When I walked in to the Studio and worked with the students of the Hip Hop Theater Lab my concerns were met with excitement. Here I found artists who were being given the opportunity, encouragement, and mentorship to explore the intersection of their theatrical training and their cultural experience. Hip Hop Theatre allows for the building on an integrated art practice. In the Hip Hop Theater Lab I experienced actors invoking their beatboxing to create a dramatic moment, using their rhymes to tell a story, and responding to poetic text with the dances of the club…. The Hip Hop Theater Lab represents a vital step in ensuring a vibrant, diverse, and truly contemporary American Theater.
– Baba Israel
The inclusion of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative (HHTI) in the WeDaPeople’s Cabaret on Saturday November 4th (2006) was inspired. The entire event turned out to be one of those rare moments where the art and spirit on the stage and where the audience was truly transformative. It was a beautifully produced evening of incredible artists. Juxtaposed against a host of relative veterans, the younger voices of HHTI more than held their own, while adding a whole other dimension to the show…It is clear in their work they have taken the best of Hip Hop culture and built upon a rich legacy. Placed in this program of so many wonderful artists they stood out, displaying their diversity of voices and collective power in a well thought out overview of the work they have developed.
– Brad Learmonth, Director of Programming, Harlem Stage
We each entered the first Hip Hop Theatre class with our own stories and abilities. Throughout the course, we learned not only from one another, but from the many talented teaching artists who introduced us to, and enriched our capacities in the arts of beatboxing, deejaying, emceeing, breakdancing, and performance poetry, all of which also supplemented our classical theatre training
For most of us that completed the class, performing and teaching is not a hobby, but a livelihood. Since leaving NYU, I’ve had the chance to develop my own unique curriculum for instructing hip hop theatre and poetry workshops which utilize many techniques I learned while working with HHTI…
I no longer feel the need to prove the legitimacy of this type of work. Hip Hop has, and may always be misunderstood, misinterpreted and exploited. My hope is that I can use it as a vehicle the build community and awareness.
We came out of this as students who studied at various acting studios, perfecting classical techniques, and you will still hear that every time we spit, flow, freestyle, cipher, break or beat-bow. We have become architects for an innovative new approach to today’s theatre. A theatre that evokes the voice of the griot and an age old, though often overlooked, oral tradition.
– Eboni Hogan, HHTI Alum and National Slam Poetry Champion
Based on the performance I recently saw in Harlem, the company and the work they’re doing are very important, timely and incredibly relevant. The excerpt I saw was provocative and probed issues and themes that I believe to be critically important to all of us right now. I also found their performance to be among the best I’ve seen recently, both artistically and aesthetically…
For this reason, I want you to know that I am going to do my best to find funds that would allow us to bring their work to the Billie Holiday in Bedford Stuyvesant…I know the audience there and elsewhere in Brooklyn would respond to this work as I have, and young people need to see the possibility it represents.
– Wayne C. Wilborne, Vice President, Business Diversity Outreach, Prudential Financial, NYC
In April 2004, the Theatre Department at Rhodes College sponsored a weekend devoted to Hip Hop Theatre…We were the recipients of an extraordinary experience. The entire weekend was impressive, exciting, and for our students incredibly eye opening…Words like ‘exciting’, ‘informative’ and eye opening’ appeared in almost every review handed to me at the end of the year.
– Julia Ewing, Chair, Department of Theatre, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN
The workshop accomplished so many things with our students who attended. It first of all grounded Hip Hop so solidly as a unique form within the art form that is theatre. It clarified that Hip Hop is not some alien, aberrational fad, but a legitimate form which has emerged from traditional theatre as well as African and African-American history.
Secondly, the workshop reinforced for our students that in a fundamental way, theatre is theatre. Actors still have to be heard, the still have to have flexible bodies and voices, they still must have emotional depth and openness, they still must cultivate their imaginations.
Finally it gave our students the opportunity for their own voices to be heard within the context of theatre. It opened them to the possibility that theatre is not just the mouthing of someone else’s words while moving in ways dictated by the director. It opened them to the humanity of theatre, to the powerful possibility of theatre to do what it has been doing since Ikernofret first uttered the words found in the Pyramid texts – to wrestle in a personal way with what it means to be human.
My sincere thanks for a powerful and productive experience both for the students steeped in Hip Hop as well as for those student (and adult!) participants for whom this was an introduction.
– Susan Marrash-Minnerly, MFA Chair, Department of Communications, West Virginia State University, Charleston, VA
The work you have done and are doing with the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative is as important as it is exciting. What was reinforced during the Youth at Risk day of the conference was the importance of finding alternative opportunities for youth and the need for them to give voice to their concerns. HHTI is doing that. Congratulations!
What is additionally impressive is the professionalism and creativity evident in the performances of your company. The work they presented was suffused with a contagious energy that spread through the audience. Their openness to questions, their willingness to engage the spectators during and after the presentation was wonderful. It is not something we will soon forget.
– John Lutterbie, Associate Director, Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, SUNY Stony Brook