person.
There's a lot of shame behind it.
The injustice is that this art form of puppetry put a stereotypical, negative stereotypical face to Black people.
Claire: Sheila was working through this research when she attended a workshop that encouraged her to make a puppet of someone close to her heart.
Sheila: The assignment was make a puppet about someone who has your back, who you trust and believe in, who believes in you.
And it didn't take me long, but I said, “Oh, that's my father.” So I made my puppet about my dad.
Claire: The puppet of Sheila's father is made mainly from toilet paper rolls, painted a deep, rich brown. The puppet sports a large mustache and a t-shirt that proudly proclaims "World's Best Dad".
Sheila: And as you can see, he has a halo and, because he's no longer with us, but he's here in spirit.
And he has wonderful wings that are really soft and reminds me of the eighties with Van Halen and all of those acts. I took it to my mother's house and my mom is suffering now from memory loss, which is a form of dementia. And I was like, “Ma, look, I made this puppet.”
Claire: Sheila’s mother hadn't been engaging with much of anything – not her grandchildren, nor other puppets made by Sheila. But she immediately gravitated toward the puppet of her late husband.
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Sheila: So lovingly and so endearing that it would put a tear in your eye. And I said, “This is daddy right here.”
And she was like, “Oh Sheila, this is so sweet. This is so nice.” And was just treating the puppet as if it was a person. just stroking the puppet, feeling the wings and the hair, straightening the hair out.
Claire: For Sheila, who had been researching the racist history of blackface puppets – there was so much beauty in that moment. A puppet of dark-skinned black men being loved — not used as a racist punchline.
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Sheila: And I just thought about the magic of puppetry and how healing it really is.
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Sheila: And one of the things that I did was I performed my piece, and it's called “Gas Mask”. And it's called “Gas Mask” because my dad, he worked at Bethlehem Steel, And our last name is Gaskins, and they called him Gas Mask.
So my dad made a lot of bridges. He worked for Bethlehem Steel. So according to him, every bridge that's out there, he built. [laugh] So we could never go past a bridge without his signature. “You see that bridge right there? I built that bridge.” We were like, “Okay, daddy.” but, so yeah, so the story is just the hijinks and our relationship driving up and down and then also talk about his final days, where I was, I was able to be near him during the final days, and I was just letting him know how great of a dad he's been, and it's okay for him to go because he did a good job.
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Sheila: And it's good to show, you know, you don't hear a lot about good daddies. And it’s just so rewarding to be able to tell your own story.
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Sheila: So emotionally, the puppet has taken on its own type of spirit.
I didn't know emotionally it would be so gratifying. And just to see my mother gravitate towards it in such a great, awesome way was really refreshing for me to see.
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Sheila: There's a level of agency that you have, that you can authentically represent your own puppet in your own voice, on your own culture.
And that whole history of blackface puppetry is so complex and so devious that no one even wants to talk about it.
Yeah, but people should be able to tell their own stories and represent their own culture and get paid for it.
Claire: Sheila has had trouble finding funding for the show about her father, and is also working hard to fund her new project: a puppet show about the life of Ona Judge – an enslaved woman who escaped President George Washington’s Plantation.
Sheila: One of the things you have to rely on is getting a lot of grants because once you do a show, it doesn't pay that much. Maybe it's like less than 300. So you either are booked a lot or you do it cause you love it. I have to rely on writing grants to go out into the community to teach puppetry and I'm currently trying to get a grant to do this show, and my other puppet, Ona Judge, which is a life-sized puppet, and she is the enslaved servant who escaped George and Martha Washington.
But this next project won’t just be a puppet show — it will also have a puppetry workshop. So everyone in the audience can learn about the power of making a puppet that represents their own history.
What I want people to take away is the power of your own story, your own narrative, the fact that you can be authentic and tell your story, and a good way to do that is through puppetry.
There is some power, some healing power in this puppetry thing. And we should celebrate that.
Claire: Sheila Gaskins is a teaching artist and puppeteer from Baltimore, Maryland.
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CREDITS
Claire: Thank you so much for listening.
ARTS. WORK. LIFE. is a production from APAP – the Association of Performing Arts Professionals.
APAP is the national service organization for the performing arts presenting, booking and touring industry. You can join APAP at APAP3-6-5-dot-o-r-g.
I’m Claire Caulfield, your host and producer.
Jenny Thomas is our Executive Producer.
And music today from Blue Dot Sessions.
This podcast would not be possible without the generous support of The Wallace Foundation. So thank you.
Other thank yous to Grace Asuncion.
The APAP staff and board of directors, our amazing storytellers today, and the hundreds of thousands of arts workers across the world.
Your stories matter, and arts workers ARE essential.
Speaking of stories If you work in the performing arts and want to submit your own story to this podcast, visit APAP-3-6-5-dot-o-r-g-slash-podcast.
And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review, follow the show on your favorite podcast app and tell a friend. Your support helps us get more listeners, and we would all really appreciate that.
Carolyn: Arts, Work, Life. that’s real *laugh*
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