On His Marc: Marc Bamuthi Joseph Brings Spoken Word to New Heights

It’s the year 2004. Spoken word as a concept has broken the invisible barrier between mainstream art and alternative urban forms. Like its predecessor Hip Hop music, spoken word has made its way out of the artistic ghettos and into the cultural zeitgeist—via instruments like Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO. Marc Bamuthi Joseph—himself a featured performer on Def Poetry—has helped the form to garner broader attention, but has not acquiesced inside of it. Instead, Joseph opens up the form and questions what it means to tell a story, perform narrative, and occupy creative and literal space on stage. An artist of significant depth and range, Joseph, once a National Poetry Slam champion, excels, says The Seattle Times, “as a cutting edge artist forging his own hybrid medium—an amalgam of rap music, poetry, movement, and theater.”

His new piece, Word Becomes Flesh, is a fluid evening-length choreopoem, the latest in a long tradition of narrative verse plays whose contributors range from Shakespeare to Ntozake Shange. Presented as a series of letters to his unborn son, the piece uses poetry, dance, live music, and visual art to document nine months of pregnancy from a young single father’s perspective. In the process, the audience confronts the intersection of the physical reality and mythology of the black male body from the cotton fields to the athletic fields to the digital plantation and all the spaces in between. One of the implicit concerns of Word Becomes Flesh is: what does it mean to be a black father in contemporary America? In posing this question, Joseph confronts how African American paternity is often stereotyped with the term, “baby daddy,” which refers to the so-called absent black father. Word Becomes Flesh fills a critical void in the conversation, however, by expressing the voice of the father himself.

This expression is described by the SF Bay Guardian as “sharp, elegant, and always urgent verse that harnesses the grit and boogie down power of Hip Hop as well as the singular beauty and sophistication of contemporary dance.” The Washington Post states, “Rarely do word and movement mesh so seamlessly and elegantly that the audience is left with the thought that drives them.” Joseph’s performance brilliance is certainly not unearned. At the age of 10, this native New Yorker and first generation Haitian American was understudy to tap genius Savion Glover for the Broadway musical The Tap Dance Kid. As a teenager, he studied ballet and jazz dance. He has also interned with the National Ballet Company of Senegal in West Africa (Bamuthi, a self-selected first name, means “of the tree” in the African N’debele language) and has collaborated with a range of artists including Sean Lennon, Ben Harper, De La Soul, Bonnie Raitt, Will Power, RUN DMC, and Sonia Sanchez.

Word Becomes Flesh has been co-commissioned by the National Performance Network, New WORLD Theater, and La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California and is funded in part by the Expeditions Program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, which receives major support from the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from the states arts agencies of New England and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It represents the completion of Joseph’s third play, having already staged De/Cipher (Theater Artaud and Yerba Buena Center, 2001) and No Man’s Land(ODC, 2002). We could say that Joseph is on his mark and ready to ascend to new creative and political heights, but the truth is, he’s been there for a long time. It’s just only recently that he’s getting the attention he deserves.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Word Becomes Flesh will take place on Wednesday and Thursday, April 28 and 29, 2004 at 8 PM at the University of Massachusetts Bowker Auditorium. For tickets call the Fine Arts Center box office at 413-545-251l; for more information visit our website at www.newworldtheater.org.