Artists & Projects Directory

• Africa Consortium
• Dan Hurlin
• David Zambrano
• Dean Moss
• Faustin Linyekula
• Ivana Müller
• Los Muñequitos
• Marc Bamuthi Joseph
• Nora Chipaumire
• Ralph Lemon
• Stories Left to Tell
• The America Project
• Voices of Strength
• Yasuko Yokoshi

Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project

Presenters of red, black and GREEN: a blues may receive up to 50% fee subsidy through National Dance Project Tour support.

red, black and GREEN: a blues (rbGb) is a full-length, multimedia performance work designed to jumpstart a conversation about environmental justice, social ecology and collective responsibility in the climate change era. Combining dance, text and visuals in a new mode of kinetic performance, rbGb reunites six artists from the acclaimed work, the break/s: a mixtape for stage - writer/performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph; choreographer Stacey Printz; director Michael John Garcés; drummer/beatboxer Tommy Shepherd; documentary filmmaker Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi; and video designer David Szlasa. Joseph is joined onstage in the performance by dancer/actor Traci Tolmaire and vocalist/visual artist Theaster Gates, who is also designing the set. 

The creation of rbGb utilizes a dynamic research-to-performance methodology that yields community input as artistic resource material; specifically, the voices of people often left out of discussions about "living green." This research has taken place through Life is Living--a series of community eco-festivals in urban parks nationwide featuring art, activism and education. Interviews, poems, films and murals from Life is Living are being translated into text, choreography and imagery that express the challenge of living green where violent crime and poor education pose a more imminent danger than ecological crisis, and that reveal emerging definitions of environmentalism in these communities.

Set into Gates' malleable stage installation of repurposed building materials and clay objects, and heightened by Jacobs-Fantauzzi's vivid films and vibrant graffiti murals from Life is Living, the poetry and performance in rbGb puts forward the idea that valuing your own life, and the life of your community, is the first step to valuing planet Earth.

red, black and GREEN: a blues will premiere in 2011.