 If you're joining us in our conversation about where it becomes flesh and issues and themes and topics that may arise or anything that these two gentlemen want to talk about. If you're not familiar with 651 Arts, I ask you to please go to our website. Please join us. We have a series coming up beginning January 26 called Live and Unspoken, where artists interview other artists. And there's also a performative aspect to it. We open a conversation with Nicholas Lecter, who's a dancer. And he will be interviewed by Issa Davis, a theater artist, playwright, writer, et cetera. We have three other ones coming up, but that's not what we are here about. But you'll have information in your program. So when you go see the play, if you're going to see it today at 4 o'clock, there's more information inside of that. We are happy to have Marco Muti-Josa, who is the writer and director, where it becomes flesh to be here in this intimate setting to talk to you. And he's going to be interviewed by Kenyon Farrell. And Kenyon is a former theater artist. He is now an activist and writer who lives in New York City. And he has a forthcoming book called The, tell me the title. Stand Up. Stand Up. The Politics of Gratial Oblivion. It's up in the press. Yeah. So he's a very prolific blogger and writer and thinker about contemporary issues around social justice, politics, and creativity. Kenyon did have a chance to see the performance. So he will be talking to Mark and sharing thoughts and ideas and comments and concerns around the play. So we have about 40 minutes. And then folks will be going up to see the show, hopefully if not, we have to end so that those who are can get there. All right. Thank you. And I turn it over to you, Kenyon. Thank you very much for inviting me to be here. I got an opportunity to see the show last night, as you just heard. And I'll try not to do too much spoiling of the events. I'll just try to be conscious of that as we discuss words become flesh. And I guess I'll just say one of my thoughts, opening up one, I just was really moved by the performance for a number of reasons that I think we'll sort of touch on. But one I just think is kind of interesting from a sort of political level is we're in election season. And what's been interesting to me in the last several weeks is ways in which I feel like the culture wars have returned from the 1980s. We're hearing GOP candidates talk about people with AIDS as deserving and their fault. And therefore should pay higher insurance. We're hearing this kind of narrative again about black people on welfare, through which it's usually targeted at black women. But absentee black fathers is often part of the secondary piece of that kind of political conversation. And so I think for that particular reason, this show is really, really important right now. And I want to say for another reason, too, that in many ways in 2008 Barack Obama's candidacy and his perhaps just relationship with Michelle and the kids sort of reemerged a sort of conversation about Black fatherhood in the last four years. So I think this piece is kind of fitting at a particular time where I feel like we're going to be hearing more of these debates in some good ways and not so good ways over the course of this election year. So I guess to that sort of point, I'll just sort of ask you sort of how do you see this particular piece fitting within kind of a larger kind of conversation? It happens in the black community certainly and certainly happens outside of it about black people. We are in a political season, but it's always winter in America. And the dismantling of the Black family structure is actually an American ideal. As much as capitalism is, as much as imperialism is, the very presence of African-descended people in the Americas is made possible by the deconstruction of the Black family structure. So yes, it's the season, but the continuum that we're talking about is a 500-year timeline. In the immediate sense, and by immediate, I mean the last 50 years, let's say, in the United States probably beginning with the civil rights era and the post-civil rights era, the introduction of drugs into black and brown communities in an intentional and genocidal way. The ways that the public school system in America fails all of our children, but beginning with Prop 13 in California, the very specific and systematic deconstruction of successful public school systems tied to tax rates, all these things, I think, form the backdrop along with the systems of patriarchy and male privilege. All these things form the backdrop of a conversation about what it means to be present in the life that you brought into the world. There are all these systemic pillars that ground us in opposition and compartmentalize and deconstruct the Black family structure in the United States. So given all those isms and given all those big ideas, I think I just really want to talk about love and how it is that we don't love our kids, how it is that issues of self-love or self-definition or self-determination occupy our practice of sharing similar love with the unborn and those that are born into our families. And so for all the systems for all the major pathologies, I think that part of what we're trying to explore in this piece is just emotional continuity, integrating a sense of self as part of the same continuum as the sense of responsibility and accountability for another. And I think that as you introduce talks of culture wars, I think what I'm struck by most is just a lack, a general lack of compassion. The polarity, the polemical discussions that we have in our politics lack compassion. And this too is an ethos that I think is present in our inability to fully love our kids. So just kind of big macro issues aside. What we try to do with the piece is create a small, intimate, sweaty, marrowed, and visceral account of why a brother might leave. And also, given those things, why we