Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Grinnell College student, international mime woos old ladies
By Abby Rapoport
The Scarlet & Black (Grinnell College)
06/16/2006

(U-WIRE) GRINNELL, Iowa — Jason Carpp is a performer. He can even tap-dance while butchering crabs. In fact, during the year he took off from Grinnell, he worked part-time butchering crabs in a Malaysian restaurant in Australia. The tap-dancing he learned as a child and used to pass the time.

"It was a horrible job but I loved it," said Carpp, looking back on the experience. But tap-dancing was not the only performative element of his job. Because the workers were from all over the world, the lack of a common language pushed Carpp to improve his miming abilities.

"When you're in that kind of community where there's no common language, things are really funny," he said.

The Iowa native has been pursuing opportunities to perform since he was young. As a child, he remembers his family egging him on to do impressions of others. His favorite part of dance classes was always the performance. "The thing that was fun was making goofy faces and getting old ladies to swoon," he said.

Carpp does not limit himself, but instead dabbles in anything and everything that catches his attention. "I had diverse interests and I thought that was a bad thing for a long time," he said. "But ultimately you can't defeat your own nature."

And Carpp has not tried to defeat his nature. Since coming to Grinnell, he's been in acting and improv troupes, bands, and dance groups.

For instance he was a founding member of the Silly Do Nothing Players, a four-person acting group that produced The Bald Soprano (and has since disappeared). In addition to this student group, he also has performed in two Main Stage plays (Pentecost and Frescoes of the Skull) and one Grinnell Independent Theatre production (Waiting for Godot).

The Silly Do Nothing Players is just one example of how Carpp readily forms groups and pursues his interests, even if he does not intend to maintain them forever. His freshman year, he started a band, The Casual Six, with five others. He played bass most of the time, except when the band attempted to feature Carpp's tap-dancing as percussion.

"It didn't really come across well," he said. "It was a little ambitious."But it did give him a chance to dance, another skill he seeks. He has worked consistently with the Dance Troupe and this semester, he took Javanese dancing. At the class's performance, Carpp performed a mask solo as the gagah, the role of the strong male.Despite this title, Carpp does not want to be categorized as such. "I tried rugby — I was obliterated," he said.

Of all these groups and clubs, he has not been in any one for all four years at Grinnell. "There's been common threads though," he said.

His performing ability does not just shine when he's on a stage. Next year, he will go to Anatolia College in Greece to teach and supervise a boys' school. He made the decision "on a whim," but he was always drawn to teaching because it has such a strong element of performance. Carpp, when asked how he had decided this would be a good idea, answered easily. "It'll make another interesting story to put under [my] belt," he said.

But for the moment, his main goal is to learn capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian method of fighting that involves singing, dancing and martial arts. In trying to explain what draws him to it, he said, "I try to struggle against the limited constraints of my inflexibility. That's what we do mentally here ... But maybe I'm just a hyper-active kid who can't sit still. That's probably the greater truth."

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