8:00 pm
Bowker Auditorium, Umass
Universes is an ensemble of writer/musician/performers who fuse poetry, theater, jazz, hip-hop, politics, blues, gospel, and Spanish boleros to create moving, challenging, and entertaining theatrical works. The Bronx-based quartet of Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz, Gamal Abdel Chasten and Ninja have created their own brand of high-energy performance, rooted in hip-hop but drawing on a global multitude of lyrical and musical influences and performance styles. Ameriville follows in the groundbreaking footsteps of Universes' Slanguage, which the New York Times called "a work of heart and soul that distills the essence of the city."
Ameriville is a cross-disciplinary, bi-lingual, multimedia exploration of what it means to be an American in the post-9/11 world of terror-level codes, the 'misinformation superhighway,' and media-fed xenophobia. Universes' unique brand of fushion theater gives new insight and urgency to the national re-examination of values, purpose, and ideals in the wake of 9/11 and in the midst of the so-called "war on terror." Inspired by the panic induced by the 1939 Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Ameriville maneuvers through contemporary issues including censorship, patriotism, the Katrina disaster, and the narrowing divide between church and state to expose "a disrobed Lady Liberty as she lies in the arms of mass media and technology, no longer sure of her own beliefs."
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