Project Title: Scourge
Recipient Organization: Youth Speaks
Lead Artist: Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Genre and Date Awarded: Literary Arts, June 2004
To be Completed: May 2005

Spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the young poets Eli Marienthal, Biko Eisen-Martin, and Chinaka Hodge, composer John Santos, and Youth Speaks are collaborating to create Scourge, a hip hop theater piece critically examining the history of Haiti. Scourge will be presented as a work-in-progress at the Youth Speaks Fourth Annual Living Word Festival in October 2004 and will premiere at the Second Annual Bay Area Hip Hop Theater Festival in May of 2005 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum.

In 2004, Haiti will celebrate its 200th year as an independent nation. This tenure ranks second only to the United States in the post-Colombian “new world.” The artists ask, “How could two countries born of the same revolutionary spirit spiral so dramatically in opposite directions?” Haiti languishes as the poorest country in the hemisphere, plagued by a crumbling infrastructure and staggering debt.

The artists propose to fuse dance, spoken word, and live music as a means “to re-visit the very narrow space between history, myth, and speculation, ultimately arriving at a series of four historical suggestions about the relationship between Haiti, the United States, and other nations in the Caribbean, most notably the Dominican Republic”

Scourge also is the story of a young Haitian man, striving to carry the burden of being the first in his family to be born in the United States. Lead Artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph has been San Francisco’s Poetry Grand Slam winner three times, and won the 1999 National Poetry Slam with Team San Francisco. A former teacher with Youth Speaks, currently he is a resident artist in Stanford University’s Drama Department.

The development of Scourge and the collaboration among the artists and the nonprofit organization will focus on the “Open Process Workshop” in which a pre-selected group of youth and members of Youth Speaks serve as screeners/readers for development of the music, text, and movement of the piece. Three young writers, Eli Marienthal, Biko Eisen-Martin, and Chinaka Hodge, who developed their considerable skills in Youth Speaks workshops and who are all former champions of its 2000, 2001, and 2002 Teen Poetry Slams, will work closely through this workshop process with Joseph on material for Scourge, and will perform live with Joseph, Santos, and Santos’s Machete Ensemble at the premiere.Kamilah Forbes will direct Scourge and Roberta Uno will serve as the production’s dramaturge.

Other collaborators are the Oakland-based Haitian dance collective RECONNECT, who will perform choreography by Rennie Harris, Stacey Printz, and Adia Whitaker. Rennie Harris is an internationally recognized performer and choreographer whose work explores the evolving traditions of African American dance through hip hop. Stacey Printz has enjoyed a 20-year career as a choreographer, performer, and teacher. He is fluent in hip hop, modern, and Haitian dance. Adia Whitaker is a member of the Alvin Ailey Repertory Company and a respected choreographer of Afro-Haitian folkloric dance.

Founded eight years ago, Youth Speaks is a non-profit literary arts, education, and cultural resource center. It has become a leader in presenting spoken word and hip hop programming, reaching 45,000 people per year with its education, presenting, and producing activities. Its founder James Kass and his staff seek to build the next generation of leaders through he written and spoken word.

LEAD ARTIST

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, originally from NYC, is an arts activist currently living in Oakland, California. He is a National Poetry Slam champion, Broadway veteran, featured artist on the past two seasons of Russell Simmons' Def Poetry on HBO and a recipient of 2002 and 2004 National Performance Network Creation commissions. He is recently returned from Tokyo where he was presented during the 1 st International Spoken Word Festival and Santiago Cuba where he joined the legendary Katherine Dunham as a part of the CubaNola Collective. He has entered the world of literary performance after crossing the sands of “traditional” theater, most notably on Broadway in the Tony Award winning The Tap Dance Kid and Stand-Up Tragedy. His evening-length work Word Becomes Flesh represents the completion of his third play, having already staged De/Cipher (Theater Artaud and Yerba Buena Center, 2001) and No Man's Land (ODC, 2002). Word Becomes Flesh has found a home in the seasons of Seattle's On The Boards, Houston's Diverse Works, Washington, D.C.'s Dance Place and New York's Dance Theater Workshop among other national venues. His work has been described as everything from “electrifying” (The Houston Chronicle), to “ever-elegant” (The Washington Post) and has compelled The Seattle Times to name him their “cutting edge performer of the year” for 2003.

Bamuthi's performance schedule has carried him from dance apprenticeships in Senegal to teaching fellowships in Bosnia. His proudest work has been with Youth Speakswhere he mentors 13-19 year old writers and curates the Living Word Festival for Literary Arts. He is currently serving as an IDA resident artist in Stanford University's Drama Department, teaching Spoken Word and Community Action. His next project, Scourge, reflects on the plight of Haiti in the post-colonial New World, and is being developed while Bamuthi is a Phillis Wattis Artist-in-Residence at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Collaborators for Scourgeinclude choreographers Rennie Harris and Stacey Printz, Grammy nominated composer John Santos, dramaturg Roberta Uno, and director Kamilah Forbes of the NYC Hip Hop Theater Festival .

