UNTOLD RICHESHip Hop Theatre practitioners such as Zell Miller III are tapping new sources for powerful stories that might otherwise not be heard. Rohan Preston, Minneapolis Star Tribune Published April 27, 2003 Onstage at Pillsbury House Theatre, Zell Miller III is ready to blow. Under bare multicolored lightbulbs suspended from strings, the Texas-based poet, playwright and performer is reeling off the narrative of his life. He pulls lights on and off to enact chapters of his story. There's the mirror image he sees in his beautiful, difficult-to-discipline toddler son, and a tale reconsidering the day he refused a white man a seat on a bus. He recounts the contentment of helping out his father around the yard, and the fear of kissing a first date. Miller looks at the DJ spinning and strumming across the stage, holding that gaze until it seems like the air between them has somehow materialized into a tactile, tense cord. Then they let it go, turning the rope back to air and allowing the audience to breathe. Miller's tour-de-force, "The Evidence of Silence Broken," suggests the flickers of a volcano's magma that burn their way down the mountainside before cooling into fertile earth. His fusing of the oral and physical gestures of rap with movement, script and a live DJ puts his show into the newly evolving world of hip-hop theater, which seems to be sprouting everywhere. Last fall, "Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam" became the first hip-hop piece to open on Broadway. The show won critical raves -- and broadened onstage voices, storytelling methods and the pool of theater patrons, even if "Def Poetry Jam" recently has been struggling to find an audience. Hip-hop theater festivals in recent years have drawn thousands in New York, California and elsewhere, with artists from North America and South Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Nor is the hip-hop influence limited to the stage or music. In film, editing techniques and content bear hip-hop's zig-zagging, script-flipping imprimatur. The same influence can be seen in visual art (Walker Art Center had a large exhibit last year) and dance. Hip-hop choreographer Renne Harris is scheduled to bring his fierce dancers to the Twin Cities next season. Locally, the roster includes Desdamona, J. Otis Powell!, Mire Regulus and E.G. Bailey, whose company, Tru Ruts, co-produced "Evidence." Profound influence "Hip-hop was the dominant sound on my radio, and it has profoundly influenced my work and the way Americans walk, talk, listen," said "Evidence" director Daniel Alexander Jones, a native of Springfield, Mass., who lives in New York. He is also a playwright and actor. "In terms of structure -- the way things are sequenced -- moving in any and many directions at once. In content, I think that hip-hop sampling, sequencing and structuring [have influenced my work]." Danny Hoch, who curates the New York festival and who performed at a thrilling, sold-out show at Walker Art Center in November, agreed. "Hip-hop is of much more relevance to our lives -- people's lives today -- than almost any other cultural force," he said. Added Londoner Jonzi D., also from the Walker event: "If you look at it, what we're doing is telling stories that are not otherwise being told. We're writing, walking, moving, breaking out of our souls because we need to express our truths. It's not like we just go onstage and want to be seen, yo." Broader than Broadway When people think of hip-hop, they sometimes think of the improvisational freestyle versifying done at poetry jams or impromptu rap battles, with words firing like bullets or falling like fluffy pollen. Or rap music, including thug-glorifying gangsta rap, whose dominant videos often show posers with free-flowing Moet, lots of ice (jewelry) and the jiggling of scantily clad dancers. But hip-hop is so much more expansive, and nourishing, than those images. Hip-hop theater is an open form, combining gesture, graffiti and music, including beat-box sounds and a DJ's artful use of records. Some shows incorporate dances that have names such as the Harlem shake, heel to toe and the Crip walk, a skipping movement banned by some California schools because of its association with a notorious street gang. Some hip-hop theater stories are told in loosely linear narrative -- like Roger Guenveur Smith's "A Huey P. Newton Story," which he performed with a DJ at the Southern Theater a few seasons back. Others, by such artists as Carl Hancock Rux and Sekou Sundiata, are multidirectional, circular eruptions, like seeds from a wheel. They all utilize literary devices from metaphors to deft wordplay. "There's a natural progression that we've seen here," Bailey said. "You start with poetry or rap, then move to writing longer pieces, then into theater or wherever else you can find a way to develop your talent." Scripted for portability Miller's "Evidence" is an example of the progression. He scripted it as a way to have a portable show that expands his horizons. "I wanted to put my poetry into something that was bigger -- to take it to the next level," he said. "Everything I do for the stage is about that." Even with its traditional theater elements, it still feels like a choreo-poem for the hip-hop age. It has a fresh, improvisational feel. The graffiti-tagged set, by designer Seitu Jones, features an old, rusted Volkswagen Bug whose hood reveals a