Los Angeles Theater Review: RED, BLACK & GREEN: A BLUES (Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project at REDCAT) By Ella Martine on February 1, 2013 // In THEATER-LOS ANGELES

THE COLORS OF OUR LIVES red, black & GREEN: a blues is art at its best and most purposeful; a visceral, engaging narrative that combines theatre, dance, music, spoken word and visual art created and expressed by and for “wonderful human beings” to ask what we are doing to protect and nurture our world and our humanity.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, our central character and the creator/performer, offers a first-person spoken word narration of a man working to green the ghettos of America, taking us from uptown Chicago to the 3rd and 5th Wards of Houston, from there to Harlem, NY, finally arriving back home in West Oakland, CA. Supporting movement, text and song are performed by Composer Tommy Shepherd (aka Emcee Soulati), Traci Tolmaire, and Yaw. The text is poetic, specific and emotionally-charged; coupled with the design and musical-physical elements of the piece, under the inspired direction of Michael John

Garcés, it becomes transcendent. The action takes place on and between the moving walls of Theaster Gates’s incredible set/installation. Mai-Lei Pecorari’s smartly simple costumes, Stacey Printz’s evocative choreography, and James Clotfelter’s lighting work together to support the many characters and locations of the piece. Documentary video by Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi and media design by David Szlasa grounds the production in a necessary reality. This is an across-the-board magical experience. The wealth of ideas embodied so expertly in this collaboration — about the Black experience in America, our power to prevent the ecological decline of our world, and “the paradox of cultivating something you will never see” — make this blues an uplifting and empowering piece of theatre and truth. This is not a

performance for an audience — it is a meeting of equals. red, black & GREEN: a blues is theatre created and shared as a socially responsive and responsible community offering. Should you choose to accept it, your life will be the richer.

Photos by Steven Gunther Marc Bamuth Joseph/The Living Word Project: red, black & GREEN: a blues REDCAT in Walt Disney Concert Hall scheduled to end February 3, 2013 for tickets, call 213-237-2800 or visit http://www.redcat.org http://www.stageandcinema.com/2013/02/01/red-black-green-a-blues/

REDCAT Hosts red, black & GREEN: a blues FEATURES by Jessica Koslow | January 29, 2013

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Tommy Shepherd and Theaster Gates playing at REDCAT

The Living Word Project’s red, black & GREEN: a blues begins with an invitation to audience members to tour the stage as if they’re in an art gallery. During their walking “tours,” theatergoers can examine four structures representing cities — Chicago, Houston, New York, and Oakland. In each of these cities, Living Word Project’s artistic director Marc Bamuthi Joseph has produced one of his Life Is Living urban eco-festivals. Together, these cabins on the stage, crafted by artist Theaster Gates, form a shotgun house. Joseph describes it as similar to a shack in a township in Soweto, Johannesburg, or on a back road in Fifth Ward Houston. An actor occupies each of the structures. “The actors are basically performing aspects of the show that will make a little deeper sense later,” says Joseph, referring to the rest of his 90-minute meditation on what sustains life in struggling communities. “The whole first half-hour is a gallery installation that’s a foreshadowing of the linear play to come.” It all starts Thursday at REDCAT. Directed by Michael John Garcés (also the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater), red, black & GREEN: a blues breathes life into the people and gives voice to the stories that were seen and heard at the Life Is Living eco-festivals in these four cities. Joseph, an Alpert Award-winning arts activist, narrates. Tommy Shepherd (a.k.a. Emcee Soulati), Traci Tolmaire and Yaw embody the characters and deliver their testimony in rap, song, monologue and poem. “Increasingly, I believe that environmentalism is the 21

st-century human rights practice and quandary,”

says Joseph. “No matter how you feel about religion, race, gun control; whether you’re HIV positive or not, gay or straight, have kids or not — the planet is the thing that we share. There’s also a shared accountability in the stewardship of that planet.” This production is part of Joseph’s vision to grow awareness about our collective responsibility for the planet. He investigates what living green means to black and brown communities experiencing social and economic stress.

“The play is a performed documentary of the process of creating in these four American cities a festival that re-examines the relationship of New Majority America to the environmental movement,” says Joseph. “By New Majority America, I mean the poor, the colored, the underclass, the folks who in 20 years will assume the demographic majority in the country. As provocative as that term may be, maybe a simpler way of saying it is the piece examines environmentalism across African America. Not in a top-down, didactic way, but by accessing simple rituals, quiet moments, hard truths, and innovative practices that inspire a different relationship to ecology in urban America.” For Joseph, red, black & GREEN: a blues is an artifact of the real work, which remains the production of these Life Is Living festivals. “Theater is a mechanism, but to convey what we’re doing,” he says. “Production of these festivals is performative.”

In October 2012, 6,000 supporters gathered in Oakland’s DeFremery Park, a.k.a. Lil Bobby Hutton Park, for Life Is Living. Rapper Talib Kweli performed a DJ set, poets braved an open mic, and people had access to a Teachers Lounge, graffiti and science exhibition, skate competition, health screenings, and HIV testing. But the centerpiece of this and every eco-festival is the question, what sustains life in your community? Joseph asked several community members to respond to the question with a particular practice, their way of demonstrating a different path forward to environmental responsibility. red, black & GREEN: a blues premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where Joseph serves as the director of performing arts, in October 2011. Since then, the show has traveled to 15 cities. “I don’t just measure the success by the people that come in, but by the depth of emotional resonance that’s palpable in the room,” says Joseph. “That’s been the best part for us as performers.” Four years ago, New York City-born Joseph launched Life Is Living to bring an understanding of environmental justice to communities that were confronting issues more immediate than the health of their natural environment — namely, survival. The series of festivals in neglected parks in underserved neighborhoods attempts to speak to the residents in a familiar language, broadcasting messages by integrating different styles and cultures of communication. “Through the practice of organizing, through the language of music, through the politics and structure of performance, we get at the urgency of environment and environmental stewardship in an accessible and innovative way,” he says. Joseph believes the festival presenters in each city begin to understand the importance of the process along with the performance. Through Life Is Living, these producers construct community around environmental justice, and he hopes that they will continue to work outside the boundaries of their buildings, with goals that reach beyond selling tickets.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Marc Bamuthi Joseph at Life is Living, Chicago 2007

Both the festivals and theatrical work are extensions of Joseph. “I’m as much an academic and curator as I am a hip-hop head,” he says. He considers Shakespeare, Chaucer and Emily Dickinson part of his canon, as well as hip-hop artists Chuck D, KRS-One and Kendrick Lamar. Growing up, the writer Joseph aspired to a spot somewhere between Chuck D and Toni Morrison.

“I like to think that my writing practice is still inside that sweet spot,” says Joseph. “I think it gives writers of our generation an added level of fluency because in addition to Spanish or English or Mandarin or Arabic, we also speak hip-hop. It’s what makes Junot Diaz’s writing so rich, so lush – that there’s a proximity to the urban experience that’s carried on the tongue that gets flipped without trying. There’s always double entendre at work, and so the culture does the work of speaking to the multitudes for us. It’s already embedded in the language itself. I don’t see myself as trying to intentionally isolate or sequester myself inside the culture.

In fact, hip-hop culture lets me speak with two tongues. I take advantage of where I come from, and it shows up in the language.” In addition to upcoming Life Is Livings in Oakland in 2013, and Houston and Washington, D.C., in 2014, Joseph is organizing The Future of Soul Think Tank at Yerba Buena. It’s part of a broader organizing model he calls The Creative Ecosystem which he believes allows culture makers who wouldn’t ordinarily be in touch to work on something together on a large path of inquiry. The think tank, Joseph says, will ruminate on “what soul and soul music will look like in 2038.” Living in Oakland has fostered Joseph’s personal artistic practice. Experimentation, he says, is part of the cultural norm. “We’re a very politically progressive place. They say the ’60s never left San Francisco. That’s represented in politics, communication style and openness to something new.” When red, black & GREEN: a blues ends each night, the audience is once again invited back on stage, to “come down and kick it,” says Joseph. red, black & GREEN: a blues, REDCAT, 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles 90012. Thu-Sat 8:30 pm, Sun 3 pm. Closes Sunday. Tickets: $10-$25. www.redcat.org. 213 237-2800. *** All photos of red, black & GREEN: a blues by Bethanie Hines http://www.lastagetimes.com/2013/01/redcat-hosts-red-black-green-a-blues/

Traci Trolmaire in “red, black & GREEN: a blues”

A New Play Explores the Beauty of Being Black in the Green Movement by Jamilah King // November 5, 2012 If you’ve ever tried to watch the rhythm of a storm, it probably looks something like Marc Bamuthi Joseph on stage. A week after Hurricane Sandy pounded parts of the Eastern seaboard, the New York-born, Oakland-based artist brought his play about being black in the green movement to Brooklyn’s wind-whipped masses. The city that never sleeps has been completely knocked out: trains are still down, gas lines are blocks long, and devastated families are still searching for refuge. The chaos has sparked a meaningful conversation about climate change just days before the country’s next presidential election. But Joseph isn’t the type to preach. He laughingly chides himself for being a do-gooder, a hip-hop generation dad who’s learned that the most valuable mandate of all is to just listen. He’s also a celebrated performance artist and curator, an educator who casually talks to me about Frierean pedagogy while he’s walking around downtown Brooklyn hours before his new show, “red, black, and GREEN: a blues”, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Those of us who were lucky enough to see art during disaster turned out for what he called a “performed documentary” of years spent trying to build bridges between an often white environmental justice movement communities of color. In many ways, that work began four years ago when Joseph helped found the annual “Life is Living” festival in Oakland, Calif. The goal of the festival was ostensibly to have fun and go green in the ‘hood. By all accounts, it worked: Mos Def, for example, performed on a solar-powered stage at West Oakland’s Lil’ Bobby Hutton Park. But the question then turned to sustainability and access. How do you create spaces to talk about urban gardens and gun violence? Material poverty and spiritual prosperity? The festivals then spread to other cities like Chicago, Houston, and New York, where more alliances were formed and similar questions were asked. In this work of poetry, dance, and song, Joseph and his fellow cast members physically invite new stakeholders to the table. It’s an interactive, intimate, and sometimes hilarious look at the uneasiness that comes with that realization that sometimes the most carefully built bridges can fall down. We spoke about his new play. Tell me a bit more about how “Life is Living” informed this play. What similarities did you see in the cities that you visited?

