Bling, or Revolution
Hip-hop's theatrical avant-garde and intellectuals come of age
a roundtable discussion
If hip-hop is the pervasive music of the moment, why does so much of it sound like rap? If hip-hop is about breakin' old conventions, why are the phat beats and lyrical flavas usually derived from Shakespeare? If colalge is fundamental to hip-hop, why aer the wordplayz spellings just buggin'? Is the revolution about wack lines and typographical bling? And now that hip-hop mogul P. Diddy is hitching the Mos Def ride in A Raisin in the Sun, who's going to represent the hip-hop musical that will stir up Broadway ground?
As querulous as these issues may seem, such intense questioning cuts right to the hip-hop state of mind. Once in place, it is a self-conscious aesthetic that is constantly synthesizing, evolving and causing a ruckus. It is embodied by a righteous crew that belongs to a different breed. As the following edited excerpts from "Making Hip-Hop Theatre," a community gathering organized by the Hip-Hop Theater Festival last February at New Dramatists in New York City, show, hip-hop is a participatory culture where the audience is insistently diverse, restlessly young and mostly under-subscribed.
It's also continually on the move. From July 12–17, the D.C. Hip-Hop Theater Festival sets up shop at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Folger Shakespeare Library and Ira Aldridge Theatre in Washington, D.C. The full schedule of performances and workshops highlights Full Circle, olive Dance Theatre, Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Word Becomes Flesh, Aya De Leon's Thieves in the Temple, Chadwick Boseman's play Deep Azure and the solo plays of D.C.–based writers Psalmayene 24, Quique Aviles, Patrick Crowley, Anupav Yadav and Ruth Young. The centerpiece is the U.S. debut of U.K.–based Benji Reid's freestyle poppin' in 13 Mics.
Hip-hop theatre is something
most of us have to search for, because the culture that surrounds the
theatre isn't where this radical generation is at. With a $1.6 billion-a-year
commercial industry throwing hip-hop down everyone's throats, its artists
and thinkers have become Gen-H torchbearers, staking out ground. At a
critical moment, they strive to keep it real, especially in the theatre,
where they have moved from being a wide-eyed discovery to become the latest
scene thing. Valuing hip-hop as a subterraneous model, its proponents
are in fervent dialogue about the gaps between their realities as progressive
artists and the ways hip-hop is represented, even when they're not kicking
rhymes or scratching records. —Randy Gener
CLYDE
VALENTIN, producer of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival: Eisa
Davis's March 2000 article in The
Source ended with Reg E. Gaines saying that "hip-hop theatre
becomes valid if Sean "Puffy" Combs or Russell Simmons or Master P reads
this, invests and puts hip-hop theatre on Broadway…until they invest,
nothing matters." My question is, What's changed in the hip-hop theatre
world? What matters? .
DANNY HOCH, playwright, actor, filmmaker and founder of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival: Hip-hop has been looked at as an accessory to culture, as a pop-culture add-on: "Okay, we can improve Hamlet—we'll put it to rap," or "We can improve this modern dance company—we'll put some break-dancing moves in it." Hip-hop is viewed this way, rather than looking at hip-hop as a culture with its own aesthetics and history. Are we only going to be validated because we are revisiting the classics? What about the stories about now—the fact that artists today have something to say right now, in this language of right now?
RAPHAEL XAVIER, choreographer and co-artistic director of the olive Dance Theatre: As an artist, sometimes you have to forget what people think hip-hop is, compared to what you think hip-hop is. Just because you do something and put it in the space does not mean that the work is automatically hip-hop. I created a play. Doesn't have any words. The only reason people associate it with hip-hop is because the movement that I do is considered breaking. But if you take those movements apart and really analyze them, it was done in the 1800s, 1700s—it's not hip-hop. All I'm doing is taking something that's been around for a long time and letting my imagination go.
Artists, whether they are writers or dancers, sometimes say with bitterness, "They don't allow us into a place. Hip-hop's not allowed here." You do what you want to do the way you want to do it, wherever you want to do it—you just have to figure out how to get there. You label it—or you do something that draws attention. At olive Dance Theatre, we try not to say that we do hip-hop. We feel that it limits our audience-hip-hop scares certain white people. Moreover, some hip-hoppers have a way of going to something and then hatin' on it without analyzing you or the work, or feeling like they're a part of that thing you're doing. As a result, they have a lot of bad to say about it and then it gets out, and it's not a hip-hop thing anymore. Meanwhile, the presenters don't want to deal with it, and the theatre feels like, "That's not what we want anymore." What's important is to just do it, so you can allow yourself to get into a place that you belong.
