Artists & Projects Directory

• Cie Heddy Maalem
• Dan Hurlin
• David Roussève/REALITY
• Emio Greco|PC
• Gregory Maqoma
• Kassys
• Marc Bamuthi Joseph
• Ralph Lemon
• Rha Goddess
• The America Project
• Yasuko Yokoshi

Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project

My work changes, but philosophically my goals do not. Aesthetically urban, pedagogically Freirean, I derive personal performed narratives out of interdisciplinary collaboration. Though my methodology includes dance, music, and film, my emphasis is spoken storytelling. My company, The Living Word Project, creates verse-based work that is spoken through the body, illustrated by visual and sonic scores, and in communication with the important social issues and movements of the immediate moment. My goal is to embody theater’s connection from Shakespeare’s quill to Kool Herc’s turntables; from Martha Graham’s cupped hand to Nelson Mandela’s clenched fist: a new voice for a new politic.

These conceptual goals are achieved through treating both classrooms and performance spaces as covens for transformation. I do not claim to have any of the answers, but my work represents an unrepentant penchant for asking questions…I seek to engage audiences and leave them moved.

A story. . .

In 1998, I walked into a club in Thies, Senegal, completely adorned in “traditional” African garb, anxious to hear the music in the local scene. I was somewhat astounded when I was met by a crew of Wolof speaking teenagers, wearing replica football jerseys and mock FUBU apparel, singing along with Tupac Shakur lyrics with amazing accuracy. I’d come to West Africa, as so many African Americans do, with my gaze firmly set on integrating my myth of the motherland into my American existence. My experience in Thies was one of many times that I found young Africans with their gaze correspondingly set on the U.S. in general, with a specific focus on the very elements of hip hop culture that I was running away from.

It is this question of gaze that has become the basis for the narrative direction of my next work, the break/s. From its grassroots beginnings, hip hop has emerged as a global cultural force, due in large part to marketers who have sold white youth on their fetishization of black style and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth. The result is a profound global youth culture with highly caricaturized expectations of young Black men from the U.S. the break/s challenges these emerging truths by critically examining hip hop culture through the allegory of international travel.