Prentice Penny, showrunner of "Insecure," shares his passion for making a slice-of-life comedy about young African-American women; a look inside USC's Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center; is AT&T's play for Time Warner a good business move?
Bodies in motion at USC's new dance program and facility
Back in 1975, the University of Southern California opened the School of Gerontology to study how the human body grows old. That was the last time the university established a new school on the main campus.
Forty-one years later, USC finally cut another ribbon this month on the latest school also dedicated to studying the human body. But this time, students won’t study how the human body ages. Instead, they’ll study how the human body moves.
The new facility is named the Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center. With a full spectrum of dance classes now in full swing, the $46 million complex holds the distinction of being the largest of its kind at any private university in the U.S.
On a recent afternoon, 18-year-old, second-year dancer Paulo Hernandez-Farella had just popped out of a contemporary dance class where he was studying efficient movement.
"It’s a lot of using your hips to drive the shift of movement," Hernandez-Farella said. "Whereas before I was leaving my body behind.”
The sun-filled multilevel center has been designed with the dancer in mind. There are spaces everywhere to stretch, warm-up and rehearse. Even the hallways are lined with barres, just in case you want to kick a leg up at any moment to loosen those tight hamstrings. For Hernandez-Farella, this is fantasy come true. He grew up in Eagle Rock and attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.
“Since freshman year, I had a dream school in mind, and it was on the East Coast," Hernandez-Farella said. "USC-Kaufman was announced my sophomore year of high school, and all bets were off— that was my new dream school. All my teachers were [saying], It’s a perfect program for you. You have to look at the faculty they are hiring, you have to look at the amazing experiences. Plus, I’m such a West Coast boy! So, I was like, What do I have to do to get in here?”
Hernandez-Farella might be a West Coast boy, but he could have easily decamped for the East Coast. Dancers who want to train professionally usually have to head to cities like New York. So Hernandez-Farella believes the Kaufman School is a game changer.
“Early on, I didn’t think I was good enough," he said. "It’s always a thing that dancers go through, especially during high school. It was always a fear of mine and I always held back a lot. And then, over time, I just stared drastically improving. I attended a lot of summer programs. I would come back every year and my teachers would be amazed at my improvement. I’d be a completely different dancer.
"So when senior year came around, I did two applications: USC and Juilliard. And then I did my 'broken leg' schools just in case! The thing for dancers is that you have your top colleges you want to go to. And then, if I had broken my leg that year, I had back-up schools.”
While this new dance school’s home is a state-of-the-art — if not downright flashy — facility, its beginnings were rather hushed.
“This is one of the stories that people will choose not to believe,” says Robert Cutietta, dean of the new dance school. He only met philanthropist Kaufman five years ago. They grabbed dinner near USC and spoke before dashing off to catch a dance performance on campus.
Cutietta recalls: “She said at the dinner before the show, ‘Why isn’t there dance at USC?’ And I said, ‘I’ve wondered that myself.’ I thought about it before because my daughter is a dancer. My wife is a dancer. I didn’t know the answer. But I knew it was missing. But I didn’t have an answer. There was no answer. So she said, ‘Well, what would it take?’ I said, ‘First of all, it would take a lot of money.’ She said, ‘How much?’ I threw out a crazy, crazy number. She said, ‘Okay, let’s do this!’
"I went to that concert. I don’t remember anything. I called the University president on his cell phone and we had tentative approval to move forward by noon the next day.”
The university will not reveal the actual amount of Kaufman’s gift. But it’s clear that it had to be quite generous. The 55,000-square-foot complex boasts an impressive mix of tech-savvy studios and lecture halls where students are encouraged to collaborate across academic disciplines, while learning from world class faculty such as veteran choreographer William Forsythe. The school’s director, Jodie Gates, is herself a Forsythe trained dancer and choreographer. So she’s setting a high bar at auditions for admission.
“I’m not just looking for the physical dancer. I’m looking for a curious thinker. Someone who thinks outside the box,” Gates said. “We have a young lady who is a ballerina that is also studying in the law school here. So, when you say the word dance, it’s a loaded word if you don’t know it. But if I said, ‘What do you think of motion?’ That’s about where motion takes me. So I like to talk about how that dancer might also be a scholar. They have to be that hybrid talent we are looking for.”
The first class entered in the fall of 2015. As students progress through the four-year program, Gates says collaboration is required. Upper class students will be expected to reach out to their counterparts in the music school to devise new work. But Gates insists her students explore how dance connects to other disciplines as well.
“Dance has capabilities that haven’t been tapped into yet,” Gates said. “For example, cognitive science and how dance helps with dementia and autism. There has been data collected already about how movement specialists work with these types of disabilities. A proscenium stage is not the only way to view dance anymore.”
HBO's 'Insecure' shows 'black people's humanity,' showrunner Prentice Penny says
Issa Rae stars in a new series, “Insecure," which she created with Larry Wilmore. "Insecure" follows Issa’s life as a young professional woman in Los Angeles who finds herself feeling stuck in a rut, both in her job and in her relationship with her unambitious boyfriend, Lawrence. At the same time, Issa’s best friend Molly feels stuck dating men who have no interest in a real relationship.
