UC Riverside
(Watkins 1000 and HMNSS 1500)Thursday, November 14, 2002
7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Friday, November 15, 2002
7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Saturday, November 16, 2002
11:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
This event is free and open to the public. FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED.The conference focuses on Hip Hop theater that has been created by and for the hip hop generation. The aesthetic of this theatrical genre is not merely the application of different aspects of hip hop culture: emceeing, dejaying, graffiti, breakdancing, b-boy/b-girl-isms to a play or performance, but it is a theatrical work which is created with the understanding that this generation grew up on MTV, Nintendo, the Internet, live wars televised on CNN, AIDS, and instant communication. This generation’s way of looking at the world has been shaped by these factors with a phat beat and an emcee’s narrative serving as the musical score. Hip hop drama runs the gamut from poetry slammin’ to performance pieces, to plays with rap, to straight plays infused with a hip hop sensibility.
The Southern California Hip Hop Theater Festival will outline and address several issues currently surfacing among hip hop drama practitioners and critics: what is the hip hop theater aesthetic? Is this a new genre or have we “been here and done this” already? How can tensions between hip hop’s history of capitalist exploitation and Black theater’s history of accessibility be resolved? How can strategies for reaching young audiences capitalize on hip hop’s “street marketing” techniques? What are the global manifestations of this new art form?Check out the PRESS RELEASE.