HOCH: It's something we debate about every year—what constitutes or what defines hip-hop theatre. If someone says, "Okay, I'm teaching a class on hip-hop theatre this week," it's like, well, which hip-hop theatre are you teaching? At the same time, these genres are still developing. People are coming up with new shit every day.
DANIEL BANKS, director and New York University instructor: Paul Carter Harrison is the father of thinking about black theatre in terms of "an African continuum," and he makes the distinction between drama and theatre. He says dramas are plays, but theatre is something that we've actually inherited from other shores via the African Diaspora, or what Wole Soyinka calls "the saline experience," saline being both salt water in ocean and tears. Hip-hop came out of a particular moment of cultural oppression and geography; it was a response to a class system, a political system. It wasn't like they woke up in the Bronx one day and said, "Oh, let's do hip-hop."
Do we just think that because someone has called it "hip-hop theatre" we are, therefore, suddenly able to get into institutions that we recently couldn't get into—is that the point? In terms of training and techniques, do you have to learn how to rap or how to break? Or do you have to learn how to hone your vision of what theatre is, which may not be a play? I think we have to keep coming back to the distinctions. I think we need to continue to express ourselves, without thinking that just because it involves hip-hop, that form puts up walls or electrified fences. We have to think about hip-hop in terms of ritual aspects and cultural function.
GWENDOLEN HARDWICK, actress, playwright, director and program director of Creative Arts Team: As someone who grew up as part of the Black Arts movement in the '70s, this discussion excites me. All of you are touching on these same discussions we had back then about black theatre, about the disenfranchisement, about coming into the theatre. Those discussions got us into so much trouble then. Black artists like Barbara Ann Teer and Ed Bullins came up with a new genre of theatre; at the same time, in Brazil, Augusto Boal was creating Theatre of the Oppressed. The only person I've ever heard talk about the genre Barbara Ann Teer came up with [black-church performance and Yoruba-inspired theatre rituals], was Paul Carter Harrison in his 1972 book, The Drama of Nommo. [Harrison's seminal book challenged audiences to discern the aesthetic foundations of black theatre.] So it becomes a question of who defines what you want to do? Who can claim the word "theatre"? And, yes, I have to know the basics and the techniques, but once you know it, you throw it out. During the Black Theatre movement of the '70s, we, black women writers, said, "Wait a minute! This isn't speaking to me. I want to create something else!" So we started our own theatre company and defined what theatre was going to be for us, how we were going to do it and what we were going to call it. That is your power and your gift.
What happened to all of that excitement of the '70s? What happened when we lost the ability to define and create theatre on our own terms? The situation is not unlike what is happening with historically black colleges. Once we can integrate into the mainstream, do black institutions no longer have a purpose? Who determines power? All of you are on the road to answer those questions for yourselves.
CHADWICK BOSEMAN, playwright: I feel like the difference in the way that we're defining hip-hop theatre and the way a lot of other aesthetics have been defined is that it's open. We may have characters that rhyme, or the lyrics may be hip-hop, or there may be a DJ on stage. It may be the environment, time, space and situations that make it hip-hop theatre.
I think the word "hip-hop" defines it in and of itself. It's hip. It's what's happening right now. It's hop—which means, essentially, it's dance, it's movement. If this is a movement, it's not a movement set in stone. So, essentially, hip-hop: the movement of the dance of now. The metaphor to me is a sandcastle built on a beach. At the end of the day, the tide is going to come in and wash it away. It's not going to be a sandcastle anymore. The next day we're going to come back, and we're going to build another sandcastle. It's a continuous change in how we define this form and structure.
But the industry is always going to say, "We've got to make money off this, we have to define this. We're gonna market it, so people will come and see it." I think it's our job to simply say, okay, they are going to do that. But what you have to know, as an artist, is the subtlety—and by subtlety I don't mean it is less. You're able to know all the different facets, and they can define it how they want to. But it's able to move.
GAMAL ABDEL CHASTEN of Universes: Presenters are often not sure how to present our work; it always comes down to the fact that they don't know how to do the outreach—they're not in touch with the hip-hop community. When Slanguage was performed at New York Theatre Workshop, it was predominantly subscriber-based audiences, and we didn't have a clue about how to approach them. It took us a few weeks to realize that this audience was listening to our work in a different way than an audience at the Nuyorican Poets Café would listen. They were listening, they were digesting, they weren't responding—there was no call and response.