Rae has best been known for creating and starring in the popular web series “Awkward Black Girl" — but this is her first show on a big channel. When Wilmore left the project to host his late night show, Rae brought in writer-producer Prentice Penny to help steer the process. Penny has worked on shows like "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and "Happy Endings," but this was his first time as a showrunner.
When he stopped by the Frame, Penny explained why he felt so strongly about landing the gig on “Insecure.”
Interview Highlights
On why he felt so strongly about getting the job of showrunner:
Larry Wilmore was going to go do his show for Comedy Central and I was just like, I don't trust anybody. I believe somebody's going to mess this up. I want to run this show. So I called my agent and was like, get me a meeting with Issa. This show is too important.
I did something really old-school: I wrote her a letter... In the letter, I just explained to her how much I loved what she was doing, how much I loved the script, what I related to in the script. I had literally had a work experience where somebody asked me what "on fleek" meant, literally a month prior to that. I worked a non-profit before I was a writer. I just explained to her why I thought I would be good to write her show.
You know when you meet people and you just hit it off and it feels like you've always known this person? That was how our relationship was when we actually first physically sat down and talked...
You don't get to tell these stories every day. I feel like shows of color fall into some areas. Some are about the things you expect people of color to do and then there are shows or movies that are about people of color's pain and struggle. This show was just talking about what life was like on a Thursday for people of color. Like the most mundane details of our lives. I feel like we don't get to tell slice of life stories.
On making the show authentic to the experience Issa wants to tell:
It is a different scenario when you are not the creator or writer brought in to run a show. I learned under a really great showrunner who had my job on "Happy Endings" named Jonathan Groff, who actually now does that too for "Black-ish." He is Kenya Barris' co-showrunner on that show.
I talked to him before we started filming, and the one piece of advice is, he was like, Always be a shepherd of the show. You're brought in to protect and nurture that vision first and foremost. This is not your time to make it be your agenda or this or that. He's like, Your job is to make the best show that she wants to make possible.
That was my whole mindset as I was doing the show. I'm a dad in real life, and they often call me the dad on the show, because HBO bought her show. So I wanted to maintain that and also share what I've learned in 12 years of television to make this show be the best.
On casting a diverse writers' room:
I think Issa and I knew for this show that we didn't want to go a typical route where we just hire a bunch of comedy writers, because there's a lot of drama in this show. So our thing was to have a mix of comedy and drama writers. So that was important.
It was a good mix to have different ages of writers in the room, from very young to people in their forties. We obviously had two white writers in the room because it would be obvious to just stack it. But if you have Issa's voice, you don't need to repeat voices.
That's the one thing I've learned from being on other shows, and when I did my first show, "The Hustle," you always want to make sure that each voice in the room is unique and specific. We had gay and lesbian writers in our room. That was specific. For us it was about assembling this puzzle of, do we feel we have enough 1) interesting voices and 2) that we have voices that don't repeat?
On what kind of material gets rejected from the show:
I think if we feel like we've seen it on a television show, it definitely is not going to get in our show. If it's a topic that's kind of skirting a thing then it's like, what's our unique take on this subject matter that's gonna be different...
We try to make storylines that you hadn't really seen before. And if it is a thing you've seen, what is our slant on it — our unique spin that's going to be interesting? If not, then we're just retelling a story that's been in there.
So that was a big thing. We would lift issues and things up on the wall of things we wanted to talk about. We said, well, so and so has talked about this, or we haven't talked about this. We would talk about those things in the room pretty candidly.
On women speaking candidly about sex on the show:
It's funny. When I first sat down and was talking with Issa about this show, I was like, Man, this is how women talk? This is what girls say? This is crazy! But it is. The character Molly is based on a friend of Issa's, and we all went out to brunch after we had cast the show, and I just sat and watched Issa and her lawyer friend, who are like best girls, and it was like, oh yep. This is exactly how they talk.
And I've hung with Issa and her crew, and that's exactly how they talk... I always liked Issa because she's educated but ratchet. So she kind of loves ratchet stuff... Ratchet is like when you're unapologetically hood... it's kind of like saying someone's "ghetto."
On how the show is a window into an often unseen part of the black experience:
I think the biggest thing for this show is, because it's talking about what life is like on a Tuesday or whatever, that it's really seeing black people's humanity. And I think so much right now, how black people can be demonized, and certainly African-American men and all the things that are happening with police shooting, there's a part of it that's like this perception of, he's big and black and he's a threat to me, without seeing the humanity that this person can be a father and a husband.
If you can just watch this show you can be like, oh I didn't know that they felt this way or he feels this way. Again, we're not all the black experience. It's like, oh there are things that I can relate to in this show too... Issa's just in a relationship that she doesn't know is going anywhere. Being uncomfortable at your job. I think those things are just relatable on a human level. I think if this show shows humanity for people of color then I think all the more better, obviously.