Podcast

Miriam Cummings Finds Freedom Through Solo Performance and Teaching

About This Episode:

In this episode, Phil sits down with Miriam Cummings, a playwright, performer, and educator who creates deeply personal solo theatre. Miriam shares how a tongue-in-cheek suggestion at Canada’s National Voice Institute led her to write and perform her first solo show, The One, and how that experience opened up new ways of being vulnerable on stage. She reflects on the protective barriers she built as a young actor after experiencing profound loss, and how solo performance helped her dismantle those walls and get closer to herself as an artist.

Miriam also discusses her second solo show, Wide, which pushed the boundaries of audience participation and co-creation, and how moving from Montreal to BC transformed both her body and her art. As an educator, she believes everyone has inherent presence and that actor training is about uncovering the joy of play we all had as children. This conversation explores grief, presence, the writing process, and the courage it takes to be honest on stage.

This episode explores:

  • How a casual suggestion led Miriam to create her first solo show
  • The terrifying vulnerability of hearing your own writing read aloud for the first time
  • Navigating grief and loss in theatre school and building protective barriers as an actor
  • The difference between creating The One and Wide, and the role of movement in Miriam’s writing process
  • Teaching presence, play, and helping adults reclaim what they loved as children
  • And much more!

Guest: 🎭 Miriam Cummings

Miriam (she/her) is an artist, actor, and educator who creates on the ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Playful improvisation that connects breath, body, and voice to image is at the core of Miriam’s practice. She holds an MFA (Performance & Creative Writing) from UBCO and a BFA (Acting) from Concordia University. Based in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal for more than a decade, Miriam performed with local companies such as Repercussion Theatre, Montréal Improv, and co-founded Hopegrown Productions, an incubator for new plays. Her solo performance and research of psychologically safe actor training methods have been selected for residencies in Ontario, Québec, and British Columbia. Miriam has instructed adults across the country for more than a decade, teaching acting, devising, and creative writing classes as Part-Time Faculty at Concordia University and workshops at Sheridan College, Okanagan College, Geordie Theatre School, Tempest Theatre, Kaleidoscope Theatre, Rosebud School for the Arts, and more. Miriam offers accessible classes for everyone that boost confidence, creativity, and self-expression through actor training techniques and coaches people one-on-one.

Connect with Miriam:

📸 Instagram: @mcummings___

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Transcript

[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on Stageworthy I talk to theatre makers of all types, from actors to directors to playwrights to producers to stage managers.

If they’re involved in Canadian theatre, I’m talking to them. Some of the people I talk to are household names, and the rest are people that I think you should really get to know. If you’re watching on YouTube, make sure that you like this episode, leave a comment so I know you were here.

And if you like the episodes I’ve been putting out, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon so that whenever a new episode comes out, you’ll get a notification that that episode is available. If you’re listening to the audio-only version, make sure that you are subscribed. Go to your favourite podcast app, search for Stageworthy, and hit the follow button.

And while you are there, if you’re using Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please consider leaving a rating and a review. Those ratings and reviews help new people to find the show. So if you could do that, that would be amazing.

I would be eternally grateful. And speaking of gratefulness, I have a Patreon, and I will go into a little bit about that at the end of this show before I tell you about who my guest is next week. But for the moment, what you need to know is that there is a Patreon.

If you want to help me to make this podcast, go to patreon.com/Stageworthy and become a patron. My guest this week is Miriam Cummings. I spoke to Miriam many years ago.

I used to have a short-lived theatre podcast before this one. And I went to the Montreal Fringe like maybe the two days before the Fringe started and spoke to artists. I must have talked to maybe 20 artists that weekend.

Miriam was one of them. We talked about the show that she was presenting that year. And now on Stageworthy, her first time on Stageworthy, we’re talking about her solo shows, art, what took her from Quebec to BC, and just art in general.

It’s a fascinating conversation, and I love talking with Miriam. So here is my conversation with Miriam Cummings. Miriam Cummings, thank you so much for joining me.

It’s a pleasure to talk to you again because many years ago for a podcast with a different name, we did speak briefly in Montreal as you were preparing to do a show there. A lot has changed since then. So let’s catch up because that episode, nobody can listen to anymore because that podcast is gone.

So could you just introduce yourself? How do you describe what you do?

[Miriam Cummings]
Thank you so much for having me. It is great to chat again. And I would just like to note that the podcast you’re speaking of is, at this point, that was 14 years ago?

