Kudakwashe Rutendo is making a handspring into the spotlight with the cheerleading drama Backspot

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

Kudakwashe Rutendo will always remember the moment she was told she had to choose between her two passions: dancing and acting.

The young star, who is at TIFF with the intense and uplifting queer cheer drama Backspot, was in a dance company in her hometown of Fort McMurray while also taking a lead role in a high school musical called When in Rome. Rehearsals for both productions would sometimes conflict with one another, and Rutendo recalls the dance teacher approaching her mom with a stern message: "I don't know why she thinks she can do both of these things."

"They were making me pick," says Rutendo, who explains that from that moment on she leaned more toward acting. "I'm gonna pick the one that's not making me pick between the two things that I like to do."

And that's her villain origin story. 

She ditched ballet but soon picked up cheer and eventually became cheer captain on her high school team, all while honing her acting skills. Now, she's managed to find a movie where she can do both.

D.W. Waterson's Backspot, executive produced by Elliot Page, stars Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs (Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Reservation Dogs) in a Whiplash-like drama about athletes who push themselves beyond their physical and emotional limits. Rutendo plays Amanda, girlfriend to Jacobs' Riley and level-headed member of their demanding cheer squad who maintains her boundaries and humanity throughout.

As you would expect, the movie features a lot of exhilarating tumbling, performed by a cast made up of real cheer athletes like Noa DiBerto (also a hilarious TikTok star), along with Jacobs, a former gymnast, and Rutendo, whose prior cheer captain experience made it possible to pull off the dazzling feats. "I actually got back my round off back handspring back handspring for shooting," says Rutendo, as if I would know what that meant.

Rutendo is in her Toronto apartment, speaking to CBC Arts on a Zoom call. It's August, the day before TIFF announces her as one of their 2023 Rising Stars (a total coincidence, I swear!). She's an incredibly positive personality, regularly flashing an infectiously joyful smile as we talk. Even as we talk about the setbacks and obstacles that had been set in her path, she says she's satisfied with how things have turned out. Like her character, she doesn't tend to stand for too much negative energy in her life.

She's thinking about how if she hadn't had juggled cheer and acting in her life, she wouldn't have landed Backspot — and how had she wouldn't be where she is if she followed that dance teacher's insistence that artists must be solely and obsessively dedicated to one thing, or must narrowly fit into some prescribed box.

"I'm complex; I contain multitudes," Rutendo says, giggling as she realizes she's quoting a line from Backspot. "Half the things that people tell me conflict feed each other, and help me do next-level greater stuff that I wouldn't be able to do if I would have listened to them. We don't have to pick one thing or the other. We owe it to ourselves to do everything we're good at, no matter how much they conflict."

And she's certainly living up to her multi-hyphenate status: she's currently working as an actor on both stage and screen and working on a book (more on that later) while still chipping away at her undergrad at U of T, where she's taking English, Philosophy and Classics.

Rutendo landed her first on-set acting gig just a couple years ago in the direct-to-streaming high school thriller Bad Influence starring 90210's Jennie Garth. It's not the kind of movie we would apply our critical faculties to, but the actor had a blast with the onscreen initiation, bringing some Craft-level badassery to the role of a cult member. "How often are you playing a cult member?!"

She then got to live her best life starring opposite Fresh Prince alum Tatyana Ali in Giving Hope: The Ni'cola Mitchell Story. That TV movie aired in April — right around the time we met Rutendo at our Rising Stars photoshoot, in the middle of her rehearsals at the Factory Theatre for the play Vierge.

Written by Rachel Mutombo and directed by Natasha Mumba, the play is about four Congolese-Canadian teenage girls within a church community, which Rutendo describes as a proxy home for immigrants finding people they can share the same language and culture with. The show is a comedy, but Rutendo plays a victim who is sexually assaulted by the pastor and left feeling alienated by a community that doesn't believe her.

"I went straight from Backspot to this," says Rutendo. "The dedication to the craft that you have to have as a theatre actor to be able to do something traumatizing night after night, after night, after night, [where] each performance has to be some level of amazing — it helped me discover myself more as an actor and what I can do, my limits."

Meanwhile, Rutendo is finishing up her first book for publication. It's a melding of prose and poetry, staying true to an author who refuses to pick a lane, and deals with seeking love and connection in a city like Toronto, which can be a lonely place for newcomers. It's also the story of a Black ballerina tapping into the feelings of alienation that Rutendo is intimately familiar with. 

Rutendo, who was born in Calgary before moving to Fort McMurray at three, was often the only Black person in her grade. She recalls kids openly stating that they wouldn't play with her as a child because of her race. She also remembers that ballet and cheer were never accommodating to her and her younger sister, who were often the only Black girls in the mix. 

Ballet costumes often looked "stark and wrong" against their skin; in cheer, the poofs that blondes and brunettes would uniformly style their hair into wouldn't work with Rutendo's protective hairstyles. "Everything that everyone else is doing that's making them look like part of a unit makes you look distinctly not part of that unit," says Rutendo. "It made a very fraught relationship with myself because you're seeing that in all avenues. I was seeing it in dance. I was seeing it in cheer." 

Backspot deals specifically with the gendered power dynamics that are seen everywhere but intensified in the dance world. Because there are so few men in dance, they have an easier rise to positions of power, making women more vulnerable in a fiercely competitive environment. The film features a thorny and nuanced performance from Evan Rachel Wood, who plays the cheer team's unforgivingly tough coach Eileen. At first her arrival is met with surprise and hope because she's a woman, before the disappointing realization that she's still ruthless, bordering on inhuman. 

"People think that women have to be pleasant and wholesome and hearts and rainbows all the time," says Rutendo. "Obviously Eileen is not the role model. But I think it was a good subversion because in a lot of communities — in the dance, cheer and gymnastics spheres — a lot of coaches are men."

Rutendo, the actor/dancer/athlete/author, is relishing Backspot's refusal to play into expectations or allow its characters to fit into prescribed boxes.

As for what her next pursuit would be, she wouldn't be against bringing some of those back handsprings to the Marvel universe.

"We can put this on the record," says Rutendo. "I think the next step is Marvel or John Wick."

Backspot screens at TIFF 2023 on Friday, September 8 at 8:30pm; Monday, September 11 at 3pm; and Friday, September 15 at 9:45pm.