Thespianage: A DAS Update
Posted on 11. Oct, 2009 by Tim Widmer in Campus
Dramatic Arts Society (DAS) is happy to announce their 2009-2010 Season. DAS once again continues in its tradition of excellent theater this year with a jam-packed new season, and boy, this season is a great one! Not only do I have to tell you that because I am the intern and it is my job, but because we truly do have an awesome season lined up. Many of you attended Lyrics from Lockdown, our first major event of the year. The incredible Bryonn Bain rocked the microphone in our very own Dauphene Chapel this past Sunday. The show had an incredible turnout and an incredible showing of support, and I would like to thank all of you your support of an incredible performer. Bain’s one man show is not that only incredible thing we are going to bring to you this year.
Our next event is entitled Shuffle: A 24 Hour Festival. I have to say this is one of my favorite events of the year. All of the artists will get together, and in twenty-four hours, we will prepare and perform for one night only these brand-new creations. Last year, I had the opportunity to direct for the event, and I have to say that it is by far one of the most exciting and entertaining theater going experiences I have been a part of. Four writers, four directors, twenty actors, twenty-four hours of craziness. Shuffle will be performed on November 15th.
Later this quarter the Dramatic Arts Society has been commissioned by the Adventist Association of Women and Spectrum Magazine to create a new work entitled This Adventist Life. The piece imitates the NPR live radio show of a similar name (This American Life) and is hosted by PUC’s own Alexander Carpenter. The show itself is a combination of story, song, and video mashup using material ranging from the 1990s film The Nostradamus Kid, and the Uncle Arthur bedtime story The Two Carolines. In short, this show is about what makes us Adventist when viewed by insiders and by those outside of the community looking in.
And that’s just fall quarter.
Winter Quarter brings us an as yet untitled new work festival, headed up by new work by local playwrights, including many aspiring student playwrights. Spring Quarter will bring the sounds of show tunes to our campus, as the next big DAS project will be a full musical production. The word on the street is that it just might be the famous Sound of Music.
It’s going to be an incredible year of theater, and I hope to see you all at the show!
The Man Behind the Lyrics: An interview with Bryonn Bain
Posted on 11. Oct, 2009 by Peter Katz in Interview
Bryonn Bain interviewd by Peter Katz
C2: Race and ethnicity play a big part in your show. Tell us a little about your family background.
BB: My family is like the United Nations. My mom’s side is South Asian; she came to Trinidad from India. My dad’s side came to Trinidad from West Africa. So I’m Asian, I’m African… I grew up in Panama, […] speaking Spanish and English. I’ve also traveled pretty extensively throughout Latin America.
C2: So, how did you get started doing spoken word/hip hop?
BB: I grew up performing. My dad was a calypso singer, who won his way to New York City. Calypso is Trinidad’s gift to the world. I remember being seven years old singing “Matilda, Matilda…” [laughs] I had no idea that there was some serious patriarchal implications; it’s like old-school “Gold digger.” Calypso singers have names like rappers […] one of my favorites was a guy named Black Stalin. My favorite song of his was all about evil and the afterlife, all the folks in the world who have been greedy getting their just deserts. I grew up with that [calypso music], so it was inevitable. My brothers and I began performing in high school talent shows, and then in local prisons during the holidays. For us, it was a great time to connect with folks who would really appreciate it—[laughs] I mean, they’ve got nowhere to go, it’s a captive audience, right? I had no idea that a decade later, after going to prisons around the country to raise awareness in local communities about how devastating the prison system is to society, I would have an encounter with the NYPD that would lead me to suing them.
C2: Outside of your cultural background, what else has influenced you in your work; specifically, which artists and genres?
BB: I’ve been in singing groups, hip hop bands, writing poetry since elementary school. As a kid, my first rappers and poets were people like Rock Kim, Microphone Fiend … What I admired was their ability to speak intelligently through music in a way that was not preachy, but was really captivating and spoke to the realities of folks who didn’t’ have a lot of access to material wealth, but who had an abundance of spiritual wealth to give to the world. Later on, people lie Queen Latifah in her early days, Lauryn Hill, MC Light, Run DMC, LL Cool J, the Jackson 5. On the other hand, I have a lot of more “traditional influences.” My English teacher in either 7th or 8th grade gave us The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, and I read the line about “tap tap tapping on my door” and I was like, “This guy’s rapping in the nineteenth century.” Other poets like Langston Hughes…that whole movement; the music of jazz singers like Billie Holiday Nina Simone, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith. My dad had really eclectic musical tastes. Obviously, there was a lot of calypso, but he also played reggae…anything from Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, to Chopin and Bach and Mozart. Just this last week, I worked some classical music into the show. I think it not only provides a really profound contrast, but