Found in Translation

Hip-hop theatre fuses the thought and the word, the rhythm and the rhyme, the old and the new

By Eisa Davis

I said it before, and I'm-a say it again. I belong to the church of hip-hop. Cain't help it. If your afterschool program is dancing to a boom box made out of two speakers, a suitcase and a skateboard spray-painted gold, if you remember when The Source magazine was just a double-sided Xerox copy, if you've got Queen Latifah's autograph from back when she used to be a dope MC, you are a hip-hop head, without a doubt. And that I am.

I also belong to the cult of theatre. My other after-school program was playing Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, Teeta in Alice Childress's Wedding Band, crying through the monologues from Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who committed suicide / when the rainbow is enuf over and over to the bunks on my bunk bed. When I saw Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror at the Public Theater in New York City and then Tony Kushner's Angels in America at the Mark Taper Forum just a few months later in Los Angeles, I knew that theatre was a place I could make my home.

One MFA and several jobs later, I heard about something called hip-hop theatre and lost my natural born mind. I was already doing this—writing plays with hip-hop in them—but had no idea that this sort of work was being created by artists all over the country, all over the world. In New York, Cincinnati, D.C., London, San Fran and L.A., a new movement was being born, a syncretic art form that, in combining two genres, was actually revitalizing the aesthetics of each.

Having a name for what we did suddenly meant we had a community. We were not alone, we had crew, comrades, an umbrella 501(c) (3). Having a name meant we were consciously developing artistic voices unique to what had come before us. Today, the name hip-hop theatre still brings people together, recognizing that the separation of hip-hop from theatre to begin with was an unnecessary, artificial split. Hip-hop theatre is a family reunion, says Javier Reyes, artistic director of Colored Ink of Oakland, Calif. It's a clarion call to artists who want to resurrect American hip-hop by siphoning the formaldehyde out of its commodified veins, and to infuse theatre with our bright, fresh blood. It's the child of hip-hop and theatre. Perhaps it has another name, which it has yet to find. For now, it carries the name of its parents—and is more than the sum of its parts.

What is hip-hop theatre? When did it start? Lot of heat around this form, not enough light. Here are a few samples. Some take it all the way back to Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, the Last Poets and Ntozake Shange—works from the '60s and '70s that exemplify what Paul Carter Harrison calls the "African continuum." Then came the Santa Claus skit by the Treacherous Three in the movie Beat Street and the interludes on De La Soul's debut album Three Feet High and Rising. All of the B'boying and breakdance from Flashdance and Breakin' to GhettOriginal and Noise/Funk. The graffiti writing in Wild Style. Might have been recorded on film or on tape but was theatre just the same. Some pioneers of the recent wave working explicitly in traditional theatre venues include Will Power, Universes, Danny Hoch, Hip Hop Theatre Junction, Sarah Jones, Jonzi D and Full Circle. There's no way to essentialize their work. Each artist recreates the genre as s/he creates individual pieces. Some artists are more interested in innovative theatrical form, utilizing one or more of the four elements of hip-hop (rapping/MC'ing, DJ'ing, B'boying/breakdancing, writing grafitti) for storytelling, and others are more interested in innovative narrative, making use of the sensibility, language and stories of the hip-hop generation for content. You could break down the difference between these creative styles like this: Whether it's Jay-Z rhyming (hip-hop form) or Latrell Sprewell playing basketball (hip-hop content), both are hip-hop through and through. Like Anna Deavere Smith and Tony Kushner, hip-hop theatre artists are pushing the envelope and creating culture instead of just riding it. With hip-hop theatre, we have what rapper KRS-One calls "edutainment." There is ritual, call and response, and an amped, young audience of color that actually wants to be in their seats.

But hip-hop theatre is a name, and names hold water, weight, sway. Names can be outgrown. Names can be used to pigeonhole, denigrate, exclude. "You mean you're 'doing' poetry instead of writing it? Slam poems instead of page poems?" "How can you be a hip-hop theatre artist and write a traditional play set in 1955 in the California redwoods! That's not street; write something uglier." "If you don't use the four elements, you are not hip-hop." "You're Asian, you're white, you're Pacific Islander, so you are not hip-hop." "You're black, so why are you so smart and articulate?" These attempts to limit expression don't just come from outside the community, they come from inside. Even when comments don't intend to be exclusionary, there is no agreement on what hip-hop theatre is, whatsoever. It's like that, and that's the way it is. It's the internal dialogue that keeps the form vital, relevant, and enhances the ability to be participants and observers simultaneously. Which is what artists must always be.