I’ll start with the festival itself, which began with an outcome driven agenda and transitioned to process-driven protocol. At first the idea was, ‘put the festivals on, people will come, the festivals will be agents in transforming behaviors that we might more closely associate with environmental responsibility and sustainability in general. And what we found was that a festival wasn’t going to buy people solar

panels. Also it did provide platforms for education and partnerships. But I think what we found was that the strongest aspect of the festival were the partnerships of the folks who we invited to present. Also, that the stronger part of the festival was inquiry-based, which is to say that we asked folks, “What sustains life in your community?” And that question was in the end a lot more

provocative and powerful than the response. The laboratory, having folks come together in conceptual and virtual, and physical space around a point of inquiry ended up being more powerful than the festival itself. There was a longer shelf life to the activity because the partnerships were able to be sustained even when the festival itself was over. What we left behind, not only in Oakland but in the other cities that we visited, were these cohorts of that we call “creative ecosystems” that were built around these critical inquiry points. So “red, black, and green: a blues” is a performed documentary of that process. It looks at the character and temperature of these different ecosystems, the people that we met and the emotional connections that we made with people, not just a behind-the-scenes look at the production. In that way I think that it’s a pretty special and emotional survey of the African American temperament as it relates to this climactic global issue. You mentioned to the New York Times that you wanted to give folks “multiple points of access” to these issues of environmental justice. Can you talk about what that means. Yeah, so I’m walking down Fulton Mall right now and there is a line that goes as far as I can see. And the line is of folks waiting for buses to get shuttled back to Manhattan. That’s a point of engagement with climate crisis. I think what we find is that if it’s the BP spill, or if it’s Hurricane Katrina, we look at that and we say ‘that’s how I understand myself relative to climate crisis.’ On the flip side, the mechanics of environmental responsibility are also fairly narrow. If I drive a hybrid vehicle, if I shop locally or eat organic foods. But I think that there are different ways of looking at sustainability, and also different ways of thinking about environmental responsibility that are more pedestrian, that aren’t as visible because they’re not inside of the conventional literacy of environmental stewardship. We try to look at things as basic as loving your family as being part of a matrix of sustainability. That love of family translates to the healthy family structure. In terms of the social matrix of sustainability, keeping a healthy family is actually environmentally responsible. It’s a leap that we don’t make because environmental responsibility requires so much direct action. But there are all these sociological factors that are in play that I think are underreported that I think should also be part of our collective sustainability measures. I think part of “Life is Living” seeks to do and what this piece seeks to do is reframe the environmental question to one that has both sociological import and one that has emotional import. We want to reframe environmental consciousness in terms of emotional and collective health and look at all the things that we do to sustain one another. It’s part of the environmental matrix. Speaking as a 30-something black male with two kids, I look around my community and I see that there is an obsession with death. I look at Sandy and I see a hundred people have died in the course of a week, and I look at Chicago and I see the unprosecuted homicides of black-on-black violence. One is a natural disaster and one is an unnatural disaster, but both need attention. Both are environmental crises. This play is really engaging, and not at all didactic. Can you talk to me a little bit about how your experiences as a teacher, as someone who goes out in the community who actually has interactions with people? Can you talk to me about how that informs your approach to this work? I would say that both are Freire pedagogy at work. At the heart of popular education, at the heart of contemporary popular education, is beginning kids’ language construction in a more formulaic way to construct a new world. How do I use my language or how do I develop my language that speaks my world into existence? I think that rather than implicating or advancing strategies that fit somebody else’s matrix of environmental success, part of what we’re doing is inviting folks to determine sustainability on their own terms. That’s not to say we’re advocating against alternative energy sources — quite the opposite. But what we’re saying to kids is, “You know that bike you tricked out? How you put hella different color foil in the spokes? That’s not just being fly. That’s also being environmentally responsible.” So it’s naming the things that are present in our behavior that also fit into the nature scene, and maybe re-inviting disparate groups to kind of name this on their own terms.

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/11/red_black_and_green_a_blues.html

Theater Reviews

Making a Fest, Keeping It Green ‘red, black & Green: a blues,’ at BAM’s Fishman Space By: Jason Zinoman November 2, 2012

Just as the Brooklyn Nets open their regular season, bringing professional sports to the borough for the first time in half a century, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is concluding a savvy counterprogramming offer.

This week the academy’s Harvey Theater, only blocks from the Barclays Center, played host to “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and its guests David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Howard Stern. The academy also has its own sleek new room to show off in its recently opened Fisher Building: the Fishman Space, a flexible black box with comfortable seats (and spacious bathrooms!) that offers the potential for more intimate programming, like Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s charming dance-theater piece “red, black & GREEN: a blues.” As the primary narrator and charismatic center of this four-person show, Mr. Joseph tells a moseying story about working with neighborhoods in New York, Houston, Chicago and Oakland to build a socially conscious environmental arts festival that helps people of all classes. Performed here after stops elsewhere, the show presents a contrast, if not a subtle rebuke, to the nearby development project, which includes the Barclays Center.

That project’s developer, Bruce C. Ratner, has been widely criticized for a heavy-handed approach and his project’s large scale, use of eminent domain and, as of yet, failure to build the low-income housing he’s promised. Mr. Joseph, in propulsive patter that evokes poetry slams, makes reference to Barclays early on and asks a pointed question: “Why not think of architecture as relevant to the poor?”

The form of the show’s prologue itself makes a statement. In the opening minutes of the performance, the audience walks onstage among the actors, who are standing inside a house that then breaks into four moving parts, each a little room. Theaster Gates’s set moves around the actors and the audience. It’s designed to fit into spaces, not overwhelm them. While the show, staged fluidly by Michael John Garcés, has political overtones, it’s neither sober nor dogmatic. Its heart is in the joyous, ingratiating performances and the music of its language, which alternates between mundane prose and staccato poetry. Moreover, its perspective is more searching than polemical. Mr. Joseph, a bald African-American in jeans, portrays himself as a creaky-kneed artist and occasionally unsure father. Such positioning does not come off as a pose. Ambivalence is fused into the show. There’s a gently satirical take on like-minded activists. In one scene he wryly describes praying over tofu at a vegan restaurant. In another he talks about advocating green and sustainable living to people worried about their kids’ being shot. He underscores the complexities of issues, hinting at the contradictions of teaching his son about the Black Panthers when the “face of imperialism is Barack Obama.” The cast offers steady support,

Tommy Shepherd, left, and Marc Bamuthi Joseph in “red, black & GREEN: a blues,” in the new Fishman Space at

Brooklyn Academy of Music

particularly Traci Tolmaire, who adds ferocious physicality and some nice character sketches. Tommy Shepherd and Mr. Gates provide percussion, soulful singing and occasional loose-limbed dance. The energy level rises in the New York sequence, which reflects the pace of the city. Mr. Joseph talks about meeting the “green czar of Harlem,” who tests him and his festival plans with rapid-fire questions about use of toxic-free products and reusable containers. In New York even an environmental advocate talks like a Wall Street trader. Mr. Joseph responds with a laid-back reggae beat. “Keep your standards higher,” he says. “But don’t keep my people out.” “red, black & GREEN: a blues” is playing through Sunday at Fishman Space, Fisher Building, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 321 Ashland Place, near Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100, bam.org.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/theater/reviews/red-black-green-a-blues-at-bams-fishman-space.html?_r=0

Theater

Socially Engaged Without Preaching By: Felicia R. Lee October 26, 2012

Marc Bamuthi Joseph at a Life Is Living festival at DeFremery Park in Oakland, Calif., this month.

Photo Credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH is hugging and kissing his way through DeFremery Park here. His route takes him past skateboarders, the animal pen of an urban homesteader, and black cowboys tending a barbecue pit. On this clear Saturday morning in a struggling neighborhood Mr. Joseph, a poet and performance artist, is hailing old friends at the Life Is Living festival, an event that he and others founded to forge partnerships among poor communities, environmental activists and the contemporary art world that he now calls home. He lingers a moment at the horse-shaped grill tended by “Mr. Henry,” otherwise known as Henry Linzie, the 61-year-old president of a group called Friends of DeFremery Park. They exchange quick hellos. “We have to keep things going for the children,” Mr. Linzie tells a visitor. “We helped get that skate park we got back there.” Both Mr. Linzie and the park itself are characters in Mr. Joseph’s latest multidisciplinary theatrical creation, “red, black & GREEN: a blues,” which, after touring the country, opens Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The park is home to “the people you don’t see,” according to the piece, which describes Mr. Linzie as having “hands big enough to cover toddlers in the rain.” The play uses the park’s unofficial name, Lil Bobby Hutton Park, after the 17-year-old Black Panther Party member who was shot to death by police officers in 1968. The Oakland festival, as well as similar events in Houston, New York and Chicago, provided raw material for “red, black & GREEN: a blues,” which, through song, dance, spoken word and visual imagery, explores the role of environmentalism in communities where solar panels seem trivial in the face of violence and dead-end schools. Mr. Joseph, a warm, talkative, deeply thoughtful 37-year-old, said his goal was to offer “multiple literacies and multiple points of access” to the audience. “How many ways can we provoke empathy and let folks in?” he said during a recent interview at a downtown cafe here. The play goes beyond the environmental movement, he said, but leaps to the question of what sustains life.

“He’s forged a very singular voice,” said Philip Bither, senior curator for performing arts at the Walker Performing Arts Center in Minneapolis, a co-commissioner of the new piece. “It’s socially engaged without being didactic. It utilizes a high-level of self-awareness, self-deprecation and humor that disarms an audience that worries about being preached to.”

“Red, black & GREEN” showcases Mr. Joseph as the main narrator in the four-person cast, which portrays characters from the four cities where Life Is Living festivals are held, sometimes using their words verbatim. Mr. Joseph, for instance, recounts an interview with the mother of a teenager shot dead in Chicago amid a wave of youth violence. (“What will grow here?” she asks.)

In the play Mr. Joseph says: I ask a mother about environment and she tells me of guns Of emotionally disabled boys Whose green movement consists of recycling the sorry narrative of black-on-black crime If you brown you can’t go green until you hold a respect for black life. Traci Tolmaire, a dancer, singer and actor, also plays a few roles, including that of recovering Skid Row wino in Houston who joyfully uses found material to decorate his home. In another segment the performers mock the imperious “czar of all things green in Harlem.” At the start of the 90-minute show the audience is invited onstage to tour the play’s set as if it were an art gallery. It consists of four shotgun houses on wheels, made from repurposed material and designed by the Chicago artist Theaster Gates. Each house represents a season, an element, a city. Chicago is fire and red, Oakland is water and blue, Houston is earth and black, and New York is green and land. Moving in and out of the houses Mr. Joseph and Ms. Tolmaire may be singing or sharing slices of watermelon. The composer Tommy Shepherd (a k a Emcee Soulati) bangs on the roofs and stamps on the stage to create a wave of sound that is by turns blues, hip-hop, funk and soul. Mr. Gates sings too. He and the actor known as Yaw (pronounced yow) have shared the fourth player’s role during the national tour. Hip-hop has been the soundtrack to Mr. Joseph’s life. The son of middle-class Haitian immigrants, he grew up in Queens, appeared in commercials at a young age and understudied Savion Glover in “The Tap Dance Kid” on Broadway. He commuted to the elite Dalton School in Manhattan. “When I was on the subway, Chuck D was in my head,” he said. Growing up, his major poets were Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and Ntozake Shange. He said his life was changed by Spike Lee’s 1989 film, “Do the Right Thing,” about a summer of racial tensions in Brooklyn. “I didn’t know you could be that colorful, compassionate and funny,” he said of Mr. Lee’s fusion of art and social commentary. After graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta he headed to the Bay Area to teach, eventually becoming immersed in the poetry slam scene, and was named San Francisco Poetry Grand Slam champion three times. Now married to a schoolteacher, he is the father of two. He attracted notice as a theater maker in 2003 with “Word Becomes Flesh,” about the unexpected conception of his son, and “Scourge” (2005), about Haitian-American identity. “The break/s,” a global survey of hip-hop woven through with his personal narrative, had its premiere in 2008 at the Humana festival in Louisville, Ky. Since February he has been director of performing arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, where “red, black & GREEN” got its start in 2011.

