All the World’s a Stage: Bringing Hip-Hop to the Theater

In the first act, the dancers’ movements are slow, calculated. The lights focus in on the stage to highlight the sinuous muscles of the three men rising and turning in an avant-garde mix of movement over break beat. The textured lights follow a narrative of fluid motions that seem to mimic a ship at sea, a journey taken from break dancing to modern dance. The dancers, members of the Philadelphia-based olive Dance Theater, are performing a production of Olive, an original multimedia narrative. In this performance dance takes a fantastical journey through the art of b-boyin.’

When the lights come on, they shine on an audience that many may not consider your typical theater-going crowd. They are young (many are teenagers and under the age of 30) and primarily youth of color. After the show some gather outdoors in corners freestyling, while others comment on the performance.

Thus began the third Annual Hip-Hop Theater Festival in Washington, D.C. This festival, which was founded by Danny Hoch, Kamilah Forbes and Clyde Valentin in New York in 2000 (then in in D.C three years ago and San Francisco last year), has evolved into the nation’s most comprehensive and influential display of hip hop aesthetics—showcasing solo and ensemble dance pieces and plays, as well as workshops and panels. According to critics, the festival’s popularity with a younger crowd symbolizes hip hop’s movement from margin to center stage in contemporary theater.

Once a movement of the underground, “Hip-Hop Theater” has burst onto the stages of the mainstream, blurring the line between high and low cultur. As one of the organizations that has brought the movement to the forefront, the Hip-Hop Theater Festival’s mission is to present and support live performances by artists who stretch, invent and combine a variety of theatrical forms, including dance, spoken word and live music sampling to express the diversity of the human experience through Hip-Hop culture. While supporting the production of Hip-Hop theater-based work, the festival also designs and implements programs that address the socio-political issues impacting their target audience—underserved urban youth spanning the ages of 12 to 35.

This year’s artists mean business. Marc Bamuthi Joseph performs “Word Becomes Flesh,” a series of performed letters to an unborn son in which he uses poetry, dance, live music and visual art to document nine months of pregnancy from a single father’s perspective. This runs alongside Aya de Leon’s Hip-Hop feminist manifesto, “Thieves in the Temple.” Her show is described as a battle cry for grassroots Hip-Hop consumers and creators, particularly women. Tackling similar, complex issues is Chad Boseman, the director of “Deep Azure,” a play that addresses the concepts of abuse, brutality and redemption.

Then there’s Full Circle Productions, a nonprofit entertainment company that graces the stage utilizing DJing, breakin’, MCing, spoken word and dance, all infused in Latino and African American youth culture. Its founders, who worked their way from the outdoor performances of street shows, now reach large audiences touring internationally at festivals like this one.

Full Circle’s artistic director, Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio, says that not much has changed in how they approach their shows. “We’re just street performing to stage,” he says, adding that he was trained in an art that has been passed down through generations. “The social exchange is a village experience,” says Kwikstep. “[You] go into cipher or circle and learn it.”

Redefining Aesthetics

These Artists see Hip-Hop Theater as being at the center of a global youth culture. But this generation is not alone in calling for an aesthetics that encompasses their experience. When Danny Hoch called for “theater that is by, for, and about the Hip-Hop generation” he echoed the words of W.E.B. Dubois, who called for “theater by, for, about and near” African Americans in the 1920s. The revolutionary aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement (the artistic arm of the 60s Black Power Movement) created artistic work that took on the struggle for socioeconomic, racial, gender and sexual equality (inspiring artists such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, the Last Poets and Ntozake Shange). Many of these movements were in tangent with cultural and musical revolutions (August Wilson’s plays were informed by the blues and Ntozake Shange’s work was informed by jazz).