Yeah, that was.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, this podcast is now 10 years. So yeah, it was a while ago.

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah, well, and congratulations for that. That is huge. 10 years of uplifting Canadian theatre artists.

Thank you. So I am an artist, an educator. I make theatre.

I am a playwright. I perform. I’m an actor in other people’s works and in my own works, which over the past few years have been primarily solo performance.

And I teach in a variety of settings. So in educational institutions and more recently on my own self-producing workshops and classes and working with local organizations.

[Phil Rickaby]
Now, as a writer, some of your work, you have at least two solo shows that you’ve written and performed. The one and wide. What first drew you to solo performance?

[Miriam Cummings]
Great question. It was a suggestion from a couple of mentors that was kind of said in a tongue in cheek way. And I at first heard it a little bit as a joke.

And then I really thought, what would that look like to write and perform a solo show? Instead of just in that mindset of like, that’s not something I do. What would that look like if I were to do it?

So yeah, I really, I credit actually Canada’s National Voice Institute, now the Moving Voice Institute, for being the place where I first started the writing process that I now use. Because it was a two week intensive, acting intensive. And I came into the two weeks very prepared in the way I always work, which is to have like, at the time, a personal diary.

Diary with entries that started Dear Diary, and that was for my personal thoughts. And then a journal that had my notes for, you know, works in the session, things I want to remember, names of people. And that was in 2018.

And I didn’t have time. I just did not have time in these, you know, eight to 12 hour days of back to back training to switch between the two notebooks. So everything ended up in one notebook, all my personal thoughts, and all these work related notes.

And that was the beginning of this impulse to share my own writing on stage.

[Phil Rickaby]
So the tongue in cheek suggestion was, like, was that at this, this, this intensive that that sort of that that came to you?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah, it was, I believe it was the kind of celebration on the last day, we all got together to just relax and decompress and celebrate each other. And it was Jerry Trentham and Diane Roberts, who are still two of my most important mentors, asking me what’s next, and kind of inserting that little earworm. And I think, yeah, delivering it in a way that felt kind of casual.

A casual invitation with just, yeah, a note of, yeah, wouldn’t that be a funny next thing to do?

[Phil Rickaby]
In terms of the process of writing a solo show, I think everybody has their own way of going about it. People who create solo shows, they all have their own kind of method. Some people start with improvisation, some people start writing a straight, like, just like, here’s the play.

What was your process? Like you had this, this diary, which was a mix of like notes from The Intensive and your diary. How did that all come together as a solo show?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah, so I had the great privilege of being a member of the Young Creators Unit, which is a program that still exists at Playwrights Montreal, Playwrights Workshop and it was led by Jesse Stong at the time. And it was a group of lots of theatre artists, but some folks who did not explicitly consider themselves to be theatre artists, people who were mostly quite new to writing for the stage. And it was, I think, an eight-month program with weekly meetings and a staged reading to cap it off at the end.

And in that room at Playwrights Workshop Montreal was where I have felt more nervous than I ever have on stage or in the wings in my entire life. And it was the moment where a cohort member of mine, a brilliant comedian and writer, Kate Hammer, read my script aloud. And I was in the witness seat with the rest of the group hearing my work read.

And I don’t think I was breathing. I certainly could not feel my body. It was terrifying.

It was a kind of vulnerability that, as I say, I haven’t ever experienced in the role of actor.

[Phil Rickaby]
How did that moment compare with the moment of first performing the solo piece?

[Miriam Cummings]
Oh, great question. Well, I first performed that piece, which would become the one at the Stranger to the Montreal Fringe. It still feels like a home to me.

The people, the spaces, the energy. So there was a base level of comfort at the festival. And I’m trying to remember how it felt other than, as you know, producing, performing, writing, wearing all these hats at one time in a festival situation, having 15 minutes between the last show ending and yours opening to kind of set everything up.

I know I felt nervous because I always feel nervous before I perform. But somehow, somehow there’s still this kind of protection that comes for me with stepping into a character. So the one bounces between a few characters, one of whom is based on me and my experiences, but none of them are me.

And I’m never speaking as Miriam. So yeah, it was different than that moment in the workshop where everyone in that circle knows, like, these are my innermost thoughts. I am creating characters, but this is Miriam.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. It’s funny because I have such a vivid memory of the day that I first, the first time I performed my first solo show, The Commandment. Previous to that, I was like, this is going to be so easy.