Mr. Joseph, who considers himself a teacher at heart, noticed that when his students in a group called Youth Speaks attended environmental-movement events to perform their poems, they were often the only black people there. “I thought, ‘Why not have a program where people are, instead of trying to get people to come in?’ ” Mr. Joseph said. “l’m going to have a version in the park with 30, 50, 100 different partners working on sustainability in one place. You show up, and there’s Mos Def or Talib Kweli, but there’s also a solar-powered stage in the middle of the park.” While many other artists plumb social issues and draw on documentary sources as their texts, Mr. Joseph makes each piece distinctive and deeply personal. “A lot of the language around the environmental justice movement or the movement for racial justice might sound abstract or dry,” said Shannon Jackson, a professor of performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “Trying to connect them to one’s own life is really the question. His techniques are really different. He adapts the material he finds into an artistically rendered poetic form.” Up next for Mr. Joseph is a hip-hop opera. His curatorial focus at Yerba Buena is not unlike the process of creating the Life Is Living festivals, he said. “While curating a Bill T. Jones or a Wooster Group, I am also developing intentional communities around critical questions,” he said. For example he has assembled a group of artists across disciplines to examine the question of what “soul” will look like in 2038. Each participant will create a project to be displayed at the center in 2013. “Part of the rap against activists is they’re railing against something,” Mr. Joseph said. “I want to make something. I want to make the world I want to see. It’s not just pretty art.” A version of this article appeared in print on October 28, 2012, on page AR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Socially Engaged Without Preaching. http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/theater/marc-bamuthi-josephs-red-black-green-a-blues.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1352141763-SvaGc1dRFBubBPTlQsajVw

RED, BLACK, & GREEN: A BLUES Makes NYC Debut at BAM's Next Wave Festival, 10/31-11/4 by BWW News Desk // October 23, 2012

Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s red, black & GREEN: a blues (rbGb) is an interactive installation and performance that blends spoken word, music, film and contemporary and hip-hop dance to re-imagine a green movement that is inclusive of black and brown voices, and posits that valuing LIFE is the first step to valuing the planet. The critically acclaimed theatrical piece will make its New York debut during BAM’s 30th Next Wave Festival from October 31 – November 4, 2012 . Developed during a three-year community-based civic and artistic process, rbGb takes place within a modular set of row houses made from repurposed materials, designed by visual artist Theaster Gates. These houses represent four American cities -- Oakland, New York, Houston, and Chicago -- where rbGb’s narrative grew out of the stories and energy cultivated at Joseph’s signature Life is Living Festivals. Within and among the houses, distinctive characters share personal stories through poetry, monologue, song, and movement that reflect on poverty, violence, racial consciousness -- and how we, as a collective society, can invent and navigate sustainable survival practices in urban America. Immersing audiences in a new mode of kinetic performance, rbGb strives to unite communities around a broader definition of “sustainable living” and to be a catalyst for cultural and creative engagement. Directed by Cornerstone Theater’s Michael John Garcés, Joseph is joined on stage by an ensemble cast, including actor/dancer Traci Tolmaire, musician Tommy Shepherd, aka Emcee Soulati, and vocalist Yaw. Performances are at 7:30PM from Wednesday, October 31 through Saturday, November 3 and at 3PM on Sunday, November 4. Tickets to all performances are $20. There will be a post-show artist talk on Friday, November 2. To purchase tickets, visit www.bam.org/theater/2012/red-black-and-green-a-blues. red, black & GREEN: a blues premiered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October 2011. For additional information about Marc Bamuthi Joseph, rbGB or the Life is Living Festivals please visit www.lifeisliving.org. http://broadwayworld.com/article/RED-BLACK-GREEN-A-BLUES-Makes-NYC-Debut-at-BAMs-Next-Wave-Festival-1031-114-20121023

Set Piece: Artist Theaster Gates Tries Stage Design for Marc Bamuthi Joseph Project at BAM by Rozalia Jovanovic 10.16.12

Designing a stage set can be a milestone moment in an artist’s career. Think of Picasso and the Ballets Russes, or William Kentridge’s recent star turn at the Met. Now Chicago artist Theaster Gates is joining their ranks. Mr. Gates, who’s known for transforming abandoned buildings into vital cultural spaces, is collaborating with spoken-word artist and director Marc Bamuthi Joseph for a production of Mr. Joseph’s experimental theater piece Red, black & GREEN: a blues that opens in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Oct. 31. The piece, which premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco last year, explores the redemptive quality of impoverished places and how different cultures understand notions of sustainability.

For research, Messrs. Joseph and Gates traveled to urban parks around the country as part of a roving environmental festival called Life Is Living. “There were young people killing each other,” said Mr. Gates. “There were all these bigger issues than, ‘How do we install solar panels on a house?’” Mr. Gates’s sets are constructed from plywood, scrap metal and other salvaged materials that the team accumulated on their trip. Because Red, black & GREEN is about the four seasons and four cycles of life (childhood to adolescence to adulthood to old age), the sets are comprised of modular units that can be broken down and reconstituted to represent the four different cities in which the piece is set. Unlike the sets and costumes of many other artist-dancer collaborations, like the Ballets Russes materials, which are owned by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, or those of the Merce Cunningham Company, which have been acquired by Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, Mr. Gates’s will not end up in museums, if he has his way. He was brought on, he said, to make a stage set, not a work of art. Many of Mr. Gates’s recent works have ventured beyond the bounds of what many would consider visual art. For the Documenta 13 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, this year, he transformed an old house into a space for artists to live and work in, a project that was inspired by his preparation for Mr. Joseph’s piece. The stage sets similarly involved collaboration, with cast members and tech people. As for his role as the design lead, Mr. Gates boiled it down to “nuanced listening.” http://galleristny.com/2012/10/theaster-gates-set-piece/

Part of Mr.Gates’s stage set. (Photo: Bethanie Hines)

Ph

Blogs / Field Guide

Living Classroom and Open Field: An Interview with Marc Bamuthi Joseph By Susy Bielak Oct 1, 2012

Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Classroom, August 2011

In the spirit of public exchange, the Walker presents Open Field: Conversations on the Commons, an

online and print book examining our three-year experiment in participation and public space. This essay comprises a chapter of the publication, which will be released online in its entirety. On August 18, 2011, the Walker hosted Living Classroom, a daylong gathering exploring the question, “What sustains life in your community?” Activities ranged from games of dominoes with artist/activist Rick

Lowe, founder of Project Row Houses, and a community walkabout — a tour and conversation about

animating public space led by local architect Marcy Schulte — to a program of table tennis matches, karaoke, and a slide show with photographer Wing Young Huie. The Living Classroom was born out of conversations around a monthlong project with Marc Bamuthi Joseph, a spoken word/theater artist and educator dedicated to building and supporting creative ecosystems. The residency was part of the Walker’s ongoing relationship with the artist that also resulted in the co-commission and debut of his interdisciplinary performance work red, black & GREEN: a blues at the Walker in March 2012.

On an early site visit, Joseph and collaborator Brett Cook introduced his ongoing project Life Is Living  — a series of eco and art festivals launched in urban parks nationwide that bring performance, intergenerational health, and environmental action to a number of artists and community organizations. Their visit left a residue of excitement and questions: Why would community-based artists and organizations want to produce an event at the Walker? Why would a project focusing on under-resourced communities be situated there? The partners decided that the majority of the residency should take place off-site, and that projects about specific communities should be sited in partnership with local grassroots organizations. Workshops, professional development sessions, and a block party took place in several neighborhoods.

For the component at the museum, the framework of Life Is Living met the values of Open Field. The collaborating partners created a day that emphasized dialogue and mutual learning. Joseph talks about this process with Susannah Bielak. Susannah Bielak: Your catalytic question for Living Classroom is, “What sustains life in your community?” Will you answer that question for yourself? What does sustainability mean to you? Marc Bamuthi Joseph: What sustains life in my community? Well, always the people, and the animal instinct to survive. “Sustain” is an interesting word

because the fact is, my community, which for the purpose of this conversation I’ll characterize as the African American community in Oakland, California, is actually leaving. That city is a place where death, education, and the level of incarceration are functioning at an unsustainable rate. So, you would think that what sustains life are the people who are doing their very

best to turn those factors around — soulful, artistic, creative healers and creative problem-solvers sustain life in Oakland. The means of creative problem-solving keep changing. Some of the problem-solvers are farmers and food activists. Some are artists and athletes. Some are just good dads or good moms. But the creative healers sustain life in Oakland. They sustain life in my community. Bielak: We’re at a juncture where institutions are asking themselves about their relevance to the cities and communities in which they live. How do you see Open Field and the Living Classroom as related to the question of community sustainability and relevance? Joseph:I think that the Living Classroom is populist and popular education at its best, but located at a specific site. What I love about the Living Classroom is that it invites a curated sample of organizations

and artists  to reveal and inquire about the best practices toward provoking thought around sustainability. So much of our discourse is about saying, “I have an idea. I’m going to communicate this idea to you.” This discourse instead is about creatively finding ways to ask, to provoke, and to invite people into the conversation. To me, that’s a reflection of our Freirean pedagogy and it’s also a reflection of good politics and city management, where policy development Is predicated on this invitation into the conversation. That’s what’s great about Living Classroom. Bielak: Something we’ve learned from Open Field is that a platform for the public’s participation and collaboration requires structure and maintenance in order to flourish. As a self-described catalyst, what armatures do you build around participation, particularly for a project about sustainability? Joseph: I am one of a class of what I call empathic intellectuals, which means that my discourse, my way of being in the world is based on energetic reciprocity. The word “armature” implies brick and mortar, steel

Marc Bamuthi Joseph performs in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, August 18, 2011

Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Classroom, August 2011

and glass. But the primary structure that I build is energetic and emotional — finding a way not only in my own practice, but implicit and integrated inside my artistic fields of inquiry to generate safe space. Whether we’re talking about the formal or informal classroom or the performance space, growth happens inside a safe space. This might be indicated through iconography, through fields of play, or through certain kinds of music. But I really think it’s the energy we ourselves carry that plays a role in this safe space. There are rigorous intellectuals who are lousy teachers because they don’t know how to orchestrate an environment for the interchange of information. Part of the whole strategy is to be intentional about safe space. Bielak: It’s interesting that you called out the word “armature.” When I think of armatures in the context of this discussion, I think of soft architecture—the social structures, human work, and relationship-building at play in organizing. I see this integrally at play in projects such as Living Classroom and Life Is Living. What kinds of networks have you been part of, inquired into, and engaged with catalytically through this work?

Joseph: I think this goes back to the thesis of the work that

we’re doing — the ecosystem — which hopefully mirrors the grand design of nature, in that the more diverse we are, the greater chance we all have for survival. We are interdependent. Part of what I strive to do inside of the performance space, and also inside of an organizing model, is to prioritize a sense of interdependence. Sometimes that looks like the Living Classroom, with all the activities and participants. Sometimes it looks like a poetry slam for youth, where there’s a scaffolded development process for the young people, community participation on the audience level, and the integration of an institution such as the San Francisco Opera House or the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, for example. Again, I think it’s my performance background and belief that as curators we’re not just responsible for locating objects in space, but we’re also responsible for communal experience. And that’s something I derived from my friend Ken Foster, who talks about communal experience being fundamental to the success of arts practice. Similarly, such experience defines the success of an organization. There are going to be some bumps in the road, emotional and logistical, but at the end of the day, if we have provided safe space for as many participants as possible, I think we’re doing our job right.

Bielak: A phrase that we’ve been using in relationship to Open Field is that of a “cultural commons.” While we don’t explicitly use the term safe, a driving principle of the project is to create a space where people want to be, and might really want to share. I’m wondering how you interpret the cultural commons, and what you might see as its value?

Spoken word artist Tish Jones performs as part of

Marc Bauthi Jospeh’s Open Field Residency

Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Living Classroom, August 2011

Joseph: Part of my arts manifestation is to reveal the process. There have been times at Life Is Living festivals when folks have asked me if I was going to perform. I would tell them that I am performing, that I don’t have to be rhyming or doing choreography to be inside of my artistic manifestation. The piece that’s

going to come here to the Walker next year is evidence of that ideology — that we can reveal the arts process as the object of a performance, or the object to be viewed. All that being said, the Living Classroom is also performative. It’s performance of culture; it’s performance of process. It’s also aesthetically beautiful.

The past few days, let alone my almost four-year relationship with the Walker, have introduced me to a certain vocabulary and to characters on the street that have placed me inside a context that will very much find its way into the finished product of red, black & GREEN: a blues. When we were in development with the break/s here about three years ago, there was something about the relationship between the education and community programs department, the performing arts department, and the visual arts program that made me want to create a work to fit in the middle of all of them. That’s what red, black & GREEN is, and what I think the Living Classroom is. Bielak: When you came in April, you sparked our citizenry with the question, “What sustains life in our community?” It seems like the way you worked on this residency was to plant a powerful seed, leave it alone, and return to encounter the flowers growing out of the residents. Is this a typical practice? Joseph: No, it’s not a typical practice either for me or for the field. I would hope that it becomes more

commonplace — this kind of active listening, quick turnaround, administrative dedication, and sacrifice. I think the current practice is for institutions to relate to an artist’s ideas in the codified form of object, and to present a platform for those objects to live. But I love the way that the Walker has absorbed, at least for a time, an artist’s process and integrated it into its own practices and processes.