I like the name "hip-hop theatre," because when it's ascriptive, voluntary and utilized by a self-described hip-hop generation that speaks through theatre, we are found in translation. Finally, a form that describes and comprises our multi-ness. When U.K.-based artist Benji Reid dances his monologues, it's new, and it's the best kind of new—the kind that plays with conventions and serves up their permutations. And we've got all kinds of historical precedents. Art forms progress when they mimic other art forms, whether it's Langston Hughes writing the blues on the page or Aaron Copland building symphonies from folk tunes or Lee Strasberg bringing the therapist's couch into acting. The purists shriek, the open-minded are jazzed, and the culture follows.

There's an intergenerational dialoguethat's going on with hip-hop theatre, too. Sometimes it's a screaming match, sometimes it's a passing of the torch, sometimes it's an active collaboration. But it's a dialogue that is entirely welcome, and it has to do with the conscious relationship that hip-hop has always had to the past. When you sample old records and quote lyrics, you're not just stealing, you're showing respect. A DJ is doing her job when she generates nostalgia for music itself. When we convened a presentation and discussion of hip-hop theatre at New Dramatists in February, I was heartened to hear from Baraka Sele, curator of New Jersey Performing Arts Center's World Festival, and Gwendolen Hardwick, program director of Creative Arts Team, that we are doing exactly what they were doing in the Black Arts movement of the '70s. [See roundtable story.] Trying to make theatre that was for us, by us, about us; being ignored by the mainstream; funneling the same raw energy into work that takes a stance in the endless struggle for socioeconomic, racial, gender and sexual equality.

And hip-hop theatre is already happening to older, primarily white subscription audiences in mainstream theatres, even on Broadway. A recent example is Regina Taylor's Drowning Crow. An adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull, the play dramatizes the conflict between mother and son as an aesthetic war between traditional and hip-hop theatre, between Arkadina's fading glory as a Negro Ensemble Company actress and Constantine's youthful search for "new forms." Of course, Chekhov wrote himself in as Konstantin—with The Seagull, he was attempting to create a new form himself. In Marion McClinton's Manhattan Theatre Club production, Constantine, or C-Trip, as Taylor renames him, was played by Anthony Mackie. As an actor, his hip-hop cred is high after playing Tupac in Michael Winn's Up Against the Wind at the New York Theatre Workshop, and for penning his own rhymes as Papa Doc, Eminem's archrival in the film 8 Mile. So when Mackie as C-Trip presents his play within a play on the lake in the first act, guess what it is? Hip-hop theatre. He recites blank verse and rhyme to a beat, dancing expressively as he speaks. Before presenting the play, C-Trip even speaks to other characters with rhyme and rhythm, revealing that his artistic experimentation with new forms is taking place in every facet of his life. And because the play unfurls from his perspective, the entire production employs the projections and dance and sampling that hip-hop theatre is known for.

But back to C-Trip's play. What does Arkadina (played by Alfre Woodard) think of it? She thinks it stinks. Why couldn't he do an excerpt from August Wilson's Seven Guitars, she asks. Eventually, C-Trip kills himself, because he can't get any love, can't get any understanding. And even if Regina Taylor had changed the ending to spare his life, Ben Brantley slayed the whole show in the New York Times, and no one could be caught dead appreciating the bold stylistic leap that Taylor had taken.

I appreciated it. Playwright and poet Cornelius Eady, author of Running Man and Brutal Imagination, always insists to his students that the instructions for hearing the play must be written into the play. We must always be sure that every audience member has a way into our work. In Drowning Crow, the instructions were there. But in our world of de facto cultural segregation, some audience members may not know the language in which those instructions are written. So we keep trying to be found in translation.