I’m going to go see a couple of shows. I’ll have some dinner before I go to the theatre. I’ll do a little warm up, then I’ll do the show.

And then I woke up on the day and I was like, I’m going to vomit today. Nothing else. All of the plans out the window.

I couldn’t do anything except like, just like, concentrate on the fact that I was going to do this thing. And it was like the first time before, like an actual audience that was not an invited audience. And so I don’t have a huge memory of that show because it was it was like, I’m marking it out and like trying to do as best as I can.

But also I’m supposed to be looking the audience in the eyes in this particular show. And man, that’s a difficult thing to do. So it was a really nerve wracking day.

And I’ve never had another one like that.

[Miriam Cummings]
Well, I’m glad. Thanks for sharing that because it does trigger a memory that I didn’t I didn’t remember doing this, but that was a bring your own venue show. So I had a few more shows over the festival than a traditional venue space.

So I think I got to do the show seven or eight or even nine times. And I guess, yeah, it must have been the very first show. I left my apartment in Montreal, walked to the Metro, got on the Metro, and got off the Metro and walked to the venue.

And that took about 45 minutes, which was the runtime of the show. And what I was most nervous about first solo show is just the lines, right? Even though I wrote them.

It’s like, so if I skip a line, do we just lose three pages? Then what happens? And so from the moment I left my house, I started running the show.

And under my breath out loud, under my breath out loud on the Metro, kind of wrapping up the moment I got to the base of the Montreal Improv Stairs. And that became this kind of, you know, practice, based on a suspicion that if I didn’t do it, everything would fall through. So I did that for every single show.

I hear that.

[Phil Rickaby]
I also ran all of my lines before each of the shows, because the one time I didn’t, I stumbled. And so I was like, never again will I not run the show. And so I would Italian the show the whole way before, like on my way to the venue, if I’m not done outside the venue, whatever.

It was necessary in my mind to do that. And it’s funny because you’re mentioning like, it seems like it would make sense that you wrote it. Of course, how can you not remember it?

But I figured it out because I had the same issue. Like, it’s a different part of the brain, right? There’s the writing part of the brain and the acting part of the brain, and they’re not the same.

And so the action of writing is somehow different. And it was so like that discovery was like, because I went into a solo show being like, this is easy. I wrote it.

How could I possibly forget it? And it is surprising how easy it is.

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah. Well, thanks for proving that superstition. Correct.

Now I know I can never do a solo show and not run it before.

[Phil Rickaby]
I wonder because, you know, there are people, you know, there are people who’ve made a career doing solo shows. Danny McIver has done many of his shows many times. I wonder if he still runs it at this point because he’s done it, done these shows thousands of times.

I don’t know, because I thought I am like since that one time when I didn’t run the show and I stumbled, I’ve never performed it and not run it no matter where I was, even when I was in like a couple of years ago when I was in Red Deer performing it. I was just like standing on a street corner just like or like because I couldn’t get in the theatre yet. Just like I have to run this thing.

I have to run this thing. It’s almost not quite manic, but like, no, this has to happen. Otherwise, I don’t know, something bad will happen.

Actors, we could be almost as bad as athletes who won’t like shave or whatever, change their hat or something, I think sometimes.

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah. Well, you know, I think actors are athletes. Absolutely.

What we do requires endurance, stamina, hundreds, thousands of hours of preparation, constant conditioning and training. So, yeah, we get to have our superstitions too, just like sports people.

[Phil Rickaby]
We have so many of them. Just add it to the list. That moment you were talking about, about when you were having your work read publicly for the first time, not even by you like reading it out loud.

You’ve mentioned that you call that like an aha moment. Tell me about how that was an aha moment and how that kept you writing. Yeah.

[Miriam Cummings]
It changed so much for me. That moment and that group, like being held in a space with other people who are working toward the same thing and are just as nervous, you know, maybe it doesn’t express in the same way. Maybe they have a bit more experience, but it’s just as vulnerable.

And I think that writing for the stage and writing for myself challenged my perception of vulnerability as a theatre artist. It kind of shone a light on some of the protective mechanisms I had for myself as an actor, keeping this distance between myself and the character and myself and the audience, which I think is very important. And I think I didn’t need as much protection as I once had.

And by kind of releasing some of that control and allowing myself to get closer to the story and the words and the actions, I could get a bit closer to myself as a performer and let the audience in a bit more.