Since beginning a career in performance poetry in the Fall of 1998, Bamuthi has been San Francisco's Poetry Grand Slam winner three times, won the 1999 National Poetry Slam with Team San Francisco, and founded and continues to host "Second Sundays", the nation's largest ongoing monthly spoken word gathering. His local work recently earned him a GOLDIE award from The San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of only seven awards given per year by the staff of the Bay Area's largest independent weekly. Nationally, he has been a featured lecturer and performance artist at more than one hundred colleges and universities including UC Berkeley, NYU, Brown University, UC Santa Cruz, Bates College, Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

He has done several performances with the current stars of the Spoken Word and music scene including: Ben Harper, De La Soul, The Roots, Bonnie Raitt, Saul Williams, Cody Chestnutt, Beau Sia, Blackalicious, Will Power, Mos Def, Sarah Jones, Sonia Sanchez, Gil Scott Heron, The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Roger Bonair-Agard, Ishle Yi Park, Danny Hoch and many others. In addition, he's released a spoken word CD, "Seeking" worked with Linkin Park's Joe Hahn for MTV, and performs on the CD "185 Progress Drive" (Alternative Tentacles Records: 2000) with Assata Shakur, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Bob Marley, Michael Franti, I was Born with Two Tongues and other hip hop and spoken word artists.

OTHER COLLABORATING ARTISTS

John Santos (Composer)

John Santos is a composer, percussionist, writer, and educator who was raised in the Puerto Rican and Cape Verdean traditions of his family, surrounded by music. The fertile musical environment of the San Francisco Bay Area shaped his career. His studies of Afro-Latin music have included several trips to New York, Puerto Rica, Cuba, and Columbia.

Widely respected as one of the top writers, educators, and historians in the field, Mr. Santos is a member of the Latin Jazz Advisory Committee of the Smithsonian Institution and has contributed to the international magazines Percussive Notes, Modern Drummer, Modern Percussionist, and Latin Percussionist. The San Francisco Bay Area community in which he still lives and works has presented him with numerous awards and honors for artistic excellence and social dedication. His musical sensibility and the wide range of cultural influences exhibited in his compositions and arrangements, and his deep commitment to evolving ideas of musical genealogy with specific attention to inherent African retentions in the music of the Americas is a critical fulcrum for his collaboration.

Kamilah Forbes (Director)

Kamilah Forbes is co-producer of the New York Hip Hop Theater Festival and a founder of the DC-based performance troupe Hip Hop Theater Junction. She developed the Festival in collaboration with Danny Hoch, Clyde Valentin, and Sarah Jones in 2000. Since that time, Forbes has become a cornerstone of the hip hop theater movement.

Hip Hop Theatre Junction’s Rhyme Deferred is a critically acclaimed piece that has been presented all over the country. A modern-day spin on the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Rhyme Deferred highlights the struggle between the hip hop underground and the mainstream commercialization of hip hop culture and music. An exiting mythical journey, Rhyme Deferred seamlessly fuses the hip hop performance elements—Djing, B-Boyin’, rhyme, and text.

Forbes also was director of the Creative Work Fund-supported project No Man’s Land, developed as a collaboration between Youth Speaks, Beau Sia (lead artist), Paul Flores, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and James Kass in 2001-02.

Rennie Harris (Choreographer)

Rennie Harris is a Philadelphia-based dancer-choreographer who started dancing in the streets of North Philly in the late 1970s, going on to tour the country with the Scanner Boys. Over the last 11 years, after founding his company PureMovement Dance in 1992, he has steadily extended hip hop’s presence from the club to the concert hall. A pioneer in hip-hop choreography, Rennie Harris and PureMovement translate the energy and spirit of the street into an electrifying form of body language. Harris and PureMovement have thrilled audiences all over the United States and internationally with their popular dance styles of hip hop, house, animation, popping and locking, stepping, and break dance. While rooted in hip hop culture, Rennie Harris PureMovement defies definition, boundaries, or categorization: The company seeks to encompass rich African and African American traditions while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of concert dance.

Harris has received three Bessie Awards for his Rome and Jewels, a hip hop musical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and won the Alvin Ailey Award for choreography in 2001.

Stacey Printz (Choreographer)

Stacey Printz, founder and choreographer of San Francisco based fusion dance company Printz Dance Project (PDP) received her sociology and dance degrees from UC Irvine, studying with the renowned Donald McKayle. Printz has been teaching fusion technique, modern, jazz, hip-hop, world dance studies, choreographic technique, and improvisation for over ten years. Currently she is on staff at San Francisco Dance Center, and RoCo. She has taught master classes and workshops in Boulder, CO., Flagstaff, AZ., San Diego, CA., and at UCLA, St. Mary's College, and Peridance in N.Y. Printz has been commissioned to choreograph in California for such companies as St. Mary's College, TDC of San Jose, and the Marin Theatre Company and has received numerous awards and grants. After dancing with local companies, Stacey founded PDP. Now kicking off its fifth season, the company has performed extensively in the Bay Area, including at ODC Theater, Dance Mission, and home seasons at the Cowell Theater.

Adia Whitaker (Choreographer)

The Ase (Ah-shay) Dance Theatre collective is a New York based company consisting of young adults of color. Under the artistic leadership of dancer and choreographer Adia Whitaker, Ase Dance Theatre Collective connects traditional forms and aesthetics of African dance with modern day models. The dance component of this artist collective consists of young people of color performing pieces that represent the diversity of African Diasporic dance and addressing the human experience. Featuring everything from Haitian to hip hop, accompanied by live and/or recorded music, and featuring song and spoken word, these dancers perform with passion and grace.

Roberta Uno (Dramaturg)

Roberta Uno is founder and former artistic director of New World Theater, which she formed in 1979 while she was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Currently she is a program director with the Ford Foundation in New York. In 1995, New World Theater began a deeper commitment to Southeast Asian, Latino, and Black youth in geographically segregated areas of Western Massachusetts. Project 2050, based on “the projected demographic shift when Caucasians will become a minority in the United States,” links youth, professional artists, and scholars in a series of collaborations dedicated to “imagining the near future.” Under her direction, New World Theater commissioned Joseph’s previous work, Word Becomes Flesh, and Uno served as the dramaturge for this critically acclaimed work.