VALENTIN: The Hip-Hop Theater Festival conducted an audience survey in 2002, and roughly the way it broke down was 35 percent African American, 25-30 percent white, 20 percent Latino and 9 percent "other." So it's a pretty diverse audience. About 70 percent was under 35. And it's still kind of early. This is the experience we had co-producing Flow with the New York Theatre Workshop at P.S. 122: We did our marketing, NYTW did their marketing to their subscribers, but we co-produced the show at a space that was neutral. The first days of previews, which were the last days of the festival, that audience was demographically mixed. The next week it went from being that diverse and young to not very diverse and mostly older white folks. Despite the marketing efforts, it's still a process in terms of who's coming out and when and why.
HOCH: In the first year of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, we were going to make sure that 75 percent of every single audience at the festival was under 30 years old. We were going to connive to do this, and the people at the box office were like, "That's age discrimination." Then we said, we could have different prices for different audiences. And they were like, "Well, that's class discrimination." In frustration, I was like, "Fuck it. The rich need to be discriminated against." I mean, if they can pay a higher ticket price, then they should. But the kid that's coming from Uptown or Queens should get in for free or should pay $5 to start this theatre habit. During our second year, our funders started saying to us, "Your budget was $150,000 the first year. You got zero leftover. You've got to have money left over next year. How much are you charging?" Even our nonprofit funders who understand what we're trying to do were like, "How are you going to sustain yourselves?" So we start turning into an institution, right? So at the same time as this ticket question is happening—raising issues about price and accessibility and marketing, about meeting our bottom line—the aesthetic battle is happening. My fear is that we're going to wind up with two hip-hops. And excluding the audience that we wanted to make this for in the first place—which is really us. We're just older now. Probably 20 years from now, we're going to be the ones in the back saying, "You know, we're having this conversation again?"
MARLA TEYOLIA, founding director of Luminating Works, an arts-management agency: If we don't define, it's going to be defined for us—and it's happening already by these theatre heads that have not produced hip-hop theatre or who don't know what they're talking about. I feel that there are two different camps. There are folks who are really pushing the form, in terms of taking the four cornerstones of hip-hop culture and using that to actually push the narrative—and then you have folks on the other extreme who are working within traditional forms, but are bringing contemporary landscapes and issues to the theatre. Both approaches are valid, but I feel that definitions need to be made. My fear is that especially for young artists of color—-that if you're a young black man and in your piece you have an MC—all of a sudden that's described as hip-hop theatre. That's ghettoizing it.
When we're going out to the theatres and booking, yes, we do have to sell a product, essentially, and that's just the reality of it. But then when it's turned around, it doesn't necessarily have to be sold [to audiences] the way I sold it to you, you know what I mean? There are ways we can co-create a marketing plan or co-create how we're going to get the word out into the field. I also feel that the beauty of the theatre we're creating is when you see the generations mixing. I personally don't have a problem with older white-haired folks in the audience sitting next to a person of color who is in some completely different place. That's where the power is. Yeah, a lot of the old folks were sitting down and just listening, but they're getting it. Their way of listening is different; it doesn't mean that it's less valid. It's a very different dynamic. I don't want to alienate any audience at all.
BARAKA SELE, curator of New Jersey Performing Arts Center's World Festival: I attended an arts conference several years ago and Peter Sellars, a very well-known opera producer, said, "If we can learn to sell poison food and bad cereal, we can learn to sell good art. I can sell anything, as long as it's good." It goes back to something I told Will Power 10 years ago: Perfect your craft, perfect your craft-and don't ever be ashamed to call your work whatever it is. If it's hip-hop or whatever, if that is what you do, sell it as that, because in America we sell everything from Pet Rocks to every damn thing else. So perfect your craft.
Also in American Theatre's series on hip-hop and theatre:
Found in Translation, by Eisa Davis, July/August 2004
Are We Dancing to Our Own Beat? by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, May/June 2004
The 5th Element, by Roberta Uno, with additional material by Harry Elam Jr., Kamilah Forbes and Universes, April 2004
Related stories in American Theatre:
Tha Playz tha Thang, Kim Euell on the 2002 Hip-Hop Theater Festival in New York City, September 2002
Sarah Jones: Wrestling Her Way Out, by Martha Hostetter, September 2002
Blowin' Up the Set, by Holly Bass, November 1999
Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, a play by Danny Hoch, July 1991
© - 2006 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.