Joseph: I love the phrase “cultural commons” because part of its value is both physical and nonphysical in terms of its occupancy of site. I think it’s fantastic, and also speaks to democracy. The idea of common ground or middle ground is different from compromise, which implies that there have been concessions made, whereas commons, or the common ground, implies a space where everyone’s ideas are welcome and preferred, if not prioritized. So I think that it’s a great phrase, politically, socially, and artistically, and might be something that I adopt to talk about what we do, because that’s really what it is. Bielak: Life Is Living is a truly ambitious and multidimensional project that maintains a high degree of performance, including graffiti battles, youth spoken word, dance, and music. Here in the Twin Cities and at the Walker, the Living Classroom was far more about process and conversation than performance. Will Open Field and the process of the Living Classroom influence your artistic practice? Specifically, do you think the emphasis on the dialogical will influence you?

Kite-flying on Open Field as part of the Living Classroom, 2011

Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Rick Lowe play dominoes on Open Field, August 2011

http://blogs.walkerart.org/ecp/2012/10/01/living-classroom-and-open-field-an-interview-with-marc-bamuthi-%E2%80%A8joseph/

red, black & GREEN: a blues by Lewis Whittington EDGE Contributor Tuesday Sep 25, 2012

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival director Nick Stuccio ongoing mission is to cultivate multi-genre experimental works. One of the festival centerpieces, Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s "red, black & GREEN: a blues," ingeniously directed by Michael John Garcés, proved nothing less than a transformative theatrical experience. The audience is onstage inside Theaster Gates’ morphing sets, what he calls ’shotgun houses.’ They break away from dilapidated rural structure to think tanks of urban artisans. The structures are maneuvered by the cast into four structures where the performers -- Traci Tolmaire, Tommy

Shepard aka Emcee Soulati, Yaw and Joseph -- tell dramatic stories of African-American communities in overlapping song, dance and spoken word.

Audience members move as close to the performers as they want to witness their testaments of their lives dealing with legacies of American apartheid and liberation against the corrupted system. Music is pounded out on the structure and household objects, stories are told, and archival footage of historical events such as Malcolm X’s funeral are on small screens inlays. Even the heavy rain coming down that night seemed part of the sound field. It doesn’t matter how much of you absorb, the accumulation in this half-hour prologue builds a communal trust; we are witness and part of it. The prologue ends when we all take seats and the structures are positioned to look like urban blight as Joseph chronicles his artistic journey to "go green" in black neighborhoods. His project to make minority neighborhoods not only eco-conscious, but also self-sustaining, with healthy food. Joseph’s interaction with the people from this project chronicles urban America fighting for eco-sustainability physically and psychologically. The stories and people he encounters are acted out with poetry and blues chronicling a disturbed, poor, oppressive and violent shared past. These heavy themes are nonetheless stories of unsung heroes celebrated in various art forms: undistilled vocal and washbasin blues are sung, magnificently. At one point Yaw sings the stirring spiritual "Motherless Child" that segues into a wending poetry sequence. Later Joseph sings a fiery cultural rap that is both blisteringly editorial and humorous. Joseph’s poetry has qualities of a singular voice, an application of craft that builds off of imagery and tonalities, aside from the content, masterfully crafted and acted. It is so affecting that it perfectly scores Traci Tolmaire in dances. Tolmaire is a hypnotic dancer, sublimely expressive in her adagio phrasing that slows down gorgeous salsa, jazz and hip-hop phrases. Later Tolmaire acts out the tableaux of a wino from Texas who gives up Thunderbird and skid row for a self-contained country house with a garden paid for by his new occupation collecting area trash. Self-sustaining was the American way of life before mass transit, electricity and plumbing. What was lost in eco-surviving and what do we have to relearn?

Performance artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph

(Source: Umi Vaughn)

Joseph is also a powerful mover and he frequently recites verse as he dances. Talk about breath control! He also is a polemicist. The generational motif of the question he poses about "What you will grow?" Does the first African American president represent an imperialist system? At one point Joseph, a second gen Haitian-American, admits that he may be trying to clean up a black neighborhood, but he himself "lost his ghetto card" seven years ago when he was becoming more successful. His humor, editorial and pathos are always present. He relates telling his nine-year-old son Malik that the park in their section of Oakland used to be the site of protests by the Black Panthers, but the son wants to hear about Tupac instead. Josephs speaks of the great socially conscious poetry and music of Gil Scott Heron and there is no stretch to see that this troupe is inspired by Heron’s singular artistic integrity. Dramatically, musically and poetically "red, black, GREEN: a blues" unlocks a gushing narrative and visual stream that must be experienced. http://www.edgenewyork.com/entertainment/theatre/theatre_reviews/137389/

September 21-23, 2012NEW YORKWEEKEND

Sanchez, Jetshead down toSouth Beach

Revis will be back forcontest with Dolphins hecalls a “must win” {page 21}

sports

Guess MichaelKiwanuka’sinfluences

The soulful folk musicianon what sounds helped himdefine his own sound {page 19}

music

television

Apartment forrent ... in hell!

The devil’s in the detailsof the lease for renters at‘666 Park Avenue’ {page 16}

FALL

GUIDE

Don’t hibernate just yet Though the temperatures

are dropping, autumn is whentheater companies, dancetroupes, music halls, museumsand galleries heat up Where tocatch culture this season {page 07-12}

fall arts guide

11WEEKEND, SEPTEMBER 21-23, 2012

Athlete participation subject to change.

November 18, 2012 3:00 PM

Tickets on sale now Go to barclayscenter.com, prucenter.com, ticketmaster.com or call 800.745.3000

November 10, 2012 7:00 PM

SEE THE FIERCE FIVE

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a bi-coastal, multitalented African-American artist who blendsdancers, designers, and envi-ronmental consciousness in hislatest work, “red, black &GREEN: a blues,” a perform-ance that melds the art galleryexperience with live theater.

“In performing spaces, wesit quietly and watch. In gal-leries, it’s about who’s walkingaround with you,” he says. “Iwant to collapse those sensibili-ties in one space. I’ve learned torespond to multiple literacies,to offer as many differentpoints of access as possible.”

Joseph, 36, grew up inQueens, went to Dalton, and at-tended Morehouse College inAtlanta. Now based in Oakland,Calif., he runs the performingarts program at San Francisco’sYerba Buena Center for the Artsand teaches at Mills College.

An affinity for teaching anda passion for literature lay thefoundation for his art. Hespent 13 years building an inde-pendent youth poetry festival,Youth Speaks. “I’ve been devel-oping as an artist, a husbandand father, feeding all thebeasts, paying attention to allthe directions in which my pas-sions lead me,” he says.

The work opens on Hal-

loween at BAM’s intimate newblack-box Fishman Space,which has seating on all foursides. Viewers can explore sev-eral houses, built by collabora-tor Theaster Gates.

Joseph’s choreographer isStacey Printz, “a little whitewoman making big blackdance,” Joseph says. “The move-ment is about the bodies it’schoreographed for; it shows offher virtuosity and our ability toadapt to different music andmovement signatures: gospelto blues to ragtime to partnerdancing to hip-hop. Traci Tol-maire and I dance. The otherperformers make music, makeobjects out of clay, speakwords. All of us do everything,but some of us specialize.”

The hybrid performance work ‘red, black & GREEN:a blues’ tells the story of Black America throughdance, theater, visual arts and spoken word

1New York PhilharmonicOpening Gala Concert

The Opening Gala Concert fea-tures the beloved ItzhakPerlman performing selectedworks for violin and orchestraincluding Rimsky-Korsakov’s“Fantasy on Russian Themes,”John Williams’s “Theme fromSchindler’s List,” and Sarasate’s“Introduction and Tarantella,”among others. Alan Gilbert isthe conductor. (Sept. 27, 10 Lin-coln Center Plaza, Avery FisherHall, 212- 875-5656)

2Brooklyn PhilharmonicSeason Preview

Want a taste of the 2012-2013season of the Brooklyn Philhar-monic? Stop by the World Finan-

cial Center for its seasonpreview, hosted by WNYC’s JohnSchaefer and conducted by AlanPierson. Performed by a cham-ber ensemble of Brooklyn Philmusicians, the concert is allBrooklyn, all the time, with cre-ative collaborations with theborough’s artists and organiza-tions including newcommissions by young

composers Kendall Williams,Christopher Cerrone, MattMarks, Tim Fite and Ted Hearne;and a joint performance withBrooklyn’s steel pan ensemble,Pan Sonatas Steel Orchestra.(Oct. 25, 8 p.m., World FinancialCenter Winter Garden, 220Vesey St., free, www.bphil.org)

3Donizetti’s ‘L’Elisird’Amore’

The Metropolitan Opera’s newproduction of Donizetti’s“L’Elisir d’Amore” by BartlettSher opens the 2012-13 seasonon Sept. 24. Famed Russian so-prano Anna Netrebko has sungthe role of Adina at other, majorhouses for over ten years, butnever before at the Met. Her co-star is the tenor Matthew Polen-zani. (The Metropolitan Opera,Sept. 24 to Oct. 13, The Met, 64Columbus Ave., 212-362-6000)

METRO

In living color

If you go

Marc Bamuthi Joseph/Living Word Project‘red, black & GREEN: a blues’Oct. 31 to Nov. 4Fishman Space, BAM Fisher321 Ashland Place718-636-4100, $20;www.BAM.org

ELIZABETH ZIMMERletters@metro.us

Classical

music preview

“L’Eliser d’Amore”

KEN HOWARD/METROPOLITAN OPERA

Tommy Shepherd, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Theaster Gates star in “red, black & GREEN: a blues,” which premieres at BAM’s intimate new black-box Fishman Space this Halloween.

BETHANIE HINES

The East Bay Arts and Culture Review: Examining the Bay Area's events through a cultural lens

Marc Bamuthi Joseph / The Living Word Project enthrall with 'red, black, and GREEN: a blues (rbGb)'

By Maia Wolins, Fine Arts Correspondent Thursday, October 20, 2011

An unequivocal standing ovation erupted tonight for Marc Bamuthi Joseph and the Living Word Project's 'red, black and GREEN: a blues (rbGb)' at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

rbGB is an inspiring example of the amazing multimedia work that can be done to bring communities into the Green, and the conversations that should happen with people of all colors to help humanity survive and thrive.

Bamuthi Joseph captivates his audience from the moment they step into the room to find the performers at home in and on unique, colorful installations. The first section of the performance thus begins with the audience mere inches from the artists. At such close range, we are reminded that we are not mere onlookers of the performance nor of life.

Such an introduction creatively sets a precedent for the whole evening, where audience members are consistently connected as participants of a critical discussion in new light: how do we sustain the human race? What role do cultural roots and history play? And who is responsible for this task?

We find our way to our seats only to fall into a whirlwind of true stories and fictionalized memoirs; snatches of conversations and breathtaking dance duets; rousing vocals and indelible spoken word; narratives that gracefully built on each other in the most beautifully crafted manner of telling a story.

The homeless user, caught in a cycle of drugs, dropping hard truths about his situation in a whisper caught by nervous passersby too busy to care.

A mother, too devastated by the loss of her son to feel compassion for the question of climate change.

The boy who was like good brown earth that would be prized in a garden, but whose life was taken in a city where it seems that nothing can grow.

The hopeful organizer of a sustainability initiative, pummeled with familiar guilt trips about faucets and organic produce who stops us with humor to ask- how are those Green dreams possible?

This question is highly relevant to many communities across America, where access to good, affordable food and education is unthinkable—let alone access to the necessary means for sustainability.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph's eloquent response to the show's question is built upon a narrative swirl of energy, humor, sadness, passion, and hope: "Red state /Blues people /Use art /To shift Black /Towards Green."

Tonight's performance was a powerful conversation with a clearly supportive audience, and I hope that rbGb and similar conversations can be introduced widely into schools and communities across the country—particularly those that might not normally have access to such an incredible event.

There are only two more days to catch the unparalleled rbGb performance at YBCA, and the performers are moving out with delectable energy that is not to be missed. A must-see for anyone who cares for this earth and for unbelievable performances:

Last two shows: Oct 21-22, 7:30pm, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. EBAC thanks the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for access to the show.

Photo Credits: Bethaniel Hines Photography

May 31, 2012

Going green in black America at heart of Marc Bamuthi Joseph work

A review of "red, black & GREEN: a blues," a multidisciplinary performance created by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, continuing nightly at Seattle Center Theatre through June 2, 2012.

