Here We Go, Yo...

A manifesto for a new hip-hop arts movement

By Danny Hoch

Twenty years ago, in 1984, I was a graffiti writer, a breakdancer and a rapper. I was pretty damn good, too; I was, however, not an artist in any of the above categories. I toyed with each discipline, didn't work too hard at the craft, and had no vision for a career as a hip-hop artist, because hip-hop was not "art." Instead, I went to school to study theatre and became an actor and playwright.

Today, as I begin my fifth year as artistic director of the NYC Hip-Hop Theater Festival, I am continually asked by folks inside and outside the culture to discuss hip-hop's aesthetics. As great as these conversations are, the consistent challenge has been to define not what hip-hop means as culture, but what hip-hop means as art—to make the case that hip-hop is art.

Hip-hop art, when it is bad, is often embraced by the mainstream as the entirety of the talent and voice of the hip-hop generation. When it is good, outsiders and insiders alike misunderstand it for reasons of politics and fear. Bad hip-hop art is invariably inarticulate, unpolished, juvenile. Good hip-hop art is highly articulate, coded, transcendent, revolutionary, communicative, empowering. Hip-hop, bad or good, is almost always relegated to a marginalized gray area where it is denied the status of art; it is seen instead as radical political thought, a really bad manifestation of pop culture, or, with some luck, as novelty entertainment.

If hip-hop is to be discussed as art, then what are its aesthetics? And (just as important) what happens to hip-hop's aesthetics when they are mixed with the aesthetics of "recognized" art, or when hip-hop's venue changes from the street to the stage, from the subway car to the gallery, from the schoolyard to the screen?

In the past 10 years, a new wave of hip-hop arts has taken shape in the form of dance, music, writing, visual art and theatre. These new works follow hip-hop's aesthetics closely, and yet they are not wholly comprised of graffiti art, breakdancing, DJ-sampling or rap. These works are products of a generation that grew up as hip-hoppers and is now branching out of the fundamentalist hip-hop book of elements and rules. Some works are created by traditional hip-hop artists who feel limited by the original four elements, yet wish to continue the aesthetic; some are made by hip-hop kids who went to art school, others by art school kids who discovered hip-hop later in life. Some of the creators are old-school B'boys (breakdancers) who have recognized that, as artists, they want to do more than perform in Las Vegas as an "attraction." Others are old-school graffiti artists whose gallery work has provided a vastly different context for their vision of what they can do with paint (or with other materials-many hip-hop clothing designers are ex-graffiti artists). Still others are rappers who feel the need to expand the possibilities of their storytelling beyond the 16 bars they are allotted on a record. For me hip-hop theatre provides the best paradigm for examining what the new hip-hop aesthetics are, what they aren't and what they could be.

Traditions, Conditions, Phenomena

Hip-hop's origins are multifaceted, politically conflicting, consistently debated and highly complicated, because we are still living through many of the same conditions that caused its birth. Nevertheless, hip-hop's aesthetics lie foremost in the social context from which it sprung. The end of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s, the turmoil of the militarized political movements (Black Panthers, Brown Berets, Young Lords, etc.), urban blight and the advent of Reaganomics, the digital age, an exploding prison population, epidemics of crack, guns and AIDS—all of these forces converged to create a socioeconomic landscape unlike any other in history. That situation, combined with New York's inner-city demographics—Southern blacks living alongside Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Jamaicans and a handful of working-poor whites, all of whom drew upon both inherited and appropriated cultures in the face of urban decay and accelerated technology—created a legacy of art forms and language that would wind up being inherited by various races, colors and classes around the world. Hip-hop, in other words, issues from the following traditions, conditions and phenomena:

The notion that hip-hop is solely an African-American art form is preposterous. It is part of the African continuum, and if it were not for African Americans there would be no hip-hop, but neither would hip-hop exist if not for the polycultural social construct of New York in the 1970s. Neither could it have been spawned solely from the African continent, a polycultural community in Durban or Barcelona or from a rural white or suburban latino community devastated by Reaganomics. It could only have been born of the fusion—and profusion—of all of these conditions.