might choose to stay, how we might sever the cycles just by undergoing a process of self-evaluation and just being humble enough to then be accountable to pass on a different set of values onto someone else. Yeah, I think seeing it yesterday, you definitely see in the work this discussion I just think it's true for people generally is to be concerned about the meta or outside forces that are shaping one's ability to make certain kinds of decisions and then one's own personal kind of drive and wishes and desires and sense of future and how people are navigating becoming fathers with both of those. The personal and the political at both at play. But I also just want to give you an opportunity to talk about the process of developing the production and maybe just talk about what it was like to work with the other actors on this particular script. OK, so first, anybody else have a dad here? OK, interesting. So in the months that my partner was pregnant, I think the months of her pregnancy were the loneliest months of my life for a whole bunch of reasons, but primarily because I didn't feel like I had anybody to talk to. I didn't feel like anybody could understand. I felt like mom was pregnant and we were all focused on her and we should be, you know what I mean? I didn't know where my outlets were. There weren't other cats that I knew that were having kids. And part of all the ugliness in America that we just described has resulted in a whole bunch of black men who don't have their dads and who also kind of have a social pass to leave. So I don't really have any immediate role models. I didn't have the greatest relationship with my own dad. So the process started really because I felt at the time like the only person I could really talk to was my son, but he wasn't born yet, so I started writing these letters just about what I was going through, but addressed them to him and ended up codifying these letters and organizing these letters in a performed way in 2003. And I performed the show as a solo piece first for almost two and a half years all over the world and was done for real. Wrote other stuff, performed another stuff, was cool. And the National Performance Network approached me to reimagine the work two years ago. And the trip at the time was Tyler Perry was doing for colored girls who've considered suicide with rainbows enough, which was a wack movie. The book is a piece of genius that has inspired me and countless other writers. I thought that the movie, I think that we all do our best, but the way that Black men in particular were portrayed in the movie I thought was reprehensible, in part because the text wasn't meant to represent Black men in any other way. So did what he had to do, but in the meantime, on the large screen, what gets played out or what got played out was kind of a repetition of the pathologies of Black men in America. And so seeing that part of what I wanted to do was re-engage with that particular text, this idea of an ensemble that, in Entezaki Shange's case, could articulate common and disparate narratives of Black womanhood and create an analogous narrative with Black men. I'm really fortunate to work with the Brave New Voices Network, which is a crew of young poets in every city in the United States that comes together on an annual basis at the Brave New Voices Festival. Each poet is between 13 and 19 years old. And so in creating this piece or re-creating this piece, the young men of Brave New Voices, these five in particular, along with our DJ, Dionne Despoles, they were the first folks that I engaged and casted because they're so adept with verse. They're so exemplary on racial and political lines. And they just bust crazy hard and they're hungry. So that was the process, from loneliness to solo performance to just kind of being through and ready to move on, and then in retaliation and in conversation, and also in kind of pedagogical extension, using the process to be an extended teaching moment. And then finally, through the manifestation in its current form with young men all under 40, some under 20 really telling this story. And I think hopefully a different kind of vision of what it is to be black male in America. You know, I'm glad you brought up a couple of things. I think one, I mean, when I saw the kind of reference to Tenderzaki Shandies for Color Girls was, I have to think like, yeah, could very well kind of feel it kind of grappling with that text as response. But not as response as antagonism. It's interesting though to hear your opinion, which I happen to share about the silent Perry film. And it is a general kind of, to me, a good narrative throughout his work about, I felt like that part of my problem with that film, one of which was that it actually also withdrew all of the places within the original Shandie text where women actually have sexual agency and pleasure. As part of like, it actually just pulls all of that out. And doesn't actually portray much of that stuff that's in the original text. And I was like, that's interesting. So just my two cents on that. The other thing that I was struck by in the performance last night was just the actual physical use of the black male body in space in ways that the physicality of the show obviously has a lot of kind of dance and movement vocabulary in that way, but was so original in the sense that I didn't feel like I was watching a dance, performance per se, and saw just the sort of way of the people use their bodies in ways that we just, they just seemed really, really new and fresh in terms of ways in which that in and of itself, I think, works to kind of force people to deconstruct the way black men are sort of viewed. And that there was a real both kind of strength as a vulnerability, there was awkwardness, there was a whole kind of range of those things. So you could speak a little bit about the physicality, the movement as you see it in this particular piece. You