[From the Ithaca Times; text by Corey Millard] Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the renowned spoken-word poet and dancer will be coming to town this week, offering three consecutive days of dance-based storytelling performances at the Kitchen theatre on Cayuga Street in Downtown Ithaca.
Joseph’s act is a seamless blend of motion, music, and slam-poetry, propelled by cultural experience and interactions to produce landmarks of performance art. “My work is based on and performed about lived stories,” he says. “I move. I’m like a storyteller who narrates through movement.”
Though Joseph has been a performer since he was a boy, he’s only been working within dance driven slam-poetry for six or so years. But this development of his act and career echo the sentiment of his expression - it’s constantly evolving, constantly incorporating new elements - never stagnant, always fresh.
At five years old Joseph found himself working as an actor in commercials where he got his first taste of professional performance. At ten he began working in the theatre, where he shortly thereafter served as an understudy to Savion Glover, the world-famous tap-dancer, in “The Tap Dance Kid,” on Broadway.
Although Glover is only a few years Joseph’s senior, Joseph says it was like working with an older brother for whom he had a tremendous amount of respect and admiration. “I was a little too young to process the experience,” he says. “But the biggest impact Savion had on me was that he introduced me to hip-hop music. It immediately became a natural inclination for me as a performer and became a major influence in my life.”
Joseph continued to perform onstage, drawn more and more toward hip-hop and allowing new elements of artistic expression to emerge, until he finally stumbled, quite accidentally, upon the formative characteristics of a new and unique variety of performance art.
Joseph, in his early twenties, was teaching high school, when he began adapting readings into performative interpretations to help his students comprehend the complexity of the material. Joseph’s students found his offerings both educational and entertaining, and so, with their encouragement, he took steps to move the act to the stage, applying for grants and commissions to fund his projects.
Joseph has since written a number of plays, focusing on community and tradition, and blending African, tap, and hip-hop techniques into a fusion of culture and history. His act is difficult to put a finger on as his influences themselves are complicated - the synthesis he creates draws on characteristics of influential elements, rather just those elements themselves.
For instance, when he says he has been influenced by hip-hop, that influence is manifested thusly: “What makes the plays hip hop isn’t that they use hip-hop or that I’m rapping; it’s that the element of call and response is featured prominently.”
Ultimately what Joseph is searching for is the spirit at the middle of the narrative, the emotional center that binds and emphasizes the elements that surround it. “It’s not so much the topic,” he says. “It’s about the humanity within.”
Joseph’s writing and performances have garnered him almost universal acclaim. He is a National Poetry Slam champion and a beneficiary of The United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship; The New York Times says his work is “eloquent… seamless…and remarkable;” and he’s worked with such an eclectic group of artists as Kanye West, Bonnie Raitt, and Joe Hahn of Linkin Park, to name a few.
At the Kitchen Theatre Joseph will forge forward with his penchant for fusion and synthesis, combining excerpts from three of his previous plays to create a narrative drawing on such topics as fatherhood from the perspective of a single dad, and interplanetary musical exploration. The work is titled “The Spoken World.”
“There is a script involved,” says Joseph. “I’m not up there freestyling for an hour. There is a classroom type of responsibility to fulfill in terms of the audience. One of the central tenets of my work and identity is to facilitate a common experience for growth, to use stories and poems as something we collectively connect to. It’s a group process. I’m doing the heavy lifting, but I’m not alone.”
Aside from his Kitchen Theatre performances and the various workshops and appearances he’s been making across the country, Joseph is also the artistic director of Youth Speaks, where he heads up The Living Word, a program focusing on spoken storytelling through various means of artistic expression. The project’s work will be featured in an upcoming 7-part HBO miniseries titled “Brave New Voices,” a Russell Simmons production focusing on a perennial spoken-word festival in Chicago. The series debuts Sunday, April 5.
And, as if his life isn’t busy enough, Joseph coaches his seven year-old son’s soccer team back in Oakland, and is even developing a new piece to be titled “Red, Black and Green” - a play based on community issues to be featured at economic empowerment days around the country. The show is part of the Life is Living campaign, a movement associated with the Living Word, that uses green-friendly storytelling to encourage environmental conservatism and awareness.
Joseph is in high demand these days, and he’s been traveling endlessly, from coast to coast, often stretching himself to the point of utter exhaustion. But then again, he’s doing what he loves.
“It’s hard to travel from the West Coast to the East Coast,” he says. “I go from 75 degrees in Oakland to getting off the plane across the country at 20. My body feels the effects of that. Sometimes it can be extremely rigorous coupled with the kind of performance I do where I leave everything on the stage. But it is completely fulfilling and I feel blessed.”
Marc Bamuthi Joseph will deliver performances on 8pm Friday and Saturday and 4pm on Sunday.