Hip-Hop Heaven

The day Fab Five Freddy became a VJ for Yo! MTV Raps in 1988, hip-hop was officially no longer an underground movement. More than 15 years later, the main elements of hip-hop culture — DJ’ing, MC’ing, break dancing, and graffiti — are all part of mainstream culture. Hip-hop theater is also thriving, as demonstrated by Hip-Hop Theatre Festival 2005, which runs June 11-18.

This year’s festival, the fifth annual event of its kind, has established new partnerships with four renowned venues: Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, the Dance Theatre Workshop, Joe’s Pub, and the New York Theatre Workshop, which is hosting the opening night celebration. There, partygoers can expect to see Danny Hoch — who won an OBIE for his one-man show Some People — sharing the microphone with such performers as Ben Snyder, Full Circle, and reg e. gaines. (This will be Hoch’s only appearance in this year’s festival, but he plans to debut his full-length play ‘Til the Break of Dawn next year.) Night owls can catch the late-night after-party at Sutra, the East Village bar located only a few blocks away from the theater, as well as the closing night party at the Zipper Theater, featuring world-renowned DJ Spinna. (Both events are being co-sponsored by TheaterMania).

At NYTW, Playback NYC will present What You Say White Boy?, which spins stories suggested by the audience into long-form, freestyle hip-hop. It will be followed by Javon Johnson’s Breathe, which tells the story of two men — one black, one white — incarcerated in the same jail cell; and Kristoffer Diaz’s Welcome to Arroyo’s, in which two siblings discover a secret past linking them to the origins of hip-hop.

Dance Theater Workshop will host the U.S. debuts of two international stars: Germany’s Niels “Storm” Robitzky and the UK’s Benji Reid. (Hoch says that their appearances will be “historic.”) Robitzky has been one of the movers and shakers of European hip-hop choreography for over 10 years, introducing such styles as b-boying, locking, and popping to the Continent; Reid, who describes himself as a “body popper,” performer, and tragedian, toured the U.K. in 2004 with his acclaimed show 13 Mics.

DTW will also be the site of the festival’s Solo Series, which consists of two separate double-bills. Witness to War begins with Jerry Quickly’s “Tales from the Front Line,” which describes the playwright’s visit to Baghdad as a radio broadcaster in the days preceding “Shock and Awe” through music, poetry, and video. It’s paired with Yuri Lane’s “From Tel Aviv to Ramallah,” in which Lane tells the intersecting stories of an Israeli and a Palestinian through beatbox.

Using only his voice for the sound design, Lane captures the various sounds of the two cities — from cell phones, street traffic, and folk music to helicopters, blasts, and waterpipes. He inhabits 15 characters in the piece, which was written by his wife, Rachel Havrelock, a Jewish studies professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Muslim video artist Sharif Ezzat designed the background images that accompany the story. Although they are tackling a volatile topic, Lane feels that he and Havrelock have created a portrait of everyday life rather than a political screed. “It doesn’t provide any answers,” he says. “We want to leave the audience to ask their own questions.”

The second section of the Solo Series, entitled Tales from the Hood, consists of excerpts from Angela Kariotis’s “Reminiscence of the Ghetto & Other Things That Raized Me,” in which she tells about her experiences in a poor, Greek neighborhood; and Teo Castellanos’s “NE 2nd Avenue,” an examination of racism and social injustice in Miami’s marginalized communities.

Two shows will be playing at the Apollo: Russell Project’s Big Voices, which is listed as an “Ace Performance for Teens,” showcases the poetry of six performers who met while working for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Chadwick Boseman’s Deep Azure, on the other hand, is a full-length play set at a historically black college, where a police officer kills a student. According to Boseman, Deep Azure is loosely based on Prince Jones, a Howard University student who was shot and killed by a police officer.

However, the play mainly focuses on the fictionalized girlfriend of the murdered student, an anorexic who finds strength fighting for justice. In real life, the officer was not brought up on charges, but the playwright will not reveal what happens in this dramatized account. In any event, he believes that the details of the plot are not as important as the play’s thematic content. Deep Azure has already been picked up by the Congo Square Theatre Company in Chicago for a six-week run starting in September. Boseman says that the piece started out as a poem; it uses heightened language, pulling from jazz slang, blues slang, and hip-hop-slang “to create its own verse.”

While the Festival participants are thrilled to be working with these prestigious theaters, Hoch notes that one of the long-term goals of the hip-hop theater movement is to own real estate. “How do we take over theatrical institutions that exclude us?” he says. “We need to hear the hip-hop millionaires say, ‘Hip-hop is art and we need to start investing in cultural institutions.” According to Hoch, the form is becoming commercially viable. “Right now, the mainstream market forces don’t know how to handle these other hip-hop arts, the same way they didn’t know how to handle rap when it first came out,” he asserts, wryly adding: “It’s going to take a while for the vultures to figure out that they can make money off it.”