know, I first started dancing formally when I was 10. And I was involved in musical theater and was on Broadway as a kid. And so dance has always been a really viable and very accessible point of reference for me. Also anybody who lives in New York, but if you're a citizen of the world, you just know the black male body and the pose and how much is communicated to really all of us, not black men, really all of us, just what we wear and how we sit and what we do. There's perhaps an exaggerated way that is so clear and so focal and especially in our neighborhoods, the way your body language will determine whether you survive or not. And so again, that's all like metaphor re-ephemera. The idea that spoken language and body language exist on the same continuum and are used to communicate the same ideas or can be used to communicate the same ideas isn't very political at all for me. It's really educational. It really comes from being an English teacher and wanting to get at, let's say, an idea. In order to get an idea, to get one idea in the classroom, you probably have to present it four different ways because there are multiple intelligences in the room and there are multiple learning styles in the room. So when I started to develop work, the things that I could immediately access were spoken language and body language as a way to communicate one idea. And hopefully as I've developed in my work, I've gotten a little bit better or a little bit more sophisticated in not compartmentalizing those things or not isolating those things, but really seeing them as one seamless form to get out a series of ideas. The body is an abstract entity. And so there are things that are communicated through the body that kind of eliminate the need to hear them spoken literally. But as poets and as students of verse, we know that especially in the spoken word idiom, there's so much kind of literal linear force that it helps to have the body as a metaphorical tool so that the literal and the figurative are operating at the same time. So that's all the form and structure of it. And then there is the political. There is the politicization of the black male body. We talk about from the cotton field to the athletic field to the digital plantation. And all those things are present in kind of the strength and the visceral nature of the piece. Also, and probably lastly, I love the integration of media design in theater and dance. But I don't go to the theater to watch TV. So I want theater that sweats. I want theater that bleeds. And I want to be able to feel it. And so all that breath, all that wanting, all that, that's intentional. Because there's a way that I think many of us are prioritizing technology over the folkloric and ritualistic nature of the body telling story. And so our emphasis is to prioritize the body over screens, which is why there are none in this piece. And I think that also works for the kind of story we're telling and the bodies that are sharing it in space. Excellent. Was there anything you were afraid in the script to put out into the world? Yeah. What's that for? You know, it's like I'm using a hell of big words and talking about the pathologies of the ephemera and the metaphor. But really, man, it's my story. And so it's just hella personal. And so it's cathartic and it's healing for me. But every night that I watch it, there's still parts where I'm like, oh, I said that. Ooh, I felt that. You know? And there are moments where I really value my anonymity inside of the relationship of the work. When I was performing it as a solo piece, there was nowhere to run. You know? But the process of writing it was the healing. And then I went into this purgatory for a couple years where it was just like, here's the lesson again and again the next night. And twice on Sunday, you know? So I would say that I was like, afraid. But there's parts of the work that still hurt. I mean, I thought it was the level of honesty in it about just a range of different conflicted feelings that, you know, in this case, men have about being fathers. But anybody's parenting certainly, you know, have and, yeah, certainly wondered about that aspect of just feeling, yeah, the emotion alley of some of the fairly controversial writing in that respect. So your son is seven, eight, nine? He's like, he's going to vote. What? No, no, no, he's ten. Oh. I'm like, yeah, nothing. Has he seen it? Yep. And what have the conversations been like about the show? You know, the really cool thing is that my son is developing into his own being and his own artist. He's ten. So he's really mature and sweet, but he's also like, right. So like the things that he, you know, he knows what he needs to know. And his mom and I decided that he doesn't need to see the show again. Like he's right at the cusp where he doesn't need to see it, which is awesome. Mostly there hasn't been direct conversation about the show. The conversation that's happening is in his art. You know, there's this whole opening credo, welcome to the spoken world of living word, the dream for reverse, return back. You know, he knows it and he can do it. You know, he can do the choreography, he can do, you know, he can do the text. He's writing poems and he's referencing Mumiabu Jamal and he's referencing Frederick Douglass in his poems. He's dancing, he's making these stop anime. You know, he's discovered, first he discovered iMovie and now he's on Final Cut Pro and he's making all these stop motion animation films. And so I don't think he's like, oh, that play is about me. Let me talk to you about this play. I think he's like, oh, theater, dance. This is the world that I'm in. This is how I make my shit. You know what I mean? And I think that that's what's most present in terms of the conversation. It's not like one to one. It's more like he's a ten-year-old filmmaker. He has his own YouTube channel. You know what I mean? Like he's on that. And I think