Touring Dance–Slam Poetry Crossbreed Sweeps Up Wright Theater

Hip-hop “choreopoem” “Word Becomes Flesh” played to a packed Wright Theater on Friday, Sept. 20 and Saturday, Sept. 21, preceded by student spoken word poets and followed by a talkback moderated by dance department faculty chair Christal Brown. The first of the Performance Art Series’ 2013-2014 series, the production brought in the six-person, California-based touring company for a week of residency events in collaboration with Theatre Department and Dance Department.

Originally performed in 2003 as a one-man show by playwright and artistic director Marc Bamuthi Joseph, “Word Becomes Flesh” is, at its most basic level, a series of letters to a man’s unborn son, morphing the chronicles of nine months of pregnancy into a meditative explanation of “why [he] might choose not to stay.”

“While women continue to fight for their right to make choices about their bodies, the legacy of patriarchy and male privilege still allow a man the social right to choose domestic absenteeism and refrain from offering either emotional or financial support,” actors of The Living Word Project explained in a press release on the project. “‘Word Becomes Flesh’ critically, lyrically, and choreographically examines this phenomenon. In the process we confront the intersection of the physical reality and mythology of the black male body from the cotton field to the athletic field and all spaces in between.”

The 60-minute piece came out of San Francisco–based theater group The Living Word Project, and is made up of individual poem/dance components that range from highly abstract, far-reaching explorations of the modern African-American condition to laugh-out-loud parodies of Bay Area natural birthing classes. In the process, the show deconstructs what it means, and what it has meant, to be to be a black man—and father—in America.

“It put everyone’s mind to work,” said Sarah Braithwaite ’14. “The content and the actors gave Middlebury a glimpse of a culture that is not spoken about a lot, and I think Middlebury needs more education culture shocks like this. People definitely enjoyed it because it blew their minds and opened their eyes to some degree.”

Now in its third year of touring as the six-person show, “Word Becomes Flesh” calls itself a “choreopoem”—a spoken word–dance performance hybrid with the narrative structure of a traditional theater piece and hip-hop spun by a live DJ as a backdrop, all of which is hard to picture until you have seen it fit together. It is about making the metaphorical physical: In one scene, a cast member talks about how difficult it is to push himself to write, and two dancers flank him on either side, choreographically mimicking the stop-and-start nature of the phenomenon he is describing. They try out a sequence; they stop short, shake it off and try again, like a more corporal iteration of crumpled drafts in an overflowing wastebasket.

With the dance and spoken word elements so well blended, the music component can feel, at first, a little contrived or superfluous. But it allows scenes to crescendo easily, building as the music does—it is all done so subtly that you barely notice the music at all until it is no longer there. These moments of calm underscore the show’s most dramatic moments—rare moments without movement or music, where Bamuthi’s words can be given their full, deserved weight.

“The talent was extraordinary and the message was extremely enlightening,” added Braithwaite. “It was all so raw and real and engaging.”

Leading up to the Friday and Saturday night performances, the six-person troupe behind “Word Becomes Flesh” spent a week in residency at Middlebury College, offering hip-hop movement and spoken word workshops that were open to all students and community members, as well as master classes for upper-level theater and dance students and a spoken word event at 51 Main in cooperation with Verbal Onslaught.

All poets, actors, educators and artists in their own right, the men who came together for “Word Becomes Flesh” brought a unique level of expertise and passion to the Dance and Theatre Departments last week.

While brought to life in this current iteration by magnanimous performers, “Word Becomes Flesh” really belongs to Bamuthi, a widely acclaimed arts educator who works with Youth Speaks, the larger organization that encompasses the spin-off theater company, The Living Word Project. Through Youth Speaks, Bamuthi also created the Brave New Voices slam poetry competition, whose final rounds aired in a seven-part HBO documentary presented by Russell Simmons and directed by Bamuthi himself.