By Misha Berson Seattle Times theater critic

'red, black & GREEN: a blues' 7:30 p.m. nightly through Saturday, Seattle Center Theatre (formerly Intiman Theatre), 201 Mercer St., Seattle; $25 (www.ticketmaster.com). You are ushered onto the Intiman Theatre stage. There you wander around a humble "shotgun" cottage, roughly constructed of old wooden boards, strips of tin, mattress padding and other scraps — it's like a rustic architectural quilt, with swatches of video screens.

The house then breaks apart into several rooms as a quartet of compelling performers roam through and around them — wailing blues and singing spirituals, dancing off walls, spouting urgent poetry, handing out chunks of watermelon.

The opening portion of "red, black & GREEN: a blues (rbGb)" would in itself make this kinetic, provocative installation and performance piece a stunner. But then the vibrantly layered piece goes on to seat you, challenge you, regale you with stories, sermons, vigorous dance, muscular music, as it reflects on the psychic condition of urban poverty — and pleads for an eco-consciousness that feeds the body and the spirit.

On national tour here as a presentation of the Seattle Center's Next Fifty celebration and the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, "red, black & GREEN" is an arresting work of environmental performance art devised by some considerable talents.

The ingenious modular set was designed by artist-performer Theaster Gates, who appears here with actor-dancer Traci Tolmaire; drummer-beatboxer Tommy Shepherd and instigator-performer-poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Director Michael John Garcés coheres many different elements into one provocative statement.

The performers lead you on a semiabstract journey through the urban underbelly of Chicago, Harlem, Houston and Oakland, Calif. — to neighborhoods where charismatic arts activist

Bamuthi has held Life is Living Festivals, one-day events designed to "activate under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life through hip-hop arts and focused environmental action."

Though there are short detours of preachiness (including a rather romanticized ode to the Black Panthers), "red, black & GREEN" reflects these struggling communities from many angles, and with few clichés.

Joseph's diary-style monologues are at once impassioned, dizzyingly metaphorical and wittily self-effacing. The pulsating music is made by hands and bodies slapping, stomping on boxes, walls, light fixtures. African-American dance idioms from shuffle and soft-shoe tap, exhilarating hip-hop and break dancing are quoted.

Oral histories of heroic community garden volunteers, neglected elders and dissolute street junkies also are part the spontaneous-feeling, sophisticated mashup.

Produced by MAPP International, the piece confronts you with an America that is for many unseen, marginalized and is often ignored in the national political discourse. Poverty, hunger, drug abuse, a "crisis of adolescent frustration" polluting such communities, and some grassroot efforts underway to transform 'hoods into less toxic, more "breathable" spaces — these are vivid concerns, creatively examined.

Ecology is here viewed in wholistic terms, while environmental purists like "The Czar of All Things Green in Harlem" are roundly (and not entirely fairly) mocked for their focus on trendy diets, competitive recycling, etc.

Bamuthi articulates a different creed of "eat, pray, hip-hop," of planting flowers and vegetables for hungry people, of using "music to shift black toward green." It's a mission by committed young artists to merge "the symbolic and the poetic with the practical," to "recycle the narrative" that is powerfully, imaginatively expressed.

Posted August 2nd, 2012 Everybody worries about the environment. Even people who don’t believe in global warming aren’t keen on littering, carbon emissions, and increased instances of tsunamis, earthquakes, and floods worldwide. After all, it’s 2012, the year that it’s all supposed to collapse and kill us—right? Artist and activist Marc Bamuthi Joseph turns distress into action with his now-nationwide Life is Living festivals, and with his show, red, black & GREEN: a blues, directed at and inspired by urban audiences. You can see rbGb September 21st and 22nd at the Annenberg Center for Performing Arts as part of this year’s Live Arts Festival, but we couldn’t wait that long. We caught up with Marc to learn more about how his work is changing the world.

symbolizing the verdant African land. Our show’s title puts the word “GREEN” in all caps to emphasize the double entendre of a cohesive, post-Garvey vision of African America and as well as the nomenclature of effective environmental thought and practice. The “blues” in the title refers to the musical and poetic form that LeRoi Jones posits as the structural backbone of African American cultural practice.

LA: Did any particular event or image inspire the initial creation of this work?

MBJ: Topically, the work is inspired by the Life is Living festivals which are local environmental interventions in under-resourced parks around the country. The festivals themselves are produced in response to the lack of demographic diversity or diversity of aesthetic approach to “green” messaging in our country. Structurally, the work was inspired by

(Sur)reality, Environmental Justice And Discarded Materials: A Conversation With Artist And Activist Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Live Arts: Why is the show title red, black & GREEN: a blues?

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: The show’s title is taken from Marcus Garvey’s vision of a Pan-African unity and an African American repatriation from the United States and the Caribbean to Liberia. In this vision, a nationalist flag was developed wherein the colors red, black and green were used, red signifying the blood of the African people, black representing their skin, and green

Dancing in the streets at Life is Living

both the festivals themselves and also by the increasing shift toward hybridity in our nation’s contemporary arts centers, houses of “high” art that welcome both visual and performance art in coincidence as our piece does.

African American cultural tradition of innovation and redemption, and the exhortation and demand for recycling and repurposing of the environmental movement.

LA: You have assembled an impressive array of artists spanning a range of artistic disciplines. How do you get not just the artists, but their various modes of artistic expression, communicating with one another?

MBJ: To foster trust, love, and authentic collaboration I choose strong-minded individuals that I am personally inspired by to invite into the creative process. I don’t dictate my personal wishes to any of these people, but try to encourage volition, and the strength of individual taste in a supportive environment. Against the backdrop of faith, love, and support, these individual voices come respectfully to the table to create a meta-aesthetic, the best of all sounds, harmonizing on a theme, in response to a critical question. Our synthesis is ultimately guided by my text, but is expertly shaped by our director, Michael John Garces, whose literary and spatial sensibilities and artistic accountability are the unseen indispensable elements that make the whole engine run.

LA: What is the setting of this piece?

MBJ: The piece takes place in four U.S. cities: Oakland, CA; Chicago; Houston; and Harlem, NY. Within these literal spaces, the narrative exists in more poetic and ephemeral space, toggling between the realities of shotgun houses, subway cars, park benches, and father son conversations, to more figurative spaces of collective memory, hallucination, dream and lament. The materials we used to make these (sur)realities manifest are all pulled from discarded materials, 100% Chicago garbage as the designers say, all of which demonstrate the something from nothingness” of both the The artist at the festival – LIFE, says the shirt

Get on your feet!

LA: You site community input and voices as some of the source material for this work. How does this input manifests itself in the final show?

MBJ: The show is a performed documentary of the process of making Life is Living happen across African America. Each moment is a hyper dream or cold truth of this process. The performance and gallery experience of the piece is a reflection of mothers too wrapped in grieving to march, activists too steeped in self-righteousness to progress, children too focused on wonder to avoid celebrating.

LA: How do you see audiences relating/connecting to rbGb? And what do you hope people will discuss over drinks after the show?

MBJ: The best part of the process is the ongoing production of the Life is Living festivals. rbGb is more than cosmetic in tone and form, but the strength of the work is the substance of its real-time, real life inspiration: the building of creative ecosystems among entities that share values but vary in modalities throughout the country.

Red, black & GREEN: a blues runs September 21 at 7:30pm and September 22 at 8pm at The Annenberg Center for Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut Street. $35. 25-and-under tickets $18, student tickets $10.

LA: Clearly the subject matter of environmental justice, social ecology, and collective responsibility must strike a dramatic chord with you. What does performance allow you to express regarding these issues?

MBJ: Environmental justice is the great social and technological quandary of our time. Climate crisis won’t wait for politicians to figure out the corporate price point for inaction. Nor will it discriminate when the water levels rise and the food is scarce. Conversely, performance is a mechanism to create a sense of inclusion and empathy, striking an emotional chord in a sector that is very good at scientific observation, but not so great at heartfelt communication.

Life is Living is a combination of talks, performances, visual art showcases, collaborative projects, and celebration.

MBJ: Our piece is built on a foundation of collective emotional implication and energetic reciprocity. My hope isn’t so much that folks will discuss environmental themes over drinks immediately afterwards, but dream about the piece in haunting and inspiring ways for weeks. My prayer is that the haunting will take human and compassionate forms, and lead folks to act in critical and sometimes invisible ways . . .

LA: What part of the work or the process has been your favorite so far? What’s important is that you get motivated

Cake in 15 red, black & GREEN: a blues 17 Mar 2012

There are three things that I feel I need to disclose before I can write anything honest about the brilliant and incisive red, black & GREEN: a blues by Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project at the Walker Art Center. 1) I spent the formative years of my childhood living in Egypt, a white boy in a Muslim Arab country where my father taught at a seminary and my mother was the pastor of a church which ran a program called the Joint Relief Ministry, working with mostly black refugees out of Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia to provide healthcare and job training while waiting for visas to other parts of the world. As a part of that post-colonial remnant, I grew up knowing acutely that I was privileged. 2) While on a trip to New York City last summer (ostensibly to see the retrospective Glenn Ligon:AMERICA at the Whitney and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Met) I found out that the funeral of Gil Scott-Heron was taking place uptown. I went. I felt like I had to, in some way. I’ve been sober for four years now, and so the death of a poet from addiction seemed too tragic not to witness. So I went. I felt like an interloper. I left before Kanye West showed up. 3) One of the greatest performances I have ever seen took place on that same stage in the McGuire Theater almost exactly six years ago, Sekou Sundiata’s magnificent, sprawling, post-9/11 exploration the 51st (dream) state. That was a piece of work that stopped me, completely mesmerized by the music, poetry, interviews and dialog, and made me think to myself, “Goddamn, I wish everything was this good.” red, black & GREEN: a blues is, with its personal honesty, poetic drive, sweat, energy and interactivity. It’s so good it makes me

feel I have to write personally honest things if only to try and relate to it.

Traci Tolmaire, Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Photo by Bethanie Hines

red, black & GREEN: a blues is loosely structured around the four seasons in four different American cities – summer in Chicago (with a side-trip to the Sudan), autumn in Houston, winter in New York City and spring in Oakland – inspired by stories around Bamuthi’s LIFE is LIVING festival, organized to foster the relationship between arts and environmental justice. The show begins with the audience invited on stage to walk amongst Theaster Gates‘ set as Bamuthi, Gates and their fellow performers – dancer and actor Traci Tolmaire and actor and composer Tommy Shepherd aka Emcee Soulati – sing and recite snippets from the show. Gates’ set is a practical but beautiful piece of work, four segments of a house on castors, cobbled together with care from raw timber, packing crates, astroturf and canvas to convey a the best use of a scarcity of resources. The construction recalls Ralph Lemon’s set for Come Home Charley Patton which was on display as part of the exhibition OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement) at the Walker in 2004 or more recently, the Chris Larson sculptural and video installation Crush Collision. Even better, the entire set is a musical instrument, with Shepherd’s hypnotic, kinetic compositions drummed and stomped out on the various boards and beams, filling the room, ecstatically accompanying the fluid hip-hop and step dancing that punctuate the show.

Woven throughout these locations are several themes – food and nourishment, addiction and its impact on social fabrics, violence and death, and perhaps most pointed towards what could be considered a generally privileged museum-going audience, the bordering-on-self-righteousness expectations of the environmental movement. It is this vein that the cast mines for the greatest humor. In the opening Chicago segment, Bamuthi skewers the patrons of a raw-food vegan restaurant who “literally pray over tofu for ten minutes,” but don’t get on board with the LIFE is LIVING festival. In New York, trying to get a local “green czar” to sign onto the festival involves a litany of bona fides that make environmentalism a chore we do as opposed to an attitude we embody. “Do you turn off the water when you brush your teeth? Do you bring your re-useable mug to Starbucks? Trick question! Fuck Starbucks!” The list of expectations goes on and on, turning practical advice into oppressive expectation. It is in response to moments like this that Gates, in an opening monolog with the audience still onstage, addresses the work that must be done – that if there are still people who do not have access to the museum and theater, then we are only half-living, the talents and skills of the artists must be in service of some greater, more expansive good. If environmentalism sets itself apart, then the definition of “green” is only half-open, and there is work to be done.