that that's more of his response than anything else. What's the future hold for you, this production and beyond? You know, I'm thrilled to be under the radar here and thankful to Shea and the staff at 651 Arts and to Mark Russell and May-Yin under the radar and the public for making a space for the piece to continue to live. I first was here at under the radar with this piece when it was a solo performance. So it's come full circle. And the great thing about it being under the radar right now is that lots of folks who have access can continue to give it life in other venues. So that's awesome. We premiered it in December of 2010 in Dallas. And I think this is the eighth city that it's been in and will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in February. So I'm really pleased with the life that it's had and the numbers of people that have seen the work. Like I said, everybody in the piece is crazy young and hungry and talented. They're all MCs, musicians, playwrights, singer-songwriters on their own and they all have viable, individual stories to tell and are playing with form in terms of how to tell them. So to me, the greatest success of the piece will be with those six dudes do individually in terms of making music and so forth. I think the piece will continue to tour a little bit longer. You know, it's been canonized or it's been anthologized by Theodore Communications Group and so it's a viable text for folks to read and I think that the best thing that happened in the piece Leaving My Body is it became practical and accessible for a company of five or six or seven to take on these different pieces and to perform them themselves and that's what I'm really hoping that happens. I think most of us that are in solo performance write for our bodies and so it's a very close fit and not enough of us I think conceive of solo performance as something to be performed by someone else. You know what I mean? I think Nalaja's Son has been one of the more successful folks that have done this in creating a piece No Child that was for her that other women have then taken on but what Danny Hawk does, that's Danny Hawk. You know what Sarah Jones does? That's Sarah Jones and I think most of us in solo performance create from that perspective so I'm really happy that it's an ensemble work. I hope young people and old people and whoever else continue to manifest the work and then in terms of my own practice, it's really two fold. I just debuted a new piece. It's called Red, Black and Green of Blues. It premiered last year and continues to tour around the country. It'll be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October and it's a piece that I'm really proud of and so a lot of my arts practice is in the continuing performance of that work and in continuing to write librettos for ballet companies and dance companies in particular and I'm also the new director of performing arts at Yerba Gwena Center for the Arts in San Francisco so I have a curatorial practice of bringing in other groups, commissioning other folks and contextualizing performance, I think in new and exciting ways for the Bay Area along with my colleagues up and down the West Coast and around the world. I think we may have a couple of moments so I want to open it up to folks that have questions. It's your opportunity to ask the artist for you to see the work. Yeah, okay. First of all, the work for employing young black men in theater, I think that's important. I know the artist on stage means so much in the integrity to be able to travel and to their own work to be able to tour and see the world, apply to the scene but the art looks like in the outside which helps so much and I know a lot of them are very hungry so I just wanted to say that and I'm sure the rest of you will be surprised. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Do you do? Oh, sorry. I'll bring my quote, well an article by Al Sharpton the other day and he was talking about the lack of arts as activists or the gap between the number of artists as activists when compared to the 60s and the 70s and I'm just wondering what the ageing of hip hop artists do you think we are getting ready to see that number increase to see their volume with their voices and things that are happening in the community or even happening in the nation to see their participation increase and he particularly was talking about just the lack of participation by these artists and major events that were happening in the American community and on the political side. Yeah, you know it's deep because I think about James Brown or Bob Dylan or Aretha Franklin or Ray Charles or Harry Belafonte or you know during the civil rights era there were a number of prominent artists and I'm just referring to African American artists but you know primarily African American artists but you can go on and on and on in the United States of America and really throughout history artists have been, the bellwether have announced the change to come. I think that's still true. I think the primary difference is that the corporatizing or the over corporatizing of art structures particularly as they relate to popular music and film give us the sense that artists aren't politically engaged and it's not that artists aren't politically engaged it's that Wiz Khalifa isn't necessarily politically engaged or you know what I mean? Or like Nicki Minaj isn't politically engaged, right? So it's like there are a number of us that are fighting that use verse and music and film visual art to continue to make statements about ourselves, our bodies and the worlds that we live in. The combination of the 24 hour news cycle that looks for sensationalism the way that someone let's say like Van Jones who is an environmental artist can say something, can make a flippant comment six, seven years ago and someone rescue that flippant comment and Glenn Beck takes it, subverts it, deconstructs it and