Hip-Hop Fest: an Artistic Mash-Up

By Laura Knowles

It’s poetry. It’s music. It’s dance. It’s hip-hop.

This weekend, Franklin & Marshall College will examine the role of hip-hop in American culture. Although the two-day Hip-Hop Theatre Festival is being held to mark Black History Month, hip-hop is not strictly an African-American phenomenon.

“Hip-hop is a part of the youth culture of America. Since so many students at F&M – black, white and all cultures – enjoy hip-hop, we wanted to validate it as true theatre,” says Matthew Mazuroski, performing arts coordinator at Frank & Marshall.

Mazuroski worked with Clyde Valentin, executive director of New York’s Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, to organize the event. They combined two interconnected genres, with the Friday night performance by the the Olive Dance Theatre, a multidisciplinary, multimedia dance company offering original work in hip-hop, break dancing, live music and video in ensemble pieces and solos. Then on Saturday night, four hip-hop soloists will perform from their varying perspectives.

“We chose soloists who would show that hip-hop transcends cultures and ages. Two of our performers are very young, one is in his 30s and another is older, in his 40s,” says Valentin. “I think the hip-hop theatre will dispel any preconceived ideas of hip-hop.”

In fact, hip-hop has many parallels to the slam poetry that got started in the 1950s during the so-called beatnik era. Yet, Valentin points out that it goes back much further than that.

For generations, African-American and Latino cultures have used storytelling as a form of theatre, blending poems, music and dance to tell their stories. Hip-hop tells its stories too, whether from the inner city American streets to Caribbean islands to South America.

“The performers we selected offer a range of aesthetics and themes relating to their cultures,” says Valentin.

The four soloists in Saturday’s performance are Teo Castellanos, of Puerto Rico and Miami, performing “N.E. 2nd Ave”; Queen GodIs of New York City performing “Untitled #69″; Rudi Goblen, Nicaraguan writer, who grew up in Miami, performing “Insanity Isn’t” and Marc Bamuthi Joseph of Los Angeles performing “the break/s.”

Castellanos, in his 40s, is the oldest, and received his BFA in Theatre from Florida Atlantic University under a full scholarship where he studied with four-time Tony Award winner Zoe Caldwell. As a writer and playwright, he is author of “War, Revolution, and the Projects,” a one man trilogy, which he has toured on the East coast, as well as his one-man show “N.E. 2nd Avenue,” which is based on Miami characters.

That show was commissioned and produced by Miami Light Project as part of their 2001-2002 Contemporary Performance Series and went on to be produced by Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami in a successful 10-week run. Castellano is also the founder and artistic director of D-Projects, an urban arts collective.

Powerful is the key word to Queen GodIs, a younger performer who is only in her 20s. Her work has been described as a “A lioness’ paw in a red high-heeled shoe.”

She was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., and in her relatively short career has become known as a gifted, lyrically insightful, thought-provoking, and dynamic spoken word artist. In her debut album, “Power U!” she shows her stuff as co-producer, budding engineer, MC, and singer with a powerful sense of melody and harmony.

“Her work incorporates hip-hop, soul, rock and theater,” says Valentin. “I see her as a force to be reckoned with.”

Also in his 20s, Rudi Goblen performs “Insanity Isn’t,” which is a dance melodrama experienced through a character named Acey, who tries to sleep through the American dream and ends up waking to an American nightmare.

Goblen is a Nicaraguan writer who grew up in Miami. He has performed with hip-hop artists such as The Roots, Mos Def, De La Soul, Mf Doom and Def Jux. A 13-year breakdancer, he has toured all over the world with the Flipside Kings.

Goblen is a member of D-Projects, a cross-section of conservatory and street trained artists creating provocative contemporary performance.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a National Poetry Slam champion, Broadway veteran, and was a featured artist on the past two seasons of Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry on HBO. In his 30s, he was recipient of two National Performance Network Creation commissions and a USA Rockefeller Fellow in Theater Arts.

Originally from New York City, he now lives in Oakland, Calif. He has performed in Tokyo at the First International Spoken Word Festival and in Santiago de Cuba where he joined the legendary Katherine Dunham as a part of the CubaNola Collective.

He has appeared in the Tony Award-winning “The Tap Dance Kid” on Broadway, “Word Becomes Flesh” at Seattle’s On The Boards, and at Houston’s Diverse Works, Washington D.C.’s Dance Place and New York’s Dance Theater Workshop. He works with the Youth Speaks organization that mentors teenage writers.

He has been San Francisco’s Poetry Grand Slam winner three times, and won the 1999 National Poetry Slam with Team San Francisco.

(c) 2008 Intelligencer Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.