“Energy is complex,” Bamuthi exclaims at one point in response to a jibe that BP’s logo is also green, and the performance does not shy away from complexity, especially when it comes to the nature of sorrow and violence. “The church that you smell in his voice is grief, waiting to perform at a festival of life,” he says about a performer at the LIFE is LIVING festival in Chicago, and then goes on to tell the story of meeting a Sudanese woman whose son has been senselessly killed. “She spits out a seed that will never grow in the desert where she lives” becomes the repeated, piercing refrain, not only challenging the American “recycled narrative of black-on-black violence” but expanding that scope via a trip to the Sudan. In Sudan, Bamuthi experienced racial privilege as the Northern Sudanese called out the Southern Sudanese in their party as inferior, an attitude

borne out in the ongoing violence in both North Sudan and South Sudan. This violence shifts the Civil Rights paradigm of “us versus them” racial politics, Bamuthi points out and does not offer any simple answers. Life is not simple, people are not monolithic blocks of desires and needs, and privilege and power can be as fluid in a situation as they are entrenched and divisive.

There are two main stories of addiction in red, black & GREEN: a blues and the first is uplifting. In telling the story of “The Flower Man” in Houston, Tolmaire recreates the monolog of an alcoholic man, who through a detox vision of a tower of found objects, asks God to get clean so that he can build that tower, and does. If it sounds corny, the notion expressed – “I believe in visions and dreams” and “I believe that one mans junk is another man’s treasure” – can and should be equally applied to art, to move it past the sanctuary of the institution and into the necessity of living, the reason to do so. The second is a eulogy for Scott-Heron via the story of a homeless heroin addict in Harlem using newspapers to try and line his shoes in the middle of winter, and dying in the street. The existential cry of “I’m so lonely in the ever-changing sameness of this high,” is as true for the heroin fix as it is for other modern addictions – the ease of internet activism, of familiar narratives, of entrenched power systems. Reading through ColorLines‘ lacerating criticism of the Invisible Children Kony 2012 campaign, “Kony 2012’s Success Shows There’s Big Money Attached to White Saviors“, (recent bizarre turns not-withstanding) gives some insight into that level of addiction. Turning it back around to Scott-Heron, “we watched him die,” the cast proclaims in the end, and if you’ve read Alec Wilkinson’s rending profile of Scott-Heron in The New Yorker, you know that’s true.

One of the first questions asked in the performance, is “What does healing have to do with social justice?” Everything, it seems. In Houston, Tolmaire enacts a character who runs an urban farm, providing meals in return for sweat equity. She notes that if you can’t walk or bike to any fresh food, you are experiencing “food insecurity” and that phrase brought out a couple titters from the audience, which quickly died as the seriousness of that thought sunk in – here are some Minnesota-specific statistics. Food also came back around in the final segment set in Oakland. In trying to explain the importance of the Black Panther movement to his son, Bamuthi notes that since Obama is the first president his son will remember, “[i]t’s hard to contextualize Huey P. Newton when the current face of imperialism is brown and handsome.” This is the same Oakland, of course, which had particularly brutal crackdowns against the Occupy protests, and in the context of that violence and the histories of violence, the Panthers are important because they practiced the most basic form of community-building: they fed people and offered them healthcare. That is still a radical notion, and red, black & GREEN: a blues challenges us to acknowledge that.

Tommy Shepherd aka Emcee Soulati, Theaster Gates, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Traci Tolmaire. Photo by Bethanie Hines

If Charles Bukowski once said “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence,” Bamuthi and the Living Word Project are full of the most intelligent and confident people, wrestling with complexity and inviting us in. Not just in the theater or in the museum, but in life, in the communities that we are trying to build and understand. After the performance the audience was invited back onstage to engage with the cast and many went down, including a white man who had come with young black boy. After they both thanked Gates for the performance and after talking to the boy for a minute, Gates picked up an unfinished clay pot that had been used as a prop and handed it to him to keep, along with instructions on how to make sure it kept from cracking. The boys eyes lit up and as he walked away, Gates reached over to pull a loose, long strand of someone else’s hair off the boys head in a smooth movement of benediction and care. That’s the show, that’s the life of it.

The set is on display today and there is one show left tonight. LIFE is LIVING, the festival, is in planning to come to the Twin Cities. These are good reasons to be hopeful, thankful. And so, after stuttering out a “thank you” to the cast, I left the Walker, got on my bike to ride down Lyndale in the unseasonable March warmth, past the Ecopolitan, the guy with the re-usable grocery bag running for the bus, the white kid in a dashiki outside of a cowboy bar, past the lights and cars and people standing, smoking and laughing together outside, to my house in South Minneapolis with the garden in the back, waiting to be planted, thinking indeed, this is life, and it is, with help from all of us, living.

Jennifer Edwards Culture Critic, Consultant, Choreographer, Speaker

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: The Art of Collaboration and Community-Building Posted: 03/15/2012 2:25 pm Today, Thursday March 15, spoken word/hip hop theater artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph's red, black & GREEN: a blues opens at the Walker Art Center. red, black & GREEN: a blues was commissioned by the Walker as a performative/experiential iteration of Joseph's community work, specifically the Life Is Living festivals he curates around the country. Both the Life Is Living festivals and this new piece are designed to encourage conversations about environmental justice and social ecology. Bringing together big ideas, personal stories, music, visual art, dance, and spoken word, red, black & GREEN: a blues asks and offers insight into the valuable question: What sustains life in [a] community?

Courtesy of the Walker Art Center

Several years ago, I met Joseph in Hawaii. I was standing in a crowded club in Honolulu when the audience began parting behind me. A rich voice breathed into the microphone and a beautifully grounded, bald and bearded man snaked his way to the stage -- dancing and dropping words, expertly crafted poetry, on us all. He shared parts of his, then one-man show, Word Becomes Flesh, a powerfully rumbling piece of historical bio-narrative that weaves together the artist's experience of his son's birth, his fears of raising a black boy in the current culture, and an open exploration of nationally internalized racism. This was before Joseph graced the cover of Smithsonian magazine after being named one of America's Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences (2007); before he was awarded an Alpert Award in Theater (2011); before he was the recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, which annually recognizes 50 of the country's "greatest living artists"; before Word Becomes Flesh was re-mounted as part of the NEA "American Masterpieces" series (2010-13); and before, his most recent appointment as the Director of Performing Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

In a recent conversation, Joseph and I spoke about his role as both an arts administrator and an acclaimed, performing artist. I asked him how he has been able to accomplish so much at such a young age (mid-30s).

"Productivity is about agility and practice," said Joseph. "I've retrained my focus to center around process, instead of around outcome, though," he laughed, "the outcomes have produced nice results." Joseph shared the aspects of his life that allow him to grow, develop, and do his work. He is quick to emphasize that his style of activism is based on making environments "where everyone shines". He also credits his non-tradition, progressive family for playing a key role in his ability to work as he does. "It's an exercise in ego subordination," he concedes. Everyone works for the good of the group -- which includes his fiancée, her daughter, his son, his son's mom and all of the extended family they each bring to the mix. This filters into all of his collaborations. Says Joseph, "I'm always looking toward points of inspiration within collaborator relationships."

Mentorship has played a vital role for Joseph. As the director of Youth Speaks, Joseph has dedicated his time to teaching youth ages 13-19 to write and express themselves. He also expressed gratitude for the guidance of many administrators he has worked with closely, like Philip Bither (Walker Art Center), and Marc Russell (Under the Radar/Public Theater). The willingness to share knowledge and experience seems a key element for Joseph -- as both a leader and an artist. He also highlighted his work with Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, who has build the set / installation for red, black & GREEN: a blues. "Theaster brings a humility and care to the work. Folks comment on the presence of a palpable soft haze of tenderness that surrounds this piece -- that's all Theaster."

Which brings us full circle to his upcoming engagement at the Walker. The piece was inspired by Joseph's Life is Living festivals but it is born of the community it is raised in. For the Walker commission, Joseph and his collaborator Brett Cook-Dizney, visited

many local Twin Cities' artists and community organizers, in order to learn firsthand about the history and current struggles that communities of color face in the region. Similar engagements have taken place in Oakland, Chicago, and Houston. Said Joseph, "There are literally 1,000 partners across four cities that we met who fed into red, black & GREEN: a blues. Those people form an invisible network that we don't quite see and yet are very present in the performance."

red, black and GREEN: a blues @ MCA Chicago

Posted on 15 April 2012 by Meghan Moe Beitiks

photo by Bethanie Hines

The set design for red, black and GREEN: a blues, at MCA Chicago has a name. It’s called The Colored Museum, and it exists in its own right as an installation, set on view at the MCA while the multimedia performance it was created for ran in the evenings this weekend. It’s a series of layered, patchwork clapboard rooms, each representative of one of four cities: Chicago, New York, Oakland, Houston, with built-in video installations and musical elements– that is, good things to hit and create a beat. It’s the work of Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, and it is available to up-close inspection during the first act of the show, also called The Colored Museum, in when the audience is invited onstage.

The layered rhythm of the show closely resembles the structure of the rooms themselves. At the start, the set is boxed into a shotgun-house shape at the center of the stage, the audience wandering around and watching action thought the windows. Marc Bamuthi

Joseph hands out slices of watermelon while Traci Tolmaire moves like liquid through the house. The chimes, steel poles and wooden boxes get a musical beatdown, with rhythms created by performer Tommy Shepherd, as the rooms pull apart and the cast throw themselves into full body-swinging tribal dance. Theaster Gates delivers a kind of Social Practice Manifesto (Art without Ethics is Bad Art) to the encircled crowd. It’s clear that what we’re negotiating here is complex, involving not just issues of black identity in America, environmental justice, and mixed media, but the basic struggle to do good in the world while staying true to yourself.

That struggle is beautifully and honestly evident in the monologues delivered by Marc Bamuthi Joseph in the second act of the show, Colors and Muses, in which we return to our usual auditorium seating. The text is based on Joseph’s experiences producing eco-festivals in the four featured cities, and includes re-performed interviews with local residents encountered en route (stunning work by Tolmaire), as well as Joseph’s attempts to, for instance, explain what the Black Panthers were to his nine-year-old son. Joseph confesses that his “ghetto pass” expired some seven years ago, and his words reveal an activist caught between the tofu-praying hyper-green Bay Area culture, the “czar of everything green in Harlem” (fuck Starbucks!), a wino turned Flower Man, and a Sudanese woman living on American soil who unselfconsciously offers him watermelon.

The show offers no easy answers, concluding that its own activists, like the Black Panthers, might just not be around as much in 40 years, and that the world will inevitably change. But it gets there through a striking blend of musicality, dance, narrative and documentation. It seeks to explore the results of its own research in a phenomenally honest way, a way that is not overly concerned with the blurring of disciplines in its work, the danger of racial stereotypes, or the portrayal of its artists as anything other than (aesthetically skilled) humans. The piece concludes with Back Talk, when each of the performers takes up residence in a room onstage and invites the public back up to chat, ask questions and engage in dialogue. The energized public, not your usual somber modern-art crowd, lingered, and filled the house with excited chatter.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph | Interview An actor-dancer-poet-teacher unpacks his latest performance and gets to the heart of what kids in poor communities face.

By Zachary Whittenburg

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Photo: Bethanie Hines

On Leap Day, Marc Bamuthi Joseph traveled directly from the San Francisco International Airport to the corner of a large conference table in Chicago, in the offices of the Museum of Contemporary Art. From April 12–14, the MCA’s theater presents red, black and GREEN: a blues, Joseph’s interdisciplinary performance and collaboration with artist Theater Gates, who designed its moving set. Before the final show, during an afternoon event called SHareOUT, that set becomes the domain of six local youth groups for creative expression: Kuumba Lynx, YOUmedia, Young Chicago Authors, the MCA’s Creative Agency and the Better Boys Foundation’s LAB programs for filmmaking and community gardening.