You probably have heard of the "original elements" of hip-hop that began in the 1970s: graffiti, DJ'ing, B'boying and rap. There is, in short, a chronology: Please notice that "rap" is the last one of these original four. People often interchange the terms "rap" and "hip-hop," and this is dangerous, because if we define a culture solely by what it is renowned for in the mainstream, then we are only looking at a sliver of its totality. To use rap to define hip-hop art is to define Jamaicans as "reggae people," Swedes as "meatballers" or the British as Shakespearians.

Here is a list of many of the pared-down aesthetics from hip-hop's original four elements, in no particular order:

Political context, lack of resources and reappropriation may seem out of place on this list, but not only do they provide a contextual basis to hip-hop art, but they also have been implemented as part of our artistic practice, even when the form or genre varies. Hip-hop art is not a coincidental pop novelty. It involves craft. There are old and new traditions, which are recognized by people inside and outside the culture. Other forms that have recently emerged as hip-hop art elements—beat-boxing, language, fashion, self-knowledge—all draw upon the same set of aesthetics.

Hip-Hop in Theatre, Theatre in Hip-hop

I remember several years ago running into Stretch Armstrong, a pioneer in modern underground hip-hop music and a personality in New York City's hip-hop scene. I gave him a flyer for the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, and he said, "Hip-Hop Theater Festival? What the fuck is this, some ill new marketing ploy that I've never heard of before?" The Hip-Hop Theater Festival is, in fact, the only institution of its kind that curates, presents, produces and develops a broad range of hip-hop and hip-hop-generation theatre. In four years we have presented more than 60 plays; by 2005 we will have branched out to four cities, namely New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

So, what constitutes hip-hop theatre? In determining what makes it into the festival and what doesn't, we came up with these criteria: Hip-hop theatre must fit into the realm of theatrical performance, and it must be by, about and for the hip-hop generation, participants in hip-hop culture or both. The parallel to or borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois's call from the 1930s is clear—DuBois's mandate was intended for black folks; hip-hop's for a diverse crowd. The clamoring for more hip-hop theatre on the legitimate stage is not unlike the cry of theatre artists of color during and after the Civil Rights movement. But few hip-hop theatre pieces fit into an African-American slot, or an Asian or Latino one.

That's a good thing, because they shouldn't. It's a bad thing, because theatres don't seem to have a category for these pieces, and therefore don't know what to do with them. I have always campaigned (when possible) to have hip-hop generation youth dominate my audience—even at regional theatres where subscribers are king. I remember when a white sixtysomething woman approached me after my show in California to say that I had taught her about hip-hop, but that she sat in the back row because the 20 rows in front of her were filled with loud, responsive, engaged young people. She said, "I felt uncomfortable. It was the first time in the theatre that I felt alienated." I said, "Well, I guess the tables have finally turned." Hopefully, hip-hop does not have to wait until its retirement age to feel welcome in the theatre.

What It Looks Like

A quick rundown of a few works from the Hip-Hop Theater Festival will give you a picture of diversity and eclecticism. Hip-Hop Theatre Junction's Rhyme Deferred is a play with two live DJs on stage who are live-scoring modern hip-hop-based dance choreography (in other words, not breakdancing), yet the story is about two brothers who are MCs. Five Elements of Change, from the Tortuga Project of Albuquerque, N.M., uses Aztec dance, capoeira, breakdancing and rap to tell the story of hip-hop's relationship to indigenous culture and sustainable farming. Nilaja Sun's Black and Blue is about a young woman at summer day-camp playing a musical role as Smurfette in a sweaty New York City park. Ben Snyder's In Case You Forget, a straight play, isn't so much about graffiti itself but about a graffiti artist. The Hip-Hop Theater Festival also presents dance theatre: tOy/bOx by Philadelphia's olive Dance Theatre pares down B'boy movements to tell a story about a fantastical toy. Rennie Harris Puremovement's repertory embraces narratives told through B'boy and pop/lock-inspired dance. Jonzi D of London's Lyrikal Fearta and Aeroplane Man use hip-hop text and choreography to weave stories about police brutality, British hip-hop culture and the modern-day African diaspora. Benji Reid of Manchester performs what he calls "hip-hop mime" in his Holiday and 13 Mics. Eisa Davis's plays, Umkovu, Angela's Mixtape and Six Minutes, all delve deeply into language and issues that could only come from this generation and culture. My own work ranges from monologues dealing with hip-hop commercialization and the prison industrial complex in Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop; to the explorations of polycultural hip-hop in Some People; to a full-length play, Till the Break of Dawn, about a group of idealistic hip-hop-generation teachers and activists who take a trip and learn how to live with some difficult contradictions.

