Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

photo: Courtesy Bethanie Hines

Can a performance on the Museum of Contemporary Art stage truly be considered hip-hop? Writer, dancer and storyteller Marc Bamuthi Joseph addresses the issue early on in his multimedia mixtape "the break/s" (running March 26-28); he quips that he's managed to convince the performing-arts machine that he is both high-art and hip-hop. And convince he has—over the past year "the break/s" has played to acclaim at such hoity-toity venues as the Walker in Minneapolis and the Kennedy Center in New York City. However, in Joseph's opinion, high-art settings do less to question the authenticity of the youth culture driving the show as the preconceptions of the audiences such venues attract.

"Folks see the show and want to divorce it from hip-hop; they feel the elements are there, but put it in a proscenium space and they want to call it something else. The problem is in the definition," Joseph says. "In our codification hip-hop is a signpost for some of the worst things about American culture: misogyny, hyper-consumerism, homophobia. So the trope is an effective mechanism for corporate culture to access a youth population who they actually belittle by pushing these tropes. Listening to commercial radio is really an insult to all our intelligences, and hip-hop is the same way: here's one view of young, urban America and that's all you’re going to get. 'the break/s' is theater and contemporary dance; it's no one thing. It's a demonstration of the evolution and diversity of the form."

Joseph explores diversity on a global scale; the show relates through verse, music and several dance styles Joseph's experiences traveling the world—Senegal, Paris, San Francisco, Cuba, Bosnia, Japan and Haiti, his parents' home country. Hip-hop, like jazz, blues and rock, is an influential American export, and "the break/s," while deeply personal, investigates how the form is adopted and transformed in a global context. "It's an amalgam of forms to document the transiency of identity across planet hip-hop," Joseph puts it. "A struggle with American identity in a trans-global society."

The title comes from Jeff Chang's history of hip-hop, Can't Stop Won't Stop, which documents the first parties, hosted by DJ Kool Herc in the South Bronx. Herc developed a spinning technique called the merry-go-round; he used the same record on two turntables, cueing up the breakdown on one as the other was finishing, thereby extending the most exciting part of the song indefinitely.

"The break is the place of possibility," Joseph says. "The break is not only where the music is stripped down, but that bare, raw moment, [where] there's infinite possibility for innovation, for gathering, for acceptance, for the imagination to flourish."

"the break/s" runs March 26-28 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, with shows at 7:30 p.m. each night. Buy tickets here.