In addition to numerous other gigs—and his big new one, director of performing arts at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts—Joseph has organized Life Is Living eco-festivals in city parks around the U.S. Interviews, films, murals and poetry generated at four sites including Uptown’s Clarendon Park became the source material for a blues, which looks at intersections between environmental concerns and communities of color. To quote the MCA’s press release, a blues “express[es] the challenge of living green where violent crime and poor education pose a more imminent danger than ecological crisis.”

There’s “a great path of relationship between the formation of [a blues], the organized model which we call the ‘creative ecosystem,’ and the performance of the work,” Joseph told me across the corner of that table. Read on for his fascinating explanation of what that means.

As one of the cities that gave birth to a blues, how is Chicago represented in the performance? The first 15 minutes are inspired by events that happened here. And so bringing it back around makes a lot of sense.

What happens during Life Is Living festivals and what were the goals when you started producing them in 2008? Their purpose was to draw attention to and promote environmental literacy in underserved or under-resourced neighborhoods. My primary desire, coming from a poetic background, was to do our best to expand the vocabulary and paths of access to environmental consciousness and practice. In Chicago in 2009, there were record numbers of public schoolchildren that were murdered so, here, it made more sense to focus not on “green” as the central codifier of environmental literacy, but on life. The module was, “if you’re brown you can’t go green until you hold a respect for black life.” In Uptown, the festival included a second line for those who were departed, but also a graffiti battle [and] performances on solar-powered stages. We worked with Kuumba Lynx and the MCA and other partners, and that changed the organizing model of the festival as well. So this city was really a fulcrum, because in New York and in Oakland prior to coming to Chicago, [Life Is Living] really just landed in a park and threw an event [that was] young and hip-hop–based, and had all these avatars of green [living] in central locations. And they were all one-day events? All single-day. So beginning [in Chicago], we changed the model to take this question, “What sustains life in my community?” and ask more than 30 different partners to respond. Their responses became the palette and the canvas for the festival that ensued. Instead of doing all the programming [for Life Is Living], we relied on community partners to take over and to demonstrate to one another what it meant to work in-ecosystem. Which tied a certain level of diversity to the environmental question, beyond play-back theater about the environment, beyond issuing water bottles. There was a free-breakfast program and we planted trees on that day. But there was also a soccer

tournament and a skate park. Action, sports, politics, youth work, sustainable food, along with all of these performance aesthetics: All of that really focused here [in Chicago].

Marc Bamuthi Joseph with youth from the Living Word Project Photo: Bethanie Hines

And became the approach that the festival adopted going forward. Right. In other cities, what we’ve tried to replicate is that pathway to the organizing model such that—I think Scottsdale being the one exception—there’s always multiple impressions: I or Theaster [Gates] or Tommy [Shepherd, a.k.a. Emcee Soulati] or Traci [Tolmaire, dancer] always visit a city prior to coming in [for Life Is Living] with an effort to connect partners around this question of, “What sustains life?” …What we hope to create is a conversation about the environment that literally is at the marrow of how we sustain ourselves in poor neighborhoods.

How present do you think that question and conversation are in those neighborhoods’ schools? Someone drops out of school every 26 seconds in this country. [This oft-cited statistic comes from a 2007 report by Education Week, whose 2011 report shows modest improvement in some areas. Dropout rates are still high, however, and significantly higher among black and Hispanic students compared to analogous white and Asian student populations.] There’s a systemic lack of investment and success nationally in public education. It’s so popular in political rhetoric to talk about education. It’s everybody’s pet project and yet we’re failing our kids. And the release valves for kids failed by the system vary according to economic class.

What do you mean by “release valves”? If you didn’t graduate from high school, then what? Where do you go? If you come from a middle-income family, there are more options, locally, within the micro-climate of your

environment. If you don’t come from wealth or you don’t come from stability, there are fewer options. The way that that comes around, we see time and time again, is in gang violence, petty larceny, engagement with the prison-industrial complex and, too often, murder.… That narrative of, We failed our kids, our kids don’t have literacy or vocabulary and then, the next week, there’s crime and corporal punishment: That’s the narrative we wish to break. Both in the language about a blues and the mission of another organization with which you’ve been involved, Youth Speaks, the word “literacy” is used broadly. Can you describe what the word means to you? Sure. At Youth Speaks, we talk about urban oral literacy, and… Okay: So we’re sitting here at the MCA and there are these multivalent, canonical points of reference that a contemporary-art center in a major city is responsible for transmitting to the world. I walked in here today and I saw the iconography of Keith Haring, [whose art] I grew up with and who I love. Three months from now, there may be an exhibit [here] about Brazil or India. I can go to the Smart Museum [of Art] and see a feasts exhibit, right? There are all these points of entry, but those points of entry are inclined to a certain worldview and a certain experience.

What we try to do at Youth Speaks is expand the canonical points of reference so that, in order to engage with what these kids and their mentors are communicating, you don’t have to read Dostoyevsky but maybe you do have to read Ben Okri. You don’t have to engage with Mozart or Beethoven or Stravinsky but maybe you need to listen to Wiz Khalifa or Nicki Minaj. It’s a different kind of code-switching ethic that we promote, certainly with Life is Living and red, black and GREEN and definitely at Youth Speaks and the Brave New Voices Network—this notion of multiple points of canonical reference being communicated through the spoken medium, intelligently, with political acumen and, mostly, just voracious urgency. All of that is part of our ethic, is part of our performance culture.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project with Theaster Gates: red, black and GREEN: a blues Photo Bethanie Hines

So greater literacy not just among kids, but a greater fluency among adults in the realities of these kids’ experience. I think that’s a beautiful way of framing it. I sometimes ask my students to make an aesthetic family tree, an aesthetic genealogy. “Who are the writers who preceded you?” Sometimes, I get, “Diane di Prima and Sylvia Plath gave birth to…” Or, you know, “Carson McCullers led me to…” But a lot of times I get, “It’s Tracy Chapman to Corinne Bailey Rae.” What I learned from that is that most of the books, most of the writers that have informed and inspired myself and many of the people that I work with, aren’t part of their conventional canon. They’re not referencing Emerson or Whitman as their literary antecedents. They’re referencing KRS-One.

How do we as educators facilitate a more open book? How do we lengthen and stretch the libraries that folks need to pass through in order to better understand one another? Flying here today, I was reading Nikky Finney’s book Head Off and Split, which just won the National Book Award [for poetry]. I read her writing and it’s very clear that she’s part of a lineage. There are young poets who may not even be aware that they’re part of that same lineage but they engage [you] because they feel it. Providing a safe space for them to share their work, and having their parents and educators hear it, inspires a desire to find out, What’s at the root of this great poetry that this 16- or 17- or 18-year-old kid is spitting? What’s at the heart of it? What’s at the root of it? Then, there’s less fear—there’s less fear because this kid, who looks a certain way that gave me anxiety, who maybe I stigmatized in a certain way, is reading something so powerful and so present that I want to figure out where that kid is coming from. I think that dissolves borders and boundaries and makes us collectively safer and elevates the conversation.

Would you say, to continue the tree analogy, that the “branches” of expression, by kids in communities that are underserved and wracked with violence, frighten adults? It’s no wonder, you know what I mean? Youth is shocking and abrasive. [Laughs] It’s boisterous and unsettling. People mature, and if you’re lucky enough to mature and grow older, hopefully it’s because you’re seeking peace. Young people disrupt that. They always have. The stakes today are just higher. The consequences are also much more extreme. What we do [in this work] isn’t always labeled as such, but it really is conflict resolution and nonviolence training through being able to use your words. I have two kids, six-and-a-half and ten years old. [When] they come up to me, shaking and hurt, I say, “Use your words, baby. Use your words.” The capacity to use language in creative ways is life-saving.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project with Theaster Gates: red, black and GREEN: a blues Photo: Bethanie Hines

Just to locate yourself in what’s happening, in what you’re feeling. Yeah, that’s the first step, I think: getting to what it is. But the second thing, which might even be more important, is the safe space that validates that language. Maybe even more important than the speaker is the audience, is the container. When I leave here, I’m going to go to the Louder Than a Bomb prelims over at Columbia College [Chicago], to bear witness. I don’t have to emcee or host or be directly involved with it. At this point, I’m a good audience member, you know what I mean? Teachers, elders or anybody in a position working with young folks: More than being able to instruct, you really have to be able to listen. A community of engaged listeners capable of energetic reciprocity makes the the communication that much richer and more visceral and important.

Youth Speaks was founded in 1996. Were you involved from the start? I came later, in in ’99. The founder, James Kass, was running programs and I was teaching tenth-grade English. We were both invited to Bosnia for this three-week festival [in Mostar] called Youth Against War, which brought young people together who were doing film or graphic design or circus work and we, the Americans, came in to do these spoken-word workshops with Kosovar Gypsy kids and Croatians and Serbians. After those three weeks of working together, [Kass and I] wanted to do good forever. [Laughs]

You were teaching high-school sophomore English where, in Oakland? In San Francisco, [after] I went to Morehouse College in Atlanta. I came to the Bay Area in ’97 and taught until I met James and was, like, “Oh, we can actually reach more kids [by] doing this.” It was a move toward reaching more kids, and not a move away from the school system?

That, and I was also doing doctoral work at [the University of California at] Berkeley and was feeling the weight of academic isolation, was feeling the limitations of working within a prescribed curricular structure. I was 23, I had hella energy and I felt like I could do everything else later. There was the feeling of, “This is the work for right now,” to do this outreach. And my dad was, like, “Look, bruh.” [Laughs] “You have this safe thing happening right here, and you have this other safe thing happening right here, and you’re going to go be a poet?” I’m like, “Dad, I just won the National Poetry Slam.” He’s like, “What’s a poetry slam? Does it come with benefits? What’s the deal?” [Laughs]

How have attitudes and expectations changed within that age bracket over 15 years? Those first kids are now in their mid- and late-twenties. Those are the kids who voted for Obama. Those are children of the war in Iraq. They are the ones that made the Internet go. There’s a closer proximity to celebrity now than there was 15 years ago—instant celebrity. My son, my 10-year-old, has a YouTube channel. He makes movies and uploads them. I think that a thing we’ve lost in the last 15 years, maybe in the last 25 years, in this generation, is a desire to be great. This generation would rather be rich and/or famous, particularly famous, than great. The things that people eat and [the clothing that they] take off to be on TV is crazy. At the same time, that same generation is more fluent, more interdisciplinary and works more efficiently, in more nomadic or migratory ways. I think I’m in Generation X. I’m 36. My generation is supposed to be apathetic. I think this generation cares a whole lot and has the aptitude and the mechanisms to carry out a vision. The last time I was [at the MCA, for] the break/s: That piece was inspired by Jeff Chang, who starts his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop with the declaration that generations are fictions, and talks about how the next generation is always the one to name the previous one, how the previous generation always names the next. So I don’t want to go too deep into what I think [kids today are doing] because they’re naming and defining themselves. But there is a big swing [among them] between substance-less activity in pursuit of celebrity, and really deep entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary, politically active mindset-and-go.

Theaster Gates on set for red, black and GREEN: a blues

Photo: Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi

Explain if you will how the set for a blues works and how it relates to the show. My main collaborator on this piece is Theaster Gates, who I think is a freaking genius. Theaster’s work preserves the social and physical architecture of what was, and repurposes physical environment for new reality. And that’s connected to the concept of sustainability. Absolutely. The set is made out of 100 percent Chicago garbage, all found materials. The design of the set is a shotgun house, because the piece, in addition to Chicago, also touches Harlem, Oakland and Houston. The idea of the shotgun house, which was so key to the social and physical environments in the Third Ward in Houston, is really the model for how this modular event, the SHareOUT, works. The SHareOUT is an opportunity for different groups to take the same physical architecture and use it as the site of an intervention, to take this same question, “What sustains life?” and use this brilliant social sculpture by this fantastic craftsman, and identify and incorporate its physical objects in a way that enables us to enter into their response to the question of sustainability.

