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Skyler Cooper Has Arrived

One could describe African-American actor Skyler Cooper as a cross between Work Out‘s Jackie Warner and Laurence Fishburne, what with her day job as a personal trainer (she hopes to own a gym someday) and her signature role as a female (read: lesbian) Othello in Impact Theatre’s 2005 production. But this hybrid definition leaves out one important, defining characteristic: butch.

In an industry where there are few out lesbians and fewer out lesbians of color, Skyler Cooper takes it one step further as an unabashedly proud butch. But if she had listened to her first acting coach, she wouldn’t be where she is today – about to launch a new TV series called Don’t Go that premieres at OutFest in July, as well as a new reality series on JengoTV.com.

“I had one bad experience that almost turned me away from theater altogether,” she said to AfterEllen.com. “My first theater coach said to me, ‘You know you’re going to have to not work out; you’re going to have to change your body. You’re a little too muscular to do this work.’ Because I was old enough and wise enough when I started [acting classes], I knew I should stop seeing her. She was trying to tell me I can’t be who I am.”

Fortunately for those of us hungry to see authentic representations of butches on the stage and screen, Cooper stayed true to herself and her love of acting.

“If I’m going to do theater, I need to be who I am to see if I even love the craft,” she explained. “If the craft won’t let me express myself and bring me and my talent to it, why would I want it in my life? I love this quote from [Russian actor] Stanislavsky: ‘Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.'”

San Francisco Bay area audiences first saw Cooper on stage in a 2000 production with Liquid Fire, an erotic cabaret by and about lesbians of color. She performed a piece called “Butch Love,” which caught the attention of filmmaker Debra Wilson.

Wilson then included Cooper in her 2003 documentary, Butch Mystique. Cooper recalled: “In ‘Butch Love,’ I was self-proclaiming myself as butch. Debra found me and asked if I wanted to tell my story. That was my first time on-camera.” And the first time lesbians outside of the Bay area were introduced to Skyler Cooper; Butch Mystique later screened at film festivals across the United States and aired on Showtime.

Her working relationship with Debra Wilson continues with First Take, a reality series scheduled to air this fall on JengoTV.com, an LGBT of color media network. “Debra said she wanted to follow me as I was trying to break into film, but she also followed me in every aspect of my life: how I juggle my world so I can get to the stage at night, in and out of my relationship, going to auditions, interactions with actors,” Cooper said. “She also came to L.A. with me when I auditioned for Don’t Go.”

Cooper won the part of Bone in Don’t Go, Amber Sharp’s (Triple Minority) show – billed as Melrose Place meets The L Word meets 227 – about the residents of a four-plex apartment building in Los Angeles. Bone is the best friend of building resident Jaden (Melange Lavonne, a butch who finds herself pregnant by her femme, intersex girlfriend (Guinevere Turner).

The pilot of Don’t Go, which also stars Nisha Ganatra (Chutney Popcorn), premieres at OutFest in Los Angeles this July and is currently looking for an on-air home.

Bone was written as a butch character from the start. “I heard that when they did the audition for Don’t Go, there were 30 women who auditioned for Bone; most of them were femme, and they all came in with bandannas on their heads,” Cooper said, laughing. “There’s definitely a lack of butch women in theater and films, and when they are there, they’re not lead characters. So this is a refreshing change.”

Cooper has some advice for casting directors about working with butch women actors: “With film and theater, they have to recognize that a butch woman can play another butch woman just like a straight woman can play another straight woman. For instance, there are different kinds of butches. I am not Bone. Producers should not be afraid of powerful women, not be afraid of showing the hotness in it. It’s hot when a woman is strong – and not imitating a male. Strength is strength whether it’s a man or a woman; strength doesn’t have a gender.”

But Cooper also doesn’t limit herself to roles for the female gender. She recently submitted her head shot and resume for a part in B-Boy Blues, a forthcoming film based on the book by James Earl Hardy. There were no female roles in the casting call.

“I could pull it off, especially in film,” she said. “They wouldn’t even need any special effects. They did call me and asked me to come to New York to audition, but I couldn’t and asked if I could wait for their Los Angeles auditions to get set up. But something must have fallen through. But you know, if I could handle the role, if I could pull it off, how awesome would that be? Why couldn’t a queer black woman play a queer black male? My niche is genderf—, and I know that.”