If you're looking for a common theme running through this work, I would say that all these pieces either employ hip-hop's elements, comment on hip-hop culture, or comment on the specific issues that affect my generation. More important, they incorporate hip-hop's wide range of aesthetics, not just by virtue of including the four elements. The plays, while structured within a contemporary Western theatre model, rely on some, if not all, of the 13 aesthetic elements listed earlier.

It is a huge misconception to think that hip-hop theatre means doing a rap-music version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Or that hip-hop theatre must have rap in it, or any one of the hip-hop elements, for that matter. In 2002, for example, the festival received a curious complaint that Indio Melendez's piece Manchild Dilemma did not belong in hip-hop theatre because he didn't rap or breakdance in it. His piece was about a Latino kid who joins the army to get away from his mother and inadvertently gets sent to Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The piece starts with a real video-letter from his pregnant girlfriend, asking when he's coming home, and the story unfolds into a series of solo scenes taking us from his home in the projects to the recruitment office and a drill sergeant who hunts him down to force him on the plane to Kuwait. All of the language, references, locales, contexts and the story reflected dilemmas of the hip-hop generation; it didn't need any of the four elements of hip-hop to qualify as a "hip-hop generation play." And it was a great piece of theatre. It belonged in our festival, just as it belongs on the main stage of every theatre in the country.

On the other hand, a play entitled Bomb-itty of Errors was performed in New York City a few years ago and has since toured internationally. This play, for me and several of my peers, was painful to watch—not because it was poorly written, acted or directed. It was actually a genius adaptation of Comedy of Errors, performed by former New York University theatre students who were greatly talented. The problem was that, as universal and timeless as Shakespeare is, performing his plays in rap does two very damaging things. First, it sends the message that the hip-hop generation has no important stories of its own, and that in order for hip-hop to qualify as theatre, it must attach itself to such certified texts as those of Shakespeare. Second, it devalues hip-hop as art by relegating rap to humorous accompaniment—the feeling that results is of watching a hip-hop minstrel show. Not only wasn't the play about the hip-hop generation, but the audience (and ticket prices) failed to reflect the generation as well. This was not a hip-hop theatre piece, but rather a Shakespeare adaptation that infused rap. Ouch.

The festival continues to receive hundreds upon hundreds of submissions of "performance poetry" or "spoken word." For some reason, people think that undirected, unchoreographed recited poetry equals hip-hop theatre, but this could not be further from the truth. A recited poem with some movement does not make a play. Nor is it spoken word. It is simply a poem with movement. Sometimes it's a great poem with great movement that has been made into a play, like Marc Bamuthi Joseph's amazing Word Becomes Flesh. But the notion of lumping spoken-word poetry into the category of hip-hop theatre distorts, dilutes and diminishes not only hip-hop and theatre, but also poetry.