Aside from its role in a blues proper, Theaster’s set serves during the SHareOUT as a kind of conduit for translation? Brilliantly put. It’s a kind of psych-test, like, when you give folks eight blocks and you say, “Put them together and what do you see?” That’s what Theaster’s set is like. There are four main structures: a red one, a black one, a green one and a blue one. They represent four cities [during a blues]: Houston, Harlem, Oakland and Chicago. The four

colors and the four cities correspond to four seasons. We begin in Chicago in summer, we move to Houston in autumn, we engage with Harlem in New York in winter and we land in Oakland in spring. We take these pieces and pull them apart to make a narrative, to make a gallery space, to make a performance environment, to indicate the city. We invite different groups [during the SHareOUT] to do the same thing and we ask them the same questions. Do those groups get carte blanche with Theaster’s set? They do because, again, that’s the model. That’s the creative ecosystem at work. Respond to a question, do it your way and that manifestation is the curriculum, it is the content, it is how we read “environment” through your eyes or through your art.

Is a blues suitable for young audiences? There’s no nudity and there isn’t excessive profane language. I think it’s really elegant language, actually. At all of our previous shows [in other cities] there have been little kids, five- to 10-year-olds, lots of high-school kids and college kids. It’s also, for me, the most sophisticated thing that I’ve done, I feel. In what sense? I’m a little older and slower now. Not in a way that lacks fire or lacks passion, but I take a more steadied approach to narrative. Working with Theaster has me thinking more in terms of visual landscape. The materials from the set themselves—old wood from barns, fire hoses or a cut-open fire hose that wraps around the frame of an old chair, the makings of a front porch, corrugated wood, hung sneakers, milk crates, old mattresses—there’s something about the physical objects having such story in and of themselves that it’s hard for the piece itself not to adopt and become saturated with some of that maturity. And then there’s the tension of this environmental crisis and escalating murder rates. So there’s a really beautiful play [in a blues] between the immediacy and urgency of global and social crisis, and the kind of slowness and texture of the objects that we’re using to tell these stories.

Embracing that slowness, cultivating that patience, seems deeply connected to this question of how we might live more sustainably, especially with regard to the environment. That’s it. “Take care of your block.” That really is it. Go to Europe, where gas prices are $30 a liter or whatever they are and you’ll be like, “There’s a reason why everybody’s on a bicycle here, why public transportation means what it means here.” What role does dance play in a blues, compared to the break/s, which had so much movement for you in it? What’s great about the dance [in a blues] is that I’m not by myself. And Traci Tolmaire, who’s from Chicago, is crazy-versatile. How did you two connect? Traci I directed in a play in 2010 and I said, “Oh, you do this, that and this? Imma holler at you.” [Laughs] There’s partnering in this work and I’ve never really done that before;

we totally take advantage of her versatility so there’s lyical and contemporary movement, there’s a little bit of footworking, there’s a little bit of tap, there’s hip-hop, all of these different forms.

In terms of this intersection of movement and text, even when both were happening [in the break/s], they were happening through my body and my body tells a certain story. Traci’s presence allows us to expand both, really critically. Tommy and Theaster both dance a little bit as well, although they both focused on the making of the music. What’s also great about Traci is that she plays other characters and so her movement is informed by her incredible character work and her acting. There’s an undercurrent of new fiction, or applied fiction, that’s part of the movement vocabulary in a way that hasn’t happened in [my] prior works. After your research and work on this project, how do you feel about the status of environmentalism in the U.S.? It’s a downer. It is. And also, we can remedy the situation. I don’t know to what extent at this point, I don’t know to what degree. I’m not a climate scientist, so I don’t have all the answers. I do know that the level of discourse in this country is deplorable. It really is, given what we’re up against. Even if global warming is a fiction, even if global warming is myth, I can’t see how it hurts to use less, just to use less stuff. There’s no downside? There is no downside to being environmentally responsible! [Laughs]

red, black and GREEN: a blues plays the MCA Stage April 12–14. Catch local kids onstage on April 14 during the SHareOUT, 1:30–4pm, free with museum admission. Admission is also free to “At Your Own Risk: what is to be done,” Joseph’s talk with Van Jones on April 10 at the International House at the University of Chicago, from 7–8:30pm.

Performance artist Bamuthi Joseph says changing the world

starts at home

Think local

Our yearly roundup of the best places to eat cheap. Pullout section inside

12 96 Hours | San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com | Thursday–Sunday, October 13–16, 2011 G

PerformBy Nirmala NatarajSPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

Performance artist Marc Ba-muthi Joseph says the first step tovaluing our ecologically ravagedplanet is valuing one’s own commu-nity. The reconciliation betweenaddressing the blights of urbancommunities and promoting sus-tainable living is at the heart ofBamuthi Joseph’s latest work: “Red,Black & Green: A Blues (rbGb).”

The piece is part sculptural in-stallation and part multimediatheatrical extravaganza. It is a po-etic whirlwind of text, film, music,dance and a set designed by visualartist and vocalist Theaster Gates(composed entirely of repurposedbuilding materials and clay sculp-tural objects). Bamuthi Josephperforms in the piece alongsideGates and dancer/actor Traci Tol-maire.

The work is a medley of personalstories that touches on how peopleof color and those who live in “at-risk” communities are underrepre-sented or altogether rendered in-visible in the move toward environ-mental consciousness. The implicitidea that “If you’re brown, you can’tgo green” is explored alongsidesocial ills that pose more of an im-mediate threat to various communi-ties than the current environmentalcrisis, Bamuthi Joseph says.

“What we wanted to do wasreframe environmental health interms of addressing social ecology,”Bamuthi Joseph says. “Rather thanputting going green at the center,the work has been about putting lifeat the center of the question of howto rethink sustainability. Whatwe’ve been doing around the coun-try is talking about the issues in thecontext of access to clean water and

clean air … and asking culture mak-ers what they are doing to sustainlife in their communities.”

Bamuthi Joseph and his col-leagues gathered interviews from“Life Is Living,” a series of commu-nity festivals that he launched inurban parks throughout the coun-try, combining activism, educationand the arts. The performance is areflection of Bamuthi Joseph’s at-tempt to integrate the experiences,voices and language of hundreds ofpeople.

“When it comes to what sustainslife, everyone has an answer,” saysBamuthi Joseph, who describes apoetic refrain in the piece in whichrespondents talk about the environ-ment in the context of the issuesthat are most meaningful to them,from hip-hop to art to violence.

“The question of the environ-ment is not about solar panels orpolar bears — it’s about people andtheir practices. The morbid truth is

that the planet will be here even ifwe’re not, but what are we doing tosustain life?”

Bamuthi Joseph says that in hisexperiences in poor neighborhoodsacross the country, “the most in-novative environmentalists aren’taddressing ways to provide accessto things like healthy food, even asthey are finding ways to repurposethe land. … In the end, our creativityisn’t being sufficiently applied tosustainable land use in the way thatit feeds our communities.”

The piece emphasizes that com-partmentalizing ecological andsocial responsibility creates a falsedichotomy that might best be solvedby bringing the issues back to ahuman scale.

“I’m not trying to oversimplify,”Bamuthi Joseph says. “I know weneed to recycle and compost and bemindful of our carbon footprint, butultimately the investment we makein things like going green can’t justbe intellectual. … Similar to art, itmust be about provoking the heartand promoting interdependence.”

E-mail comments to96hours@sfchronicle.com.

Bethanie Hines Photography

Performance artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph (front) strives to reframeenvironmental health in terms of social justice.

‘Red, Black & Green: A Blues (rbGb)’: Multimedia piecetries to reconcile urban despair, environmental responsibility

7:30 p.m. today-Sat. ThroughOct. 22. $5-$25. YBCA Forum,701 Mission St., S.F. (415)978-2787. www.ybca.org.

THEATER

Absolutely San Francisco Amusical comedy about lostlove and the San Franciscoexperience. Ongoing. $32-$50.The Alcove Theater, 414 Ma-son St., Fifth Floor. (415) 992-8168. www.absolutelysanfrancisco.com.w

Alice Down the RwongWrabbit Whole A fictionalaccount of the psychologicalunraveling of actresses KarenLight and Edna Barrón. EndsSat. $12-$15. The EmeraldTablet, 80 Fresno St. (415)500-2323. www.brownpapertickets.com. w

Annie Get Your Gun IrvingBerlin’s Annie Oakley tale.Ends Sun. $10-$25. BethanyUniversity Theater, 800 Beth-any Drive, Scotts Valley. (831)818-1516. www.svpaa.org. b

Arrivederci Roma “TheGodfather” collides withTrannyshack in this hilarioustransgender mafia story.Through Oct. 29. $24. StageWerx, 533 Sutter St. www.wilywestproductions.com. w

Beach Blanket BabylonSteve Silver’s fast-paced,topical musical. Ongoing.$25-$130. Club Fugazi, 678Green St. (415) 421-4222.www.beachblanketbabylon.com. w

Bellwether Ryan Rilettedirects the premiere of SteveYockey’s suburban thriller,with Arwen Anderson andGabe Marin starring in the taleof a gated community tornapart by a child’s disappear-ance. Through Oct. 30. MarinTheatre Company, 397 MillerAve., Mill Valley. (415) 388-5208. www.marintheatre.org.n

Blood Is Mere Decoration: ARitual for Liberation Antho-ny Williams’ solo show. 8 p.m.Thurs.-Sat. $10-$15. Intersec-tion for the Arts, 925 MissionSt. www.brownpapertickets.com. w

Cabaret A stark version of theTony-winning musical. Berlin.Through Oct. 23. $25-$40.San Jose Stage, 490 S. FirstSt., San Jose. (408) 283-7142.www.sjstage.com. b

Clementine in the Lower 9TheatreWorks presents thepremiere of Dan Dietz’s blues-fueled look at a family strug-gling to re-form their lives inKatrina-clobbered New Orle-ans. Through Oct. 30. Moun-tain View Center for the Per-forming Arts, 500 Castro St.,Mountain View. (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org.p

Confessions: Improv Come-dy for the Soul A new come-dy inspired by real people’sconfessions performed byEndGames Players. ThroughDec. 16. $8-$10. The AlcoveTheater, 414 Mason St. www.endgamesimprov.com.w

Damn Yankees The classicmusical. Through Oct. 29.$14-$18. Morgan Hill Play-house & Theater, 17090 Mon-terey Road, Morgan Hill. (408)782-8087. www.svct.org.b

“Day of Absence” and “Al-most Nothing” LorraineHansberry Theatre opens itsseason in its new home withtwo one-acts, a revival ofDouglas Turner Ward’s satireabout what happens when allthe black people disappear,and the North Americanpremiere of Marcos Barbosa’stale of a couple recounting afatal incident. Fri.-Nov. 20.Lorraine Hansberry Theatre,450 Post St. (415) 474-8800,www.lhtsf.org.w

Death of a Player FilipinaAmerican women’s theatergroup show pushing the ideathat in living life to the fullest,one must die to fully live.Through Oct. 29. $15-$20.Bindlestiff Studio, 185 SixthSt. (415) 255-0440. www.bindlestiffstudio.org.

A Delicate Balance ArtisticDirector Tom Ross directsEdward Albee’s unsettling firstPulitzer Prize-winner to openAurora Theatre’s 20th season.Through Oct. 23. Aurora The-atre, 2081 Addison St., Berke-ley. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org.e

Desdemona: A Play About aHandkerchief Paula Vogelgives a glimpse of “real” life onCyprus and what really goeson behind closed doors whileOthello is being destroyed byhis jealousy. Through Nov. 5.$15-$35. Boxcar TheatrePlayhouse, 505 Natoma St.(415) 776-1747. www.boxcartheatre.org.w

Faces of Nature RosangelaSilvestre’s solo show. 7:30p.m. Sun. $15. Dance MissionTheater, 3316 24th St. www.brownpapertickets.com. w

Frankenstein The Indepen-dent Eye presents a newstaging of Mary Shelley’sclassic novel adapted byConrad Bishop & ElizabethFuller featuring live actors,live-size puppets, poetry,music and video elements.Through Oct. 30. $20. 6thStreet Playhouse, 52 W. SixthSt., Santa Rosa. (707) 523-4185. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com.n

Find reviews, venue maps and critics’ choices at sfgate.com/performance