[Phil Rickaby]
Could you tell me a little bit more about that control, that protection that you thought you needed?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah, absolutely. So I have just spent a couple of years here in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. And the first thing I did when I got here was start a master’s program in performance and creative writing.

And my thesis project ended up being this exploration of my own training as an actor and unpacking that time in my life. And the second week of the second year of acting school, which for me was at Concordia University in Montreal, my dad died unexpectedly. And it’s taken me, you know, 15 years to really unpack the impact that my dad’s death had on me as an actor.

I had done a lot of work in therapy of unpacking the impact on myself as a human. But the ways that experience shaped how I trained were kind of obscured to me for many years, because I was still so in it. So I would say that I have learned through the process of re-examining my training through the lens of this master’s degree and this thesis project, that I kind of instinctively knew at 20 that I wasn’t going to use this tragedy in the acting.

And I was pretty stubborn about it. So I kind of erected a wall that would protect me from, you know, being pushed in emotional directions I didn’t want to discuss. And there was a way in which this necessary protection made me a bit rigid as a performer.

And not necessarily in a way that showed on stage, but in a way that I approached the work for myself in terms of, you know, this is the character over here. This is me over here. This is the text.

This is my feelings about the text. This is rehearsal space. This is my life outside it.

And creating some quite strict binaries to separate, you know, my life and my work.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah. I want to get into…

Grief is a thing that everybody goes through in their own way. And everybody’s journey is different. But everybody, people who haven’t had to deal with it, always kind of feel like…

Often people reach a point where they’re like, you’re not done with that yet? Even though it’s a traumatic, terrible thing, right? And it can be also bad in a theatre school situation.

I had a friend whose father died when they were in, I think their second year of theatre school. And the theatre school was unsupportive. After about a week, they were like, I’m sorry, your dad died, but you’re coming to class.

You’re not giving enough. You have to… No support for the fact that this happened at all.

Was that something that… How was your theatre school when that happened? Was there support?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s so tricky because there’s the human level where, by and large, everyone who taught me was incredibly empathetic.

And we’re also in a very specific structure that does not have empathetic capacity. It has forms and deadlines and a list of people to contact. And I had just turned 20, and I’m grateful that I took a year to work between high school and undergrad, because I think that work experience gave me more administrative skills that helped me navigate being in a university and needing to do things like bring a copy of my dad’s death certificate to the student center to prove that this had happened in order to release some payment to my student account and give me permission to submit XYZ late. There’s the human capacity for empathy and care. And then there’s the context that we’re in, that other than exactly like your friend had, that question of, are you coming back or not?

And whatever you choose, A or B, here’s the steps to follow. There isn’t very much nuance in a situation like that.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny how talking about those protections that you erected around yourself, those break down in strange ways.

For example, when I was writing my solo play, The Commandment, it had a very specific tag. It had a very specific thing, and it was going to be funny, it wasn’t going to be serious, and there wasn’t going to be anything about me in it. I was not ready to do that.

And then somewhere along the way, it ended up happening anyway, that the loss that I had experienced a few years previous bled into the play, gave it a heart and became an essential part of the thing. But man, I’ve pushed against that for so long. No, no, no, that can’t happen.

That is not something that we can have happen here. And then without my really wanting it to, it did. And it’s funny how we can have the decision, oh, I need to be like this, and then it will break when I guess it needs to, or when we’re ready.

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah. I think so much about what the work needs from the playwright’s seat, from the creator’s seat. And it can be so vulnerable to stay open to what the work needs.

And for you, that decision, it’s going to be all me in that it’s a solo show. But there’s going to be none of me in terms of vulnerable explorations of my inner life, which I think is a great description of the barrier I expressed before. I am going to excel.

I’m going to get top marks. I’m going to get feedback that shows that I am doing well. I’m going to get cast.

And I’m going to be formally excellent. And you don’t get to know anything that’s going on underneath. That’s just for me.

And so there was a way in which, especially as a young actor, I was able to keep that barrier. But then we come to writing, and the piece says, I need you in this.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.

[Miriam Cummings]
It’s not going to land if it’s just formally excellent. We don’t need those stories as humans. We need you as the author to be honest and trust that that honesty will connect.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. So moving from The One to your next solo play, Wide, was there something about performing solo the first time that made you want to do it again?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah. It was so fun. It was so fun.

And I actually did The One twice. I did it in 2019 at Montreal Improv at the Fringe, as I described. And I was not expecting this, but it almost became like a bit of a stand-up act.

