> War Peace: The One Drop Rule is a youth driven hip-hop theater piece that imagines the Bay Area as a potential war zone in a time of protracted drought. Directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, War Peace is collaboratively written and performed by Chinaka Hodge, Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs, and Nico Cary. War Peace features an original score by the SF Jazz Youth All-Stars, while Emmy award winning choreographer and tap sensation Jason Samuels-Smith joins the cast and performs a percussive tap and modern movement vocabulary to underscore the work’s spoken language.
> Scourge is a hip-hop theater piece which blends the traditions of Afro-Caribbean jazz, spoken word, and contemporary and folkloric movement into a compelling historical narrative tracing the social and diplomatic trajectory of Haiti.
> Word Becomes Flesh is a fluid evening-length choreopoem, the latest in a long tradition of narrative verse plays whose contributors range from Shakespeare to Ntozake Shange. Presented as a series of performed letters to his unborn son, the piece uses poetry, dance, live music and visual art to document nine months of pregnancy from a young single father’s perspective.
> In Spite of Everything features the Bay Area’s most dynamic spoken word trio, the collective known as “The Suicide Kings” (think Culture Clash meets I was Born with Two Tongues in a moshpit) and theatrically documents their unlikely movement away from the precipice of their own lives, to the center of the public school system in Northern California.
> Mirrors in Every Corner by Chinaka Hodge is an evening-length theater production chronicling the life of an African-American Oakland family and its grapple with race and identity from 1984 to the present. After raising three boys, a fatigued mother grieves at her first daughter’s birth. While healthy in all regards, the child is born White. Not light-skinned or pigment deficient, but White. We track the story through the early life of the girl, called Random, right up until her 13th birthday, when she has a muscle memory of the lynching of one of her black ancestors. The play aims at discussing how race is lived in and through the body, and the reality and fictive of race that is unearthed when we ask, “What does it feel like to be Black?”
> Written in Blues by Lauren Whitehead asks why some women get stuck with the blues as their primary means of expression and other women don’t. Why some songs come out sour and some tunes never find words, and the struggle to create out of a place of pain or darkness. Our narrator finds herself fighting this gift of song that she has been given, so she takes us on a journey through her years growing up in a lily white suburb, to her fantastical vision of history and eventually to her interpersonal relationships with the men who have provided the inspiration for her blues. The show will speak to themes of music, love, transcendence, race and time and will do so by looking through the lens of song and sadness.
> Cause features the musical score of Jonathan Norton and a series of Spoken Word pieces originally created by six members of Youth Speaks.
> Bury Marcos written by Jason Mateo.
“Summer 2003. I am standing in an endless queue of curiosity-seekers, waiting to view Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos’ body. The body is kept in a refrigerated crypt in the province of Ilocos Norte. Soon I will be peering into the lifeless face of an enigma.” The struggle to reconcile the real and ideal is an ongoing conundrum for both artist and activist. Jason Mateo left the Philippines that summer with an undying urge—to bury Marcos. As the desire traveled with him, and he with it, he began to unravel more of what that truly meant. Bury Marcos is an attempt to exhume, examine and ultimately bury Marcos’ legacy, and those martyred under his rule—and exorcise the collective trauma of those that live in the wake of his regime.
> a eulogy for three, written by Jose Vadi, is an attempt to write the last words for an unknown man through history, memory, and spoken word. Crammed into a studio apartment, three friends — Andrew, Benny, and Leo — are given only a day to complete this task after Benny’s father calls Benny informing him of his grandfather’s passing before asking Benny to write the eulogy in his voice, as he is too preoccupied to write it himself. Now, asking his friends for guidance and assistance, Benny’s inherited task exposes the stories and histories all three friends have inherited from their own father’s and throws into question who will be the true author of the eulogy itself.
> Tree City Legends, written by Dennis Kim, is a cycle of story and song focused on the lives of the Kane brothers—Junie, Sum, denizen, and Min. The Legends are at once flesh and fiction, men and make-believe. Their story is a remembering, a reworking of myth. Their song is a dub, a version; the sound the dead make, mourning themselves. Poems, monologues, 16s, and an acoustic guitar; heaven is high and hell is low.
> the break/s
Premiered march 2008 // produced by MAPP International Productions
Created by The Living Word Project / Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Directed by Michael John Garcés
A multimedia excursion across planet hip-hop, the break/s dramatically realizes the living history of the hip-hop generation through the performed personal narrative of poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph. the break/s is a deeply honest investigation into the conflicts between Bamuthi’s public identity as successful spoken word artist, and his private identity as young man coming of age in our globalized, multieverything era. A life-long performer, he leaves it all on stage—simultaneously devouring the space with everything from shamrocks to attitude turns and eloquently spitting rhymes spoken from the heart.
“Joseph is the real deal, swinging with such confidence that you grasp for adjectives to capture his skills.” -Star Tribune
In the break/s, the medium is also the message.
In this “mixtape for the stage,” Bamuthi performs in a call-and-response format with turntablist DJ Excess, and beatboxer and percussionist Tommy Shepherd (aka Soulati). The multiple layers of meaning in their exchange are intensified by video projections, created by filmmaker Eli Jacobs Fantauzzi, composed of interviews and documentary footage of hip-hop culture throughout the world.
Bamuthi drew inspiration for the break/s from Jeff Chang’s 2005 American Book Award winning publication, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, which definitively captures the birth of hip hop as a local movement inspired by a generation’s longing to make culture that impacts the world.
A remarkable team of artists and creative advisors contributed to the break/s, led by director Michael John Garcés, and including dramaturg Brian Freeman, choreographer Stacy Printz, video and set designer David Szlaza, lighting designer James Clotfelter, and composer Ajayi Lumumba.