Ey yo. At the moment, I’m tunneling mouth first into a barrel of Pabst Blue, feeling baptized and born again into the real life: I’ve spent the past seventy-two consecutive hours huddled around ABC’s Lost like a grizzled refugee escaping the tyranny of sunlight.

I’m in downtown Sacramento at the Press Club, among a throng of heads on an exodus toward Destination: On One. It’s the 90′s Comeback Party tonight, and the lighting in here looks like the color wheel has gone all scratched disc, skipping jarringly in a buzzsaw-to-the-oculars slap of red, stained pearl, green, blue and back again. It looks like someone tied your hands behind your back and stuck you on the inside of a Geocities webpage, really. Sitting off to the side, shrouded in a hand-me-down J. Crew hoodie, I’m throwing frantic shurikens from each corner of my eyes like some bemonked turf journalist who’d just snorted the ashes of Hunter S. Getting drunker by the heartbeat, I thought it would be a good time to do some blogging.

Its been a good night so far.

The remastering of Akira hovers above us on a silent flatscreen and the bartender is making extra sure to look every which way because even though its the ass-end of the Sabbath he knows people have come to spend money. And they do. There’s head nodding everywhere – we all know there’s nothing to do but the give the silent yes, and stillness counts only as refusal, so even the most painted-on of wallflowers are still giving it up.

The voices, tones and pitch here are webbed together into something my ears approximate to an open bar at St. Peter’s gates and he’s left them slightly ajar. When the right song hits, everyone’s lungs deflate and we all go weightless for a breath in a collective “aaaaaaaahwhaaaaaaaa!!?” before falling back perfectly into the city’s pulse. The way we were meant to, the way heads do pillows.

All this and I haven’t even touched on why I’m writing any of this in the first place.

So, me, I’m a kind of a retired theatre major. “How does one retire from their major?” you might ask (if you’re at all interested or even still reading). Its because by the time I was finishing up my degree, I’d realized it wasn’t what I really wanted to do anymore: Everything classified as theatre seemed mad confining, restrictive, outmoded; even among the entities and individuals I’d worked with and subscribed to as ‘revolutionaries’ of theatre. I spent a few years trying to get it right here and there. A theatre that didn’t fail the way so many others had: A group of the solipsistic & privileged waxing vain over some shit that that was generally alienating and difficult to relate to. What I was looking for was a performative space that could be home to the non-theatre artist as well, anyone who had a story to share, to tell, to be experienced; he or she with the whisper in the belly that we had much to learn from and vibe with.

I pretty much gave up. Not because I felt foolish, or alone. On the contrary, even though we didn’t know it, everyone I worked with was on the edge of theatre chic – it was honestly a very ego-gratifying experience, thinking we were doing something, bringing Mighty Theatre to the hip-hop youth of today.

But like, what? The difficulty in being a student committed to any project related to social justice is the specific site of conflict you’re caught up in: The distance between the place you’re in, and the places your work implicates. A very real theoretical and material distance that trilly needs to be acknowledged and negotitated.

Its by no means an awful thing that we’ve been fortunate enough to exposed to a breadth of systems of knowledge, mentors to guide us as well as the opportunity to spend a few extra years growing into ourselves before we’re gobbled up by all the great mouths of zipper faces we built to compensate for our lack of pyramids.

But it is always a problematic situation when any of us presume to have a monopoly on knowledge and assume leadership because of it. It’s an oft-repeated theme, and I’m definitely guilty of this myself: A young graduate arriving home, believing himself equipped with all tools necessary to shake this world by the shorts and take whatever change he wants. He’s got it all in the (book)bag.

What I’ve noticed about the academic approach to artistic discipline is that it tends to occur in an imagined “neutral” context, a presumed objective space that studies the world while somehow standing outside of it (which is a pretty lol-worthy idea). In my experience, this tends toward an alienating disengagement with the world, its communities, and the people that are the lifeblood of both. Just imagine every time someone tries to “get down with the kids” via some lame revision of Shakespeare or whatever.

Among the many unhealthy/unhelpful things this perpetuates, I find that this disengagement tends to position a lot of art (in this case, theatre)

here…………………..and the rest of the world at large……………………………………..over here.

When it comes to hip-hop and theatre, it seems that every attempt to combine the two revolves around the idea of “sanitizing” the former to make it suitable for bending it around the stodgy old conventions of the latter.

So I’m wondering when it became standard practice to neatly compartmentalize art and theatre away from everything else? And then, effectively, what does this accomplish? What kind of orthodoxy and dogma and we submitting to, and by upholding that, what are we giving up? Maybe most importantly, what genius cutting-edge forms are we unable to recognize because of this lens?

I’ve been re-reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed lately (with monocle & expertly crafted chai tea riding shotgun and cooling beside me, I promise you) and a portion of it that spoke very loudly to me is how it is absolutely crucial to place faith in the people’s ability to recognize what it is they need, unique to their own circumstances, and create it or as Bambu put it down in MY INTERVIEW WITH HIM, “if there’s a change needed in Compton, the change needs to start from Compton“

I think that we will need to divorce ourselves from the old fundamentals and understandings (of movements represented by eloquent men of middle class stature, of education as a system of depositing knowledge into blank-slates of young people) and collectively build new ones that are equitable and just, lead by the experiences of those most disenfranchised by the old ways of seeing/doing.

So when it came to theatre, who says its a good look to “deliver” these hip-hop youth into the legitimized arms of an artistic standard whose history is attached to the hip of the old order many are seeking to break free from? Why be enfranchised by something that’s sought to destroy what’s unique about you and your history from the jump? Seems like a willing traipse toward self-destruction.

And if the people have historically – consciously or subconsciously – built the instruments of their liberation, then maybe the theatre for today’s youth already exists. Just maybe, its already here.

I’m sitting in a decent-sized hall, room for about 80 at max capacity, and at the top of the night, a young man is onstage delivering a crowd-pleasing medley of 90′s R&B favorites. Its all of the best parts of the 90′s in here, the parts we like to think made us who we are. DJ Quik teaching us how to dance, Playa’s maufuckin Holiday, HELLA DMX and not a single mention of 3-Strikes or the emaciation of the welfare state.

And I’m wondering, in this hollow belly that has pulled people from every corner and burb of Sacramento with its inimitable and unmistakable magnetism; where we dance dances of pure signification, where there is a stage and upon it a bevy of emcees assume identities and guide us through narratives using forms and conventions and signs we all implicitly have relationships not through textbooks and formal conditioning, but through the creative practice intrinsic to living, through each other, I’m wondering…in this place where there is distinctly performer and audience, but they are not rigidly dichotomized but rather in working dialectic (The performer proclaims “I’ma need y’all to move closer…I’ma need y’alls energy for this to work” and then they do, and then it does)

…is the theatre we’ve actually needed, the one we’ve been looking for, trying to synthesize in awkward artistic experiment after clumsy graduate dissertation – is it already here? Is it actually this immensely complex thing that we handle so simply, that has been made for us, is of us, and that we participate in and shape daily?

How much of the foundations for what we need exists already? Is it possible we just need to see the things we have through another lens?

I dunno. You tell me. We should talk:

young.d.scott@gmail.com

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