trove of books. The playing area is strewn with tires and discarded electronic gear -- seemingly an urban refuse heap. "Hip-hop has always been about spinning what the world throws away as scraps into gold," director Jones said. The lights hanging from the ceiling of the set suggest interrogation bulbs, as if the artist is sharing, without coercion, from his soul. "We thought of [Ralph Ellison's 'The] Invisible Man' with those lights -- we wanted to have a light-cave where you can see yourself, your shadow," Jones said. "I wanted to make this a spiritual piece," Miller added. "I wanted it to be all that I am as a man, a human being, an artist. It wanted it to flip to script, to kick knowledge out of my soul. I just wanted it to be true to my life." Jones, who earned a master's degree in fine arts from Brown University, said he finds that hip-hop has many of the elements Zora Neale Hurston named to define African expression. They include the use of folk heroes, an absence of privacy and asymmetry or angularity in presentation. "In music, it's the 'blue' notes. In communication, it's the need for slang, for giving words new, even opposite meaning," he said. "In the development of dramatic narrative, I'm much more interested in the ways things fall out of balance." "The inner sanctum that often functions as subtext for others is, with us, the text," Jones said. "The spiritual and the ordinary are one. What's so exciting about what we're doing here at Pillsbury House is that we're finding this mouth of a human life inside common stories. "But we're engaging with epic themes, with spiritual conundrums -- trying to find ways to resolve what's seemingly irresolvable. It's like being in the middle of a magic spell. That's the bomb." Hip-hop born For Miller, 33, becoming a hip-hop theater artist has been like driving and paving the road at the same time. He was a young boy when the first rap song was released, in 1979 -- "Rapper's Delight," by the Sugar Hill Gang. In the seventh grade, he started to break-dance, doing the stop-start moves known as locking and popping as well as power and style dances such as the windmill, the flare and the flying "air track." He would see rivals from other schools at the movies, mall, wherever, and challenge them. "I'd go up to a cat and start popping and locking," he said. "He would go get his crew. Somebody would bring some cardboard, and we'd be doing windmills, turtles, backspins. "The movie 'Breakin' ' came out, and everybody lost their mind over that." He decided to pursue community theater. When he was 21, Miller read Malcolm X's autobiography for the first time. "First, I was just full of rage that I could go through 12 years of Texas public schools without exposure to that," he said. "I felt cheated, betrayed. So I wrote poetry, day, night, whenever, and all this stuff came out -- full of anger and fire." Miller flunked his English classes, but he knows his way around the language, with poems that can spit bullets one minute and whisper the next. He attributes much of his growth to meeting avant-garde avatar Laurie Carlos, of St. Paul, and director Jones. "I talk about Laurie as my theatrical mother because she opened up the world for me with her breath work, with ways of using the body to express ideas," Miller said. "When I first met her, I was writing those Malcolm X poems, you know, about this messed-up world, and she took them and said, 'Everything you're saying has been said 30 years ago. But you're an artist.' " Miller barely wrote for three years after that, concentrating on acting. He has been on a roll since, winning the slams, having his shows, "MadIzm" and "She; a remember prayer/a dream," selected as the best of festivals in Texas. Genius DJ Kitundu While Miller's story provides the spine and ribs for "Evidence," much of the mood is set by an inventive music-and instrument-maker named Kitundu. A San Francisco-based artist born in Tanzania and raised in Winona, Minn., and the Twin Cities, Kitundu is a scientist who has created instrument hybrids with turn tables and chords. The "phonoharp" he made and uses in "Evidence" has 16 strings plus various electronic gadgets. He can play records on it and augment those sounds with echoes and other effects. He can create eerie dreamscapes to accompany Miller's posing. Like his mentor, Douglas Ewart -- a Minneapolitan who makes instruments out of bomb casings -- Kitundu has created instruments (and sounds) that defy categorization. "That's hip-hop and jazz," he said in his too-quiet voice. "I'm interested in experimenting, in finding new ways of expression." At home in San Francisco, he has created turntables that run on water and wind power. He has designed, but not yet executed, one that will run on the vibrations caused by earthquakes -- playing a record for 2 minutes. He also has made a turn table glove, where the fingers have needles, so he can put his hand on a record and play it -- in five places at once. Kitundu, whose father (a doctor) and mother (a nurse) still live in Winona, embodies the exploratory aesthetic of hip-hop. "Black men feed their souls with music -- I want to know what's in those crates, what's in their headphones, what's in their souls" director Jones said. "Hip-hop theater is another way to roll that out, to show what human and divine material they -- we -- are made of." |
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