When I was in grad school, the director/actor Stuart Vaughan once came and spoke in our Shakespeare class. He talked about two major epochs in drama: the theatre of the articulate and the theatre of the inarticulate. Vaughan used Shakespeare as his prime example of the articulate, where each character eventually says exactly what s/he feels. Sam Shepard was his example of the inarticulate, where much of the play's meaning takes place in the subtext, in what is not being said or is unable to be said. Articulate theatre recognizes a one-to-one correlation between thought and word, whereas inarticulate theatre does not trust words to say it all, recognizes that expression, let alone communication, is often impossible. Hip-hop joins the articulate with the inarticulate. The lyrics provide the articulation of intellect, the need to speak plainly or with complexity, with irony, local and personal specificity, satire, longing—and the beat brings the inarticulate release of pure music, of the drum, of our primal rhythm. And we can flip it. The lyrics can be inarticulate, the pure feeling evoked by a curse word, a nonsense rhyme—and the beat can be intellectual, not danceable, just something to contemplate, to analyze. When hip-hop moves from the corner and into a theatre, you get the one-two punch. Articulate inarticulateness. Restoring theatre to its full power.

In just 25 years, we've already got a classical hip-hop aesthetic. Just as ballet technique became codified over the years—first through fifth position for legs and arms, arabesque, tendu—so have hip-hop music, lyrics, dance and visual art developed a stable vocabulary—battle rhymes, freestyle, uprock, poplock—that can be taught and used to tell anybody's story. Philly collective olive Dance Theatre (Jamie Merwin and Raphael Xavier, artistic directors) demonstrated this loud and clear in its recent piece tOy bOx, which imagined a set of mechanized children's toys dressed in green and red coming to life through breakdancing moves. Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson once said that history judges a race by the quality of its literature and art. If jazz and modernism are the formal legacies of his generation, hip-hop and postmodernism may well be the formal legacies of ours. Content may never change, stories always stay the same, but new forms alter consciousness, actually change the way we imagine ourselves.

So if hip-hop is now at the center of global culture, how long will it take our theatres to catch up? We're on the bound. Four years ago, I wrote an article in the grownup, glossy version of The Source magazine about hip-hop theatre. I didn't coin the term: It actually had appeared some months before in an American Theatre article by Holly Bass who would go on to curate for the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. But she didn't coin the term either. I think that just like calculus being invented simultaneously by Leibniz and Newton, hip-hop theatre simply arrived because of evolutionary necessity. Because my article was in the March 2000 issue of The Source, a hip-hop magazine, the term "hip-hop theatre" was able to galvanize a community of artists already developing the form, some of whom had never met before. Danny Hoch and Kamilah Forbes and Clyde Valentin started the New York Hip-Hop Theater Festival that year. In The Source article, Noise/Funk co-creator Reg E. Gaines said that "hip-hop theatre becomes valid if Puffy [Sean Combs] or Russell or Master P reads this, invests and puts hip-hop theatre on Broadway…until they invest, nothing matters." Since then, Russell Simmons has won a Tony for producing Def Poetry Jam and MC/actor Mos Def has starred in Suzan-Lori Parks's Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog. And regardless of your opinion of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs playing Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, by simply being on stage, he is creating an excitement around live theatre that many young people have never felt before. Will Power and Universes and Danny Hoch work at New York Theatre Workshop and the Mark Taper Forum. We've had a Future Aesthetics retreat for artists spearheaded by Roberta Uno at the Ford Foundation, and plays by Ben Snyder, Indio Melendez, Gamal Chasten, myself and others are being developed by theatres nationwide. Through such grassroots initiatives like the International Hip-Hop Exchange, the roots of hip-hop are being nurtured by MCs in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Cuba, and hip-hop theatre's got a multi-part series in American Theatre.

And we don't stop. We're in both worlds, and we want you to be, too. Keep learning about us, and we'll keep learning about you.

Eisa Davis is an actor and writer whose plays include Angela's Mixtape, Umkovu, Bulrusher, Paper Armor and most recently Six Minutes. She is the winner of the 2004 Helen Merrill Award and is featured in the film Robot Stories.

Also in American Theatre's series on hip-hop and theatre:

Bling, or Revolution, a roundtable discussion with Daniel Banks, Chadwick Boseman, Gamal Abdel Chasten, Gwendolen Hardwick, Danny Hoch, Baraka Sele, Marla Teyolia, Clyde Valentin and Raphael Xavier, 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

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