all of a sudden he's out of the White House. Like that kind of machinery is why you don't have more artists or athletes just kind of stepping up and speaking out because there's this corporate sterilized filter on banals and consequently the actions of folks that are in prominent positions to speak out. Keith Overman who was on MSNBC, a progressive channel and who every other night will just go off for 15 minutes about somebody. He gave some money to a candidate and it's like you know what dude's politics are? You know what dude's politics are, that's why he's a and he was censored, you know what I mean? John Stewart, all these folks there's a very tiny threshold in the corporate structure for activism. We want our national spokespeople to be as sterile as possible. Kelly Clarkson, you know, tweeted which I know is a less than 140 characters. Kelly Clarkson tweeted that she dug Ron Paul and you know there are darts thrown at her. So it's like she can't even express a political opinion. You know what I mean? How is that complicated? The Dixie Chicks, I mean just, yeah. Just on and on and on. So you know, when the United States went into war in Iraq you know anybody that spoke out against the war in Iraq was immediately vilified. You know what I mean? And it's just like where have we gone? You know, where you can't say war is whack. Like who are we? You know what I mean? With all due respect to Reverend Sharpton and growing up here in New York City a lot of my political vocabulary was shaped by Reverend Al just kind of going off, you know what I mean? So you know, with all due respect I think that it's less about active artists and more about a highly sensitive, you know, low threshold corporate structure that doesn't give visibility or license to artists that are speaking out. And what I just would offer too in terms of the music industry that might actually offer some, I don't know, hope or whatever a shift is, you know, nobody's selling records anymore. I mean that's the, no one is selling, you know I mean there's like a very few, like Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga are the only people selling records right now. Nobody else is selling, nobody's even going platinum. Like nobody's selling a million records anymore but there are a lot more people selling 20,000, you know, 50,000, 100,000 and I think, you know, that in and of itself may shake up some of the kind of political control over what gets out just because people don't have to be so reliant on a record label for distribution anymore like, you know, people have found other ways around it. So that I would say is one of the hopes I have that some of this other stuff can be undermined. Is there anybody in particular theater artist that inspired you to go into the field and second part is as African-American man do you feel a particular challenge because it does seem to be the same to the white industry that has established theater? Yeah, I mean, there are lots of folks that I've been inspired by and Tizaki Shange probably first among them and yeah, there's really just a long list. I'll say folks that inspire me to move into the field. I think that, you know, I saw Danny Hawk in a park somewhere in the 90s do this riff. Man, you know, I don't know how old that, maybe I was 19, I forget how old I was, but man, I saw him go off, you know, it was a piece from Jail's hospitals in hip hop. And I knew I couldn't do what he did, but he was speaking my language. I remember being a junior in high school and going to PS 122 and there was this piece What's Happening Now? And Crazy Legs was in it and all these B-Boys were in it and I was like, that's hip hop, I can touch that. When I was 15, there was a playwright named Bill Kane who is this incredible playwright. He wrote this piece, he was still, and I think he is still a practicing Jesuit priest, but it was this piece called Stand Up Tragedy that I was in and that was really instrumental and important to me. And then of course August Wilson. So yeah, so folks I can touch, folks I will never know. In terms of, you know, maybe intimidation or separation inside of the field, oh no, I don't really, not so much, because it's part of my life, you know what I mean? Like it's just part of my life. So yeah, exactly, so it's no different, you know what I mean? It's no different, like I could be in any field. I could be running for president, I could be running for student council. It's all kind of the same thing. The challenge I think is the normalization of narrative and how that fits into the context of your average presenting season. By that I mean, you know, I feel like I go to, you know, a lot of plays or a lot of dance and the canon that they're referencing is, you know, French philosophers and Russian novelists and German composers and you know what I mean? There's like a certain, you know, like I'm supposed to know that this was based on Dostoevsky and I'm supposed to know that they're referencing Mahler when they, you know what I mean? And so normalizing the, a consistent reference to Du Bois or to Hughes or to Schange or to Sanchez or to Lemon Anderson, you know what I mean? Like normalizing those things is actually part of my challenge as a curator to create a context by which audiences can absorb and practice and become versed in a different kind of literacy. That's my curatorial challenge. My challenge as writer and performer is just to be as true to my personal convictions as possible. And I think the kind of person that I am, and this also speaks to just my being, is, you know, like I'm inclined towards empathy and I'm a pretty good code switcher. So I practice that in my art. Again, I'm much more, I would much rather create an environment than to create my educational practice than in my arts practice. So, yeah. Well, let's give our playwrights, Mark O'Donnell, thank you for coming to this performance talk and hopefully you enjoy the show.