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The Living Word Project Presents the 7th Annual RACE IS FICTION A 10-day Festival produced by the Resident Theater company of Youth Speaks Featured Artists and Participants Include Mos Def, Goapele,
The 7th Annual Living Word Festival continues this weeks with the premiere of War Peace: The One Drop Rule, a youth driven hip hop theater piece that imagines the Bay Area as a potential war zone in a time of protracted drought. Directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, War Peace is collaboratively written and performed by Chinaka Hodge, Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs, and Nico Cary. Now in their early 20s, these four artists boast work published in journals such as McSweeney’s and Newsweek, hold performance credits that include appearances on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry for HBO, and hold undergraduate degrees from Berkeley, NYU, and Brown. They all grew up participating in programs by Youth Speaks, the nation’s leading nonprofit presenter of spoken word performance, education, and youth development programs. War Peace features an original score by the SF Jazz Youth All-Stars, while Emmy award winning choreographer and tap sensation Jason Samuels-Smith joins the cast and performs a percussive tap and modern movement vocabulary to underscore the work’s spoken language. War Peace is the Living Word Project’s eighth, verse-based interdisciplinary work, and joins critical successes such as the break/s, In Spite of Everything, and the Robert Moses’ Kin collaboration Cause. War Peace takes place at Theater Artaud on Thursday and Friday, October 23 and 24. Additional programming includes: Unbuckled, Uncensored, a new solo work by spoken word pioneer Regie Cabico, directed by playwright, poet, actor, director, and founding member of the Pomo Afro Homos, Brian Freeman. October 23 and 25 Animal Farm, by Jacinta Vlach and Liberation Dance Theater on October 24 An excerpt of Beauty, the Beast by Delina Brooks, October 25 The San Francisco premiere of Mapa/Corpo3, a new work by acclaimed performance artist, writer, activist, and educator Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra at Theater Artaud at 7pm. Read Jesse Hamlin’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/20/DDJA13HFO5.DTL 
OCTOBER 23 OCTOBER 24, 2008 7:30pm
Theater Artaud
450 Florida Street, San Francisco
OCTOBER 25 Regie Cabico in Unbuckled, Uncensored AND Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s La Pocha Nostra in Mapa/Corpo3
All shows at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida St., San Francisco.
SPREAD THE WORD. . . A festival born out of forced labor AND pandemic unemployment. Jim Crow and Reaganomics. Blues and Hip Hop. After-flood America. Since 2001, The Living Word Festival has focused on a particular school of theatrical thought: Saul Williams, Carl Hancock Rux, Danny Hoch, Sarah Jones, Rennie Harris, Cristal Truscott, Mos Def. For 13 years, Youth Speaks Inc has identified, and supported a national network of teen poets, convening them annually as Brave New Voices. As these young people come of age as practicing writer-performers, they represent a shift in linguistic approach and a rise in standard of performance poetry for proscenium. In 2008 and beyond, Artistic Director Marc Bamuthi Joseph brings together the most compelling of these intra-aesthetic, intergenerational voices. Universes and Guillermo Gomez Pena. Chinaka Hodge and Nicole Klaymoon. Tania Isaac and DJ Qbert. Dave Eggers and George Watsky. A Left Coast, Left-Leaning(out of your Hybrid Impala) kinda interdisciplinary artist-curated Festival. Living. Word. |
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