America's Theatre Dysfunction

Why must hip-hop theatre be by, about and for the hip-hop generation? Because theatre itself isn't. An entire generation of hip-hop theatre artists has graduated from the nation's arts schools (as drama majors, writing majors, directing majors, etc.), and yet our stories are rarely put on the stage. We represent the largest audience in the country, but when our stories are offered, they are not offered to most of us, but rather to an obscure group of grandparents. The ticket prices are insane. Ninety-nine percent of Broadway theatre, Off-Broadway theatre, American regional theatre and even Off-Off Broadway theatre excludes the very generation that corporations, government, media and educational institutions say is critical to the nation's future. (Meanwhile, Wonderful Town and Fiddler on the Roof are being done all over again on Broadway.) It's not only dysfunctional-it's a cultural crime that the dominant programming in theatres across the country consists of classics, revivals, Irish playwrights, dead British and Scandinavian playwrights and Tom Stoppard. When these same theatres that spend millions producing these works suddenly decide to get hip and produce one play "catering" to a younger audience and with a grittier theme, the majority of those who see it are still the mostly-white, over-fifty (and, in some theatres, over-seventy) subscribers. And then these theatres invite a group of teenagers one Sunday for a post-performance discussion. How generous.

Many times, after performances of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop or Will Power's Flow, teenagers will come up to us and say, "Yo, this shit is dope, I never seen anything like this, you were really saying like what's going on, and it was funny, but it made me think about mad shit, what is it, what do you call this?" And when I reply, "Theatre," they say, "Nah, it's not theatre. It can't be theatre, because if it was theatre then it wouldn't be about us." That alone speaks volumes about the dysfunction that permeates the American theatre.

Ironically, the institutions that have most supported arts for the hip-hop generation have not been theatres but museums, places that historically support dead artists and obscure and esoteric art—art that is generally the opposite of grassroots. Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia has presented a pan-hip-hop arts festival, as have the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The Brooklyn Museum did a hip-hop retrospective, as did the Bronx Museum. New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark hosts a bi-yearly international hip-hop performance festival. It seems that the dead artists are on the live American stage, and the live American stories that are about today and are happening now are relegated to museums as things the theatre world would rather see die.

Contradictions and Challenges

For all the young audiences hip-hop theatre draws purely because of its name, the genre still has its problems. Artists of color whose works have nothing to do with the hip-hop generation are often still pigeonholed into the category of hip-hop. Meanwhile, hip-hop artists are pigeonholed into the ethnic or minority category. Few directors know how to handle hip-hop aesthetics (many have no idea what they are), and there are rarely (if ever) dramaturgs who know what to make of a hip-hop text. At the same time, few hip-hop theatre artists know what dramaturgs do or understand how they can help. There are few theatres commissioning hip-hop theatre artists, and even fewer that are offering artistic development for this genre. As usual in the arts, the amount of resources is not proportionate to the work being made, or the work screaming to get made, and the situation is even worse for the hip-hop arts movement.

Hip-hop was already swimming in dangerously contradictory waters when it sprang up as a grassroots art form in the ghettos of the biggest capitalist state in history. Now that hip-hop is maturing in the fields of art, activism, education and business, what are the risks of hip-hop theatre itself becoming elitist and exclusive precisely because of having penetrated mainstream institutions? Isn't that what hip-hop set out to do in the first place-take over mainstream institutions and redistribute power and ownership?

What about cultural power and ownership? If the Def Jam, No Limit and Jay-Z empires are examples of this revolution in the for-profit world, then what will the revolution look like in the not-for-profit world? Will not-for-profit institutions co-opt hip-hop culture into their programming and hoard grant money without really giving up any power? Will hip-hop art at not-for-profit venues become highbrow?

What about issues relating to access and permission and inclusivity? What happens to all that codification? What happens when hip-hop moves into the opera house, and we still don't own the opera house? What if we do own it?

How do the aesthetics of hip-hop change when the cardboard and linoleum become a marley floor, when, instead of plugging into a street lamp, an artist is plugging into a million-dollar sound system in an acoustically tuned concert hall? How about when your audience is paying $75 to see you on Broadway instead of hearing you for free in their own neighborhood? How has graffiti changed now that the canvas is legal and a museum is commissioning you? What will hip-hop theatre look like when, instead of hustling together something with one light in a warehouse in their spare time, the artists are being paid union salaries, and the play enjoys real development money and a staff of designers and dramaturgs? What happens when the rapper whose main themes have been selling crack and suffering and death makes it big and gets himself a 401K?

