A Conversation with Sonja Dumas ’86
/How did you start getting involved in the arts?
My parents would often take me to concerts and museums when I was very young, and our home was always filled with paintings and music. I remember that on any given Sunday, I could hear the sounds of Mozart, Miles Davis or The Mighty Sparrow (one of Trinidad and Tobago’s calypso icons). We travelled all over the world for vacation or to live, and I became fascinated with how different cultures expressed themselves through the arts. I first toyed with dance when I was five when we lived in East Africa the first time, and when we lived in New York, one of my fondest memories is walking to the Martha Graham School, just a few blocks from our apartment building, to take the children’s class on a Saturday. I would have been about seven or eight. I didn’t dance consistently for various reasons, but I think I fell in love with dance performance around then.
On your Princeton Arts Alumni profile, you mention being “an arts consultant, performer, choreographer, teacher, filmmaker and writer.” We imagine that these identities inform one another often. Are there times when these identities feel separate?
That’s a great question. It’s true - there’s a lot of overlap among the forms, especially since I locate my practice in the often-multidimensional Caribbean aesthetic regardless of medium or discipline. However, the identity of “arts consultant” is the most separate, or different, from the others. It’s more clinical, more administrative, and more business-oriented; I’m interacting with clients who may not know much about the arts and to whom I have to introduce concepts that artists may intrinsically understand. The way I communicate is therefore much different and that makes the product different since it’s informed by the client’s ultimate wishes. Filmmaking can also feel separate because the budgets can be so vastly different from, say, a ten-minute piece of choreography. So the management approach is different because the production needs of each artistic world is different. What isn’t different is the time and attention that each activity takes in order to get it right. Whether it’s writing a scene for a film, inscribing movement on a dance company or writing a proposal for funding, I try to craft each effort carefully, and that takes time. When I was at Princeton I remember having a temporary, part-time job as a marketing assistant for the Health Center on campus and I was charged with the responsibility of writing copy for a brochure describing the center’s services for students. I was frustrated that the words weren’t spilling on to the page the way I wanted, and I told my supervisor. She gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received: “There’s no such thing as good writing - only good rewriting”. The lesson learned was that the full fruit of my efforts lay in my ability to craft, question, revisit and edit whatever I was creating several times over. Dedication to process is critical.
What is one of the most memorable moments throughout your career in the arts?
One of my most memorable moments lasted an entire year! My fellowship from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, under the auspices of the Organization of the American States of which Trinidad and Tobago is a member state, was the pivotal moment for me as an artist. I had been working in corporate Trinidad, dancing part-time, but dreaming of being more immersed in the arts. A friend happened to see an ad for a Kennedy Center Fellowship in the papers and literally ordered me to apply. Never in a million years did I think I’d get it. After all, I wasn’t a full-time practicing artist. But get it I did, and that opened up the opportunity to learn from amazing choreographers like Bessie Schönberg, Phyllis Lamhut, Katherine Dunham, Mark Morris, Donald McKayle, David Dorfman, and Walter Nicks. All of these people who seemed mythical in proportion were right there – training me, showing me their process or giving me advice – what a ride! The acclaimed Garth Fagan, choreographer of “The Lion King”, along with the legendary Suzanne Farrell, were the ones who recommended me for the fellowship. Garth, whom I had had the pleasure of meeting in person during the fellowship, said that as a Caribbean person, he understood that the artists in the Caribbean rarely had the privilege of full-time, gainful employment in the arts, so he totally understood my part-time status and was sufficiently impressed with my actual work that he and Suzanne wanted to give me a chance. I thank them for that from the bottom of my heart.
Congratulations on the Zum-Zum Museum! What inspired you to create the museum?
I was lucky to have had the upbringing that I did; it was filled with arts and the power of imagination, but many children don’t have that – especially children in many parts of the Caribbean where the public education system, while very adequate on one level, is often so blinkered that our own Caribbean heritage and ingenuity can get sidelined. And for a country like Trinidad and Tobago that’s famous for its festivals – especially our multidimensional Carnival, I thought that that was a real gap in the system. So I wanted to create an alternative in some small way, by offering children a space to understand the wonders of their own Caribbean culture and to explore their creativity on their own terms.
Zum-Zum (pronounced “Zoom-Zoom”) is the first of its kind in Trinidad and Tobago, as far as I am aware. One of the most touching things that happened in our first 2020 exhibition was that soon after the opening, a young 20-something year-old mother visited the museum with her husband and one-year-old daughter, and said that she wished that she had had a place like Zum-Zum to come to when she was very young. One the very last day of the exhibition, a 96-year-old woman, the most senior visitor to the space and nearly four times older than the young woman, said exactly the same thing. So I’m guessing that I’m on the right track. And then there are the beaming faces of children who prance through the space and discover life in so many different ways. That always brings me joy.
Of course, the pandemic shifted everything and we’re trying to work out a hybrid system of engagement, where small family pods are invited to come for scheduled visits, and where our online activities have also been heavily increased. Time will tell if this is sustainable. I’m really hoping that it is, since it’s something that could empower our children in the most positive of ways.
We know that being a creator is an ongoing, and often exploratory process - what is the big question you are wrestling with right now? And is there a “dream project” that is still in the works?
When I, along with other dancers, sat at the feet of Katherine Dunham in East St. Louis, Illinois in the mid-nineties, she offered us this thought: that it might take ten years to find the origin of a single movement. That was another one of those statements that’s stuck with me to this day. So I’ve just begun a practice-based Ph.D. in Cultural Studies that looks at embodiment; specifically investigating if there were any movement aesthetics created in the Middle Passage by enslaved Africans forced to come to the Caribbean, and if these contributed to our Caribbean movement culture of today. Hopefully, I’ll have some interesting theories to share about the historical African and African-Caribbean imagination. The Ph.D. concentration is in film, so I plan to make a film to explore my dance/movement findings. And I don’t see it as a documentary - in fact, I’m seriously thinking of setting it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. So that’s an epic dream coming to life.
I’m also working on other screenplays that I’d love to see on small, medium and/or big screens (whatever the post-COVID world holds for us): Two comedic buddy movies – one called “Angels in Tunapuna” where two estranged buddies have to find their way back to their friendship, after death but before Heaven, and “Right and Left”, where a drag queen and woman facing breast cancer find strength in supporting each other when Caribbean society challenges them in certain ways.
The big dance dream project is to create a Caribbean version of “Swan Lake” – on Broadway, of course. One can dream!
Thank you for your time! As one final question, What is one piece of advice for young artists?
Make sure that you’re passionate about your craft. Then nurture it by giving it the attention and patience it deserves. It will enrich you a hundred times over and make you the best artist that you can be.