And people responded so much, gave me so much laughter and callbacks. And then the second time I did The One in 2022, I did it in the round. So almost a complete round, except for two kind of chairs opposite each other.

One that was Isabel, Emily’s grandmother. That was her spot. And one was the phone.

So Isabel, cell phone, and Emily were the three characters in that play. And the second time I did it, I wanted the audience to feel implicated and involved and less like that stand-up orientation, which is so fun. But again, creates a bit of that distance, like we’re a bit, you know, The One is about act dating, essentially.

And I wanted to involve the audience in Emily’s search for The One. And both of those experiences led me to say, I want to go further with Wide. And I want to take elements from The One and dig in.

So I knew I wanted the same way I did with The One to have poetry as a part of the play. I wanted to have movement. And I was curious to keep exploring the round.

And what I added with Wide was participation. And a very, oh yeah, I will say a very Miriam kind of participation, meaning like almost riding the line between a performance and a workshop. And so some of the participation in Wide invited people from the circle that I was sitting in, in a chair on stage, to step into the circle and be guided and coached in an improvised scene.

So really, in some ways, co-creating the performance with a live audience, meaning that the length of the show was different every time I did it, the content of the show was a little bit different each time I did it. But I knew I wanted to keep a really strong container so that the storytelling was clear and that people had clear options for if they were in, if they were out, if they didn’t want to participate at all. The story wouldn’t completely fall flat.

There were kind of structural things in place to ensure that we got from A to B.

[Phil Rickaby]
What was different about the creation of Wide from the creation of The One?

[Miriam Cummings]
Great question. It was really different in some ways. What I discovered when I was making The One was how much of an on-my-feet writer I am.

It is so rare for me to sit down and write something. If I’m sitting down and writing something, it’s often because I’ve just been moving. Like, I’ve been on a walk or moving in a studio or doing some kind of guided practice, and then I’ll write, write, write.

So I kind of knew that about myself. A lot of The One kind of existed on notes apps in my phone, because I would be on the metro and something would come. I knew that going into Wide, and I wanted to research it.

I was doing a Master’s of Fine Arts, and I wanted to understand more about my process. So I created six development sessions over the course of five months, four and a half months. To each development session, I invited—sometimes there were five people, at times there were up to 40 people in the space.

And we would come together and sit in a circle of chairs, and I would essentially try sections of the play, and what that looked like for Wide was kind of games. Like, games I had devised to help tell the story, moments I created to see, like, does it work to do this movement now with this sound? Does it work to do that movement with this sound into this poem?

How do people respond when I describe an exercise that we’re all going to participate in in this way? Does it make sense? And so I used those six development sessions to kind of gather a lot of information about how that felt for me, how it landed for others, and then I would go back and delete stuff, change stuff, add things, and come back and try increasingly longer sections of the piece.

[Phil Rickaby]
For me, I don’t have a particular method of writing. Like, I find out how to write this play that I’m about to write, and that’s how I write that. And the next play, it might need paper and a notebook, and the next one might be a laptop play, and the next one might be something else.

Like, it’s never quite the same. Did you find a way, like, as you sort of worked with these two different methods of creating the solo play, is there a way that works for you, or are you like, the play will decide?

[Miriam Cummings]
I think I know movement is essential to my writing. I’m stuck when I’m in a context that I don’t feel free to move in, even if that’s, you know, a class where I’m kind of sitting and listening, and it would be impolite to be moving or asking questions or adjusting or, you know, not making eye contact with the person who’s speaking. When I’m in a situation that feels constrained like that, it doesn’t flow.

The words don’t flow. So, I know I need movement, and I also need outside stimulus. So, often, you know, to help build these invited development sessions, I would often be in the studio alone and start by reading from a text.

I was very, very influenced by Jordan Tannehill’s Declarations, which is a piece for an ensemble that is all declarations. It’s a series of statements, and together with movement, it just forms this beautiful, kind of abstract, really poetic story. And I was also really inspired by The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, which is another, well, it is a solo show, and it is direct address to the audience, and it is very specific and literal.

So, real contrast to the abstract, poetic nature of Declarations, it is going through this loss of her husband, which is the true story for Joan Didion, and the subsequent loss of her daughter, and kind of giving things excruciating detail, the timing of things, the medical jargon. And so, often, I would read a text like this, and I would notice there’s a moment in my reading where I feel an impulse to pick up my pen and write something. I feel an impulse to put on, you know, deep underwater bubble sound on Spotify and move around the room.