Audiences in Berkeley discovered that in 2005, when Cooper starred as the militaristic Moor in Impact Theatre’s production of Othello in Berkeley, Calif. The production was initially staged in the basement of a pizza joint a few blocks away from the U.C. Berkeley campus, and its run was extended several times. It then made a move across the bay to San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros.

“Who tours Shakespeare?” Cooper asked in wonder. “Who tours Othello? I’d never been in a show that was extended so many times and then traveled. And it was Shakespeare!”

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote of Cooper’s performance: “Tall, intense, muscular Skyler Cooper assumes the role with such natural command that gender seems irrelevant … Cooper’s descent into homicidal jealousy is painfully vivid. She and Marissa Keltie’s Desdemona create a sweet, shared passion.”

The production — which I saw during its run in the basement of La Val’s Pizza — was wonderful, and showed that Othello was a role Cooper was born to play. Director Melissa Hillman did not change the text to indicate that Shakespeare’s Moor was a woman, except for pronouns. The result was powerful, making the relationship between Othello and Desdemona matter-of-factly lesbian.

Cooper loved the production, loves the role, and wants to play it again. “I want to be the first woman to perform Othello on a major stage,” she said.

She came to her love of Shakespeare via her mentor, acting coach Phil Bennett, with whom Cooper studied for three years. Initially she went to his Theatre Labs to learn contemporary theater. When Bennett offered a course in the Classics, she resisted at first (“Do I have to?”), thinking she would not enjoy it, but instead found that she loved it and that the language came easily to her. And then Bennett paired Cooper with another woman in the class and had them do a scene from Othello.

Cooper recalled: “After the scene, [Bennett] said, ‘You have to start studying Othello’s speeches now — all his monologues. You are meant to do Othello. You have that presence.’ He said it in front of the class, and the class was nodding with approval, which touched me. And so I did what he suggested, and a year after I left the school, I landed the part as Othello.”

In addition to revisiting Othello, Cooper would like to play Aaron in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. “He’s not such a good guy,” she said. “I’d like to play someone sinister.” In the meantime she awaits the reception to Don’t Go and First Take, auditions for other roles, and keeps her day job as a personal trainer.

“I’ve been working out for 17 years, have a bodybuilding background, and was a fitness coordinator in the military,” Cooper said. “I’ve been training people for two years now.” The job provides her the flexibility she needs to attend auditions and callbacks on short notice, but she also has a passion for the work.

“I’ve never been able to say I love my work before now,” she admitted. “I’m meant to train people, to motivate them to realize their dreams. I doubt I’ll do it forever, but for now, it’s great.”

And yes, she’s seen Work Out. She even scored a new client after the woman had seen Jackie Warner in Work Out. “I owe her thanks for that,” Cooper said. “I haven’t seen the show a lot, but what [Warner’s] doing by showing what a personal trainer does is good.”

Though Warner might also qualify as a butch lesbian, her Los Angeles-style butch persona differs from Cooper’s. “We’re different in terms of our styles as butch women, but I don’t think we’re different in terms of our training intensity — we’re both motivators,” Cooper said.

“Luckily I haven’t had to choose between personal training and acting — at some point I will have to choose one or the other. I can’t be running off to do movies and plays and expect my clients to be without me for months at a time.” So like Warner, Cooper hopes to open a gym someday so her clients will have a set place to work out with her philosophy. “I came out with the name ‘Sky Body’ before she did,” she said with a laugh, “since it’s from my name, Skyler.”

She takes her responsibility to her clients seriously — and she also takes her responsibility as an out actor of color equally seriously.

“It’s important for me to be out,” she said. “It’s liberating because I can enjoy both my work and my personal life.” Only a small number of lesbians of color are professional actors, but Cooper believes the tide is shifting: “It’s changing, slowly. I don’t see a need to bury our existence. If I’m doing good work as an African-American butch woman, my peer group is going to see that, and it will bring credibility to a group of people who are often invisible.”

See Skyler Cooper in the trailers for both Don’t Go and First Take, and visit her MySpace page.

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