In 2050, when we of the hip-hop generation are in our seventies and eighties, will we be hovering around Lincoln Center with our wrinkled Ecko suits, buying thousand-dollar tickets to see renditions of Busta Rhymes and Benji Reid? Will we still be relevant? Will the thirtysomethings be complaining for us to get out and give them the keys so they can start their own movement? Or will hip-hop generations keep generating themselves, as poverty and injustice does?

I'm not sure of the answers to all these questions, but I know that hip-hop is not waiting to "get into" Lincoln Center. Hip-hop is not waiting for anything, because, unfortunately, the last and crucial part of this aesthetic is that hip-hop creates work through a fatalistic lens that has little to do with passing reckless youth. Most of the hip-hop artists who lived through the 1980s in America's cities never thought they would reach the age of twenty, let alone thirty. Many did not, and many who did so spent their time behind bars or under very difficult circumstances. Even if our lives or families were not directly affected by crack, guns, AIDS, Giuliani, Daley or Riordan, this bleak expectation of not surviving is partly responsible for many hip-hop artists not seeing themselves in a trajectory of artistic longevity. Not as individual artists, not as ensembles, not as institutions. Add mistrust, discrimination and marginalization, and you have a situation where many artists wouldn't even approach an arts institution, let alone perform in one. This must change.

What must also change is the battle/game aesthetic. Battle is a key component of the aesthetic, and it signifies resistance, rebellion and competition. But if hip-hop artists continue to look at hip-hop simply as a game, then we devalue the culture-and how do we make good art? Game is distraction, sport and competition. Hip-hop is not a pastime.

If hip-hop is going to have a future, it's important that we document hip-hop theatre works, and that we critique one other's work, but not solely through the lens of Western theatrical aesthetics. Too often we read reviews by critics who are of another time and place, and simply do not have the language, context, or understanding of hip-hop culture to seriously critique a piece of work, and the movement suffers because of this. We must critique one another, and we must be honest, everybody! If some shit is bad, you gotta tell them, "Yo-it's bad." And tell them why. And if it's good, we must support it, and let everyone know.

Considering all these obstacles, can hip-hop maintain a steady flow of quality art? I believe that hip-hop is more universally relevant and democratically resonant in this day and age than opera, ballet, classical music or traditional theatre. Only time will tell whether hip-hop becomes "classical" art in the next 200 years. I believe it will, not simply because I like it, but because during the past 30 years hip-hop has already influenced generations of artists and audiences around the globe, like good art always does.

Hip-hop is art. Whether it is revolutionary art or bling-ass-make-money-biaatch art, hip-hop art does not depend on how many records it sells, how much the gallery piece sold for, whose hip-hop theatre piece goes to Broadway and whose doesn't, how many rallies were held, or how many times the kid can spin on his head. Even though the culture is marginalized and misunderstood, it is also moving on and maturing. There are rules, there is a foundation, and motherfuckers better know the ledge.

Danny Hoch is a New York City–based actor, playwright, producer and director. He is the founder and artistic director of the NYC Hip-Hop Theater Festival.

Also in American Theatre's series on hip-hop and theatre:

Found in Translation, by Eisa Davis, July/August 2004

Bling, or Revolution, a roundtable discussion with Daniel Banks, Chadwick Boseman, Gamal Abdel Chasten, Gwendolen Hardwick, Danny Hoch, Baraka Sele, Marla Teyolia, Clyde Valentin and Raphael Xavier, July/August 2004

Are We Dancing to Our Own Beat?by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, May/June 2004

The 5th Element, by Roberta Uno, with additional material by Harry Elam Jr., Kamilah Forbes and Universes, April 2004

Related stories in American Theatre:

Tha Playz tha Thang, Kim Euell on the 2002 Hip-Hop Theater Festival in New York City, September 2002

Sarah Jones: Wrestling Her Way Out, by Martha Hostetter, September 2002

Blowin' Up the Set, by Holly Bass, November 1999

Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, a play by Danny Hoch, July 1991

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