So, I think, yeah, whether it’s a conversation with someone reading, listening to music, witnessing other performance, I really need outside stimuli to respond to in the writing process.

[Phil Rickaby]
Interesting. I would like to move a little bit now into your education work. I would like to talk about the work that you do with people and how you think that everybody has the ability to have presence, they just need to be able to learn how to do it.

Tell me about teaching with you and the work that you do.

[Miriam Cummings]
The title of Wide, one of the working titles, was You Already Have It, and I believe that. I think that humans are experts in human behavior, and that’s why even someone without acting training can see a film or a TV show or someone on stage and kind of read whether it’s truthful or not. You know, we’re experts in human behavior, and I think about it, that person has it, as presence.

This ability to be here now, not be running ahead to the next moment or ruminating on the past, in the mind, to be embodied in their breath, really feeling their body and breath in the moment, and listen, listen in a really open way. And I think that children have this inherent presence and this inherent confidence to follow impulses they have when they’re playing or learning something new, and those delightful moments that we love to watch kids do or like reels of kids going viral doing like cute thing, that we all still have access to that as adults. It’s just kind of less and less socially acceptable to, you know, say the blunt thing or ask the question or show how excited we are about something new.

And yeah, for me, actor training is all about uncovering, revealing this inherent presence and helping to kind of lower barriers toward accessing the joy of play.

[Phil Rickaby]
Isn’t it funny, and a little not funny, how as we grow up, the things that we used to love as children, the things that we held on to as fun for us or whatever, as people get to become adults, a lot of people let those go. And I think that by letting those things go, they’re sort of giving up essential parts of themselves, right? But they sort of go like, well, I’m an adult now, I shouldn’t be into this thing anymore.

But it’s a thing that you, I bet on some levels still love. And if you were to access that, you could have this freedom, this joy, but we keep ourselves locked as adults. How do you break down this locked feeling, this armor that we wear as adults?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah, it’s funny you say that. I mean, I was teaching in Victoria, BC this past weekend, and someone found out about the class on a random Facebook group and in a comment that someone left. And afterward, she posted a little story on Instagram and said, I just came out of the most fun workshop.

It was delightful in every moment. I happened to randomly find it. And I was looking for it because performance was something I loved as a child.

And I haven’t done it in so long, and I haven’t found somewhere to do it. And this is a reminder that if you loved something when you were young, go and try it and see how it feels. And I just, yeah, it’s so powerful to first of all, be honest about what we like, even, you know, and to even be honest with ourselves that yeah, an acting class is something I would like to do and let go of, well, I’m not experienced or I haven’t done it in a really long time.

What if I’m not good? I’m not going to be a professional actor anyway. So what’s the point?

Like, there’s a lot of inner monologue that can pop up when we even admit to ourselves we have a desire. So I think, you know, for so many people, myself included, like, as a teacher of mine at Concordia said, 80% of the work is showing up. Like, making the space in our lives as adults to come to a room for two, three, four hours, whatever it is, and, you know, put our phones on silent, put them away, and see what happens.

Not because, you know, we’re training for a specific event, like a marathon or something that kind of is seen as worthwhile and understandable just immediately. Like, yeah, getting to the room is not always easy. So I think having the courage and the capacity to make space and come is big.

And then, yeah, I think it takes a lot of trust in yourself and the other people in the space and the person holding the space to inch toward letting down some of our very important for the outside world but less relevant in the work things like being polite, you know, and sounding smart and being right and looking good. Like, we inch toward letting those things go in the service of the work.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, yeah. How did you start teaching? Because not everybody who’s in theatre, who’s like a writer and an artist goes on to become an educator or to teach classes.

How did that become something that you wanted to do and how did you start doing it?

[Miriam Cummings]
I forget to gush about a wonderful teacher of mine. I had a beautiful teacher at Concordia named Brian Dout. Lots of people have been instructed by Brian over the years and at Concordia and at various other institutions.

And he taught this really special class called Devising and Facilitating an Acting Workshop. It was a two-part intensive class. And you were required to take both if you wanted to apply to be a workshop leader, which was a role that’s part of an introduction to acting class that Concordia offers for any undergraduate student who’s not studying acting.

You can’t be doing a major or a minor in theatre. So you get people from all over the university, engineering, history, mathematics, music, anthropology, you name it. Lots of business students too.

