Marc Bamuthi Joseph and The Living Word Project in "red, black & GREEN: a blues"
On April 27 & 28, 2012 the Bates Dance Festival, in collaboration with Bates College, presented "red, black & GREEN: a blues" as the culminating events of a 2-year long cross-curricular residency project.
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Blog Post: red, black & GREEN: a blues at Bates |
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Blog Post: The Audience Responds to red, black & GREEN: a blues |
Spoken word/hip-hop theater artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph presents red, black & GREEN: a blues (rbGb), a new evening-length multimedia work on environmental justice and social ecology questions collective responsibility (his own included) in a time of dramatic climate change. In an exhilarating, interactive performance of dance, text, and visuals, Joseph is joined onstage by dancer/actor Traci Tolmaire, drummer/beat boxer Tommy Shephard, and vocalist Yaw.
rbGb is set into Theaster Gates’ malleable stage installation of repurposed building materials and clay objects, and heightened by Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi’s vivid films and graffiti murals. Source material is drawn from a series of art and eco festivals Joseph created in Houston, Oakland, Harlem and Chicago. The poetry and performance in rbGb posits the idea that valuing your own life, and the life of your community, is the first step in valuing the planet Earth.
"Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s “red, black & GREEN: a blues” was one of the finest and most important national performance works to have hit the state in my 13 years here."
~ Linda Nelson, Executive Director, Opera House Arts, Stonington, ME
"This was an amazing performance. Other than Noh, I have never seen a performance that made such an authentic whole out of the disparate elements of music, poetry, dance, text, theater, sound…… thought. It was inspired and inspiring, frightening in some fundamental way because it took hold of so much and didn't want to let it go, at least not let it go unobserved."
~ John Farrell, puppeteer, Freeport, ME
"To say the show was brilliant is understated. This was storytelling at it's finest, full of song and dance and character. red, black, and GREEN:1 blues gave a relevant, challenging, conflicted, and hopeful voice to blackness, and at the same time, to those of us who are not black and working to find respectful relationship and commonality--to sit with the hard truth of what it is to be black in the world."
~ Oren Stevens, The Telling Room, Portland, ME
"I sat there, unable to move, awash with yet unfolded emotion, remembrance. A grieving and a hope simultaneously. When I shook Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s hand, I could barely speak my thank you. This is a piece that will live with me forever."
~ Donna McNeil, Arts Policy and Program Director, Maine Arts Commission, Augusta, ME
rbGb Video: Bamuthi & Theaster Gates on the set 
