Performing Arts

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an artist whose medium is his entire self.

And the side of himself he presents in the break/s is hip-hop. His body is hip-hop. His brain is hip-hop. His words are hip-hop. He is hip-hop from the heals of his feet to the top of his head.

Legend has it that hip-hop was born at a house party in the Bronx in the 1970s. Cindy Campbell wasn't thinking about starting a social movement, inventing a new genre of music or way of life, she was looking for a way to make a little extra money for back to school clothes. So she rented the rec room in her apartment, procured party supplies and charged a quarter or two for each guest.

It happened that her brother Clive, known to the neighborhood as DJ Herc, set up the perfect sound-system. Noticing that the dance floor really moved during the drum breaks, DJ Herc started mixing soul and funk records so that the music moved from drum break to drum break. And so another element of hip hop was born: break dancing. After a while emcees started rhyming over the freshly mixed music. And before long, graffiti artists started creating images as the music played. Thus there are four elements of hip-hop: deejaying, emceeing, break dancing and graffiti.

During a decade when the south Bronx was nearly abandoned; (the region lost nearly half it's population and arson and neglect left nearly half the buildings in the area empty), one of the most powerful social movements was begun. Hip-hop became a place where people could come together, it became a venue for social critique, it gave rise to other art forms and, for some, became a way of life. For me, hip-hop is connected to history and hope.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an intentional artist and educator, the powerful history of hip-hop as a cultural force feels present in his work.

the break/s is a play on words that brings the breaks that are the heart of hip hop music to mind, but also links to a more personal story of a break. This fits perfectly as the title to the performance piece in which Bamuthi shares stories of his life and work using spoken word, dance, projection and sometimes by conversationally addressing the audience over beats and breaks created by Tommy Shepard and DJ Excess. He moves and speaks with incredible charisma, artistry, sincerity and generosity. With stories of his travel, Bamuthi takes the audience to faraway places across both the Atlantic and Pacific but more importantly geography is a backdrop for stories that begin conversations about race, identity, relationships, hip hop, art and much more. I would tell you all about it, but Bamuthi does a much better job than I could begin to do.

In fact, every single cell in his body is engaged the story telling he does to a degree that I can't describe, please just go see it for yourself. You will be awed and inspired. I promise.

No one coughed, no candy wrappers were opened, and nary a cell phone disturbed Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Hey Girl! on the McGuire Stage at the Walker Art Center last night.

The nearly full house was engrossed in the many enigmatic images that passed before our eyes through the course of the performance; a female body slowly emerged from primordial goo; words flashed across a screen so swiftly they could just barely be perceived; a pack of men inflicted an aggressive beating on our anonymous heroine that could be seen only in strangely beautiful bursts of flashing florescent light; the white heroine whose story was on display sold the black heroine who joined her onstage into chains; the skin of the black heroine was painted silver as she stood brandishing a mirror and sword over a stage covered in broken glass.

4-D art is work created in any media that incorporates time. Hey Girl! is one of the loveliest works of post-modern performance art that I have ever seen and an exquisite example of a truly multi-dimensional work of art. In addition to playing through time Hey Girl! also plays with the notion that there are multiple 'truths' in history. Nothing felt fixed or absolute in this piece. Movements and images were presented and then repeated in new contexts where meanings were revised.

The piece quotes elements of classical and modern performance. For example, text from the balcony scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was projected above the parts of the performance and the white heroine looked like a re-invented Joan of Arc while draped in a flag and brandishing a sword. There were certainly strains of narrative, I watched a white woman be 'born' and make her way through this strange, surreal world. I watched black woman appear on the scene in this world, be stripped to her skin and chained. But this show was not like a tragedy of star-crossed lovers in which I could find catharsis or even a beginning, middle or end. Identities shifted, power was revealed and reassigned.

While watching the piece, I felt the 'girl' in the piece was not a universal representation of every human. As soon as I saw her be complicit in the oppression of a woman of another race, I realized she was a person with a class that was complex and sometimes changing. The two virtuosic female performers, Silvia Cost and Sonia Beltran Napoles, were more like modernist symbolic figures than characters. Castellucci took many familiar elements and ideas, like words, bodies, mirrors, swords, etc.out of familiar contexts and repositioned them in a new, brutally poetic combination.

Toward the end of the piece, a sharp, pencil thin point of light shone on the head one of the two women in the show like a laser beam. Hey Girl! hit my brain in a similar way. I was completely enthralled, I watched the piece with razor sharp focus while it played before me and thought of nothing else. And, since walking out of the theater, my brain has been wrestling and processing the content of the show and trying to figure out what it means to me. I've been thinking about men and women, history, slavery, loneliness, connection, violence and art. In short, the performance passed what a friend of mine calls 'the butt test' and 'the brain test' with flying colors; meaning I sat in rapt attention through the piece (my but was still) and after it finished my brain recalled the intriguing images clearly and I wanted to re/examine what I saw voraciously.