And workshop leaders in that class are responsible for essentially guiding like a lab, like a smaller group of students through practical exercises and working with the professor of the course to deliver not only a lecture class that has 60 students, but having these smaller opportunities to play games and get to know people in a smaller group. And I really wanted that workshop leader job. I thought it sounded great.

I was always looking for jobs within the school and the theatre department because it was so much easier than having a job off campus. And I was really curious about this Devising and Facilitating an Acting Workshop. And to this day, it remains some of most profound teacher training I’ve ever had.

It really demanded that we look at ourselves and see our own habits and patterns and biases as artists and as leaders. We identified artists and leaders and teachers that we admired and learned why that was. We had to write a teaching statement.

We had to do a whole bunch of workshops where we led our peers. We had a lot of feedback on our teaching. It was really theoretical and really hands-on.

And yeah, to this day, remains the foundation of my teaching practice for a long time. I think really until maybe three or four years ago, that teaching statement remained my active teaching statement.

[Phil Rickaby]
Has it been adjusted since then?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah. Yeah, it has.

[Phil Rickaby]
What changes have you made to it? What led to the changes that you made to it?

[Miriam Cummings]
I think really the biggest change is allowing myself to get more specific over the years about exactly who I am in the work and the kind of work I want to do. And, you know, when I was first becoming a teacher of acting, I was quite young. I was often younger than people in these introduction to workshops, introduction to acting workshops, which is a whole dynamic in and of itself.

And I really, really, really wanted everyone to like me, which, you know, is relatable and it’s really dangerous when you’re a teacher and you hold inherent power in a space. And when I was teaching as part-time faculty at Concordia later, and I really did have that power dynamic of like, I am giving people grades, you know, that’s where it gets really dangerous to have a mindset of, I hope everyone likes me and I need everyone to like me. It’s not relevant in the context.

I need people to respect me and I’m going to respect everyone and we’re going to have standards of respect. But, you know, whether you like me, whether you like the work, that’s not a requirement for us to be in a shared space together. So I think really like, you know, growing up, learning that I’m not for everyone and everyone’s not for me and that’s okay.

It’s not something I need to fix. It’s something I just need to be honest about, so people can make informed decisions about whether I’m their teacher.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. All right. So now we’re coming to the end of our time and I want to, at the beginning, you mentioned being in BC and doing your master’s.

Was your master’s the impetus for moving to BC or was the, which came first, the master’s or BC?

[Miriam Cummings]
The master’s or the egg.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Miriam Cummings]
Great. Yeah. I visited BC for the very first time in my life in 2021 and I came out to Penticton, BC, which is an hour south of Kelowna, where UBC Okanagan is.

And I lived with my sister and my niece and my brother-in-law for three months. And the summer of 2021 was on the heels of a winter of curfews related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Montreal. All of my work had been cancelled and I got a job as a full-time nanny for the year, so that I could have human contact, because I realized how important that was, like physical human contact.

And yeah, and then that job wrapped up and I had this kind of free space and I thought, I’m just going to go. I’m going to see what it’s like to go without a plan. And I ended up auditioning at a theatre called Tempest Theatre in Penticton, artistic director Kate Twaugh and Ronan Reinhart.

And that thing happens when you just align with a space at the right time, where my totally free summer with no plans turned into an intensive training at Tempest and a brand new device show that I helped write and performed in and doing teaching for Tempest within the city. So yeah, that was my first time ever in BC. And coming as someone who grew up in London, Ontario, very beautiful access to the Great Lakes, but incredibly flat.

Every time I looked around me and there were mountains to me, mountains, hills to some, and just beautiful sparkling bodies of water with rolling hills in the background, it just kind of felt like paradise. And being in a place that was so much less populated than Montreal just made for a really different pandemic experience, like just more space for everyone. And that’s when the bug kind of got put in my ear.

And honestly, just like how I chose Montreal as a place to study in undergrad, it was the land. Like it was this beautiful, wide, open, silk Okanagan, beautiful, totally different than I’d ever experienced land. And I kind of was like, I’m different here because my body is different.

And I think if I come here and make art, it’s going to be different.

[Phil Rickaby]
Were you right?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, place has a huge effect on our lives and on our art.

And so going to a place that makes you feel a certain way is going to affect everything.

[Miriam Cummings]
I could feel that it was different, but it was really when I returned to Montreal, I was going to stay in BC. And then I got hired as part-time faculty at Concordia. And, you know, as with many jobs in our industry, like it was not my first time applying.

I’d been applying for years, and that was the year. So just at this moment of like, I think I really love it here. And I think I’m going to stay.

Like, oh, here you go. The thing you’ve always wanted. So I came back to Montreal and I loved the experience of teaching at my alma mater.

I learned so much. And I also noticed like within a couple of weeks of being back in Montreal, I left my apartment one day and was walking to the metro. And I realized, wow, I am completely hunched forward and my eyes are down and I have this kind of like mask on.

And I only noticed it because it had been different for three months. And that was, it was, it made me a little sad to realize like, wow, there’s a way I hold myself in this place I’ve lived for 13 years that’s quite closed off. And I wonder what would happen if my body was physically more open more of the time.

How would that affect me and my art?

[Phil Rickaby]
And it had, it obviously had a big, a big impact.

[Miriam Cummings]
It did. I mean, WIDE is by far the most personal story I’ve ever told. I, I found a way to tell it that meant that I didn’t share anything that I’m not comfortable sharing.

I did not push myself past a point of any boundary in terms of emotional disclosure. I was so honest and, you know, kind of silly and nerdy and like not trying to be cool or like good or beautiful or any of these things that felt so important to me and like, kind of just expectations for a young actor. And I think that’s, you know, that’s what I’m going to keep doing for my whole career is just unlearning these limitations that I digested as a result of just where I was in my formal training and what I thought I, who I thought I needed to be to succeed in this field.

[Phil Rickaby]
Okay, last question. So WIDE is your newest show and The One was your first solo show. Have you ever revisited The One or for you is that in the past and done?

[Miriam Cummings]
Yeah, it’s a great question. I, I was given the opportunity to revisit and remount The One just in the last 18 months. And, and it felt wrong.

It felt like, and I never expected to feel this way. It felt like if it’s going to go up again, someone else will perform it. There’s a lot that’s really specific to like the malaise of the late 20s and the hypervigilance of the transition from kind of early adulthood into just adulthood.

The pressure that I certainly feel as a woman to not show age and not age. And I think there’s like an acting challenge and a writing challenge that I achieved in the two times I performed out. And yeah, it feels like if it were to go up again, I would want it to be someone else’s challenge of how to bring themselves to that piece.

[Phil Rickaby]
Nice. Nice. Well, Miriam, thank you so much for joining me.

I really appreciate it. Thank you for giving me your time today. And I can’t wait to see what you do next.

[Miriam Cummings]
Thanks so much. It was great to chat with you again.

[Phil Rickaby]
Thanks for listening to this episode of Stageworthy. I will tell you about next week’s guest in just one second. But first, I want to go into a little bit more detail about my Patreon.

I can’t do this show without the people who’ve chosen to back me on Patreon. Putting out a podcast costs money, even though it’s delivered to you, the listener, for free. It costs money to have website to host his audio files to distribute the podcast to all of the places where you people can get it.

Editing software costs money, putting out transcripts costs money, and I don’t have advertising or sponsors. So for the history of this podcast until relatively recently, I’ve been paying for everything to do with Stageworthy out of my own pocket. Some really wonderful people have backed this podcast, they’ve chosen to to be people who helped me to make this show, because that’s what they do.

Their backing helps me to afford the things that we need to be able to put this show out. But the thing about it is, is that we’re only just covering costs. And even then, only just there, I’m still not being paid for the time that I put into this podcast.

And I do this out of love for the theatre community, theatre in general, because I just love talking to and meeting new theatre artists. But there’s a lot of time and work and virtual blood, sweat and tears that goes into making a podcast like this. So if you want to help me if you want to be one of the people that helps me to make this podcast, go to patreon.com/stageworthy, and become a patron. patrons get early access to episodes, we have conversations about theatre issues, and just generally talk about theatre. And the more people who join the Patreon, the more I’m able to offer the patrons. So if if you want to help me to make the show, go to patreon.com/stageworthy, and become a patron, I would be eternally grateful. My guest next week is Bryn Kennedy. This is Bryn’s second time on the podcast. I spoke to her back in 2019.

But this is Bryn’s first time on the podcast by herself. And we are talking about Riot Kings the Moors, which she is directing, we’re talking about, we talk about marketing, and we talk about theatre in general, just so many things that we talked about in this episode, it’s going to be a great conversation. I mean, I’ve already had it, but you can listen to it next week on stage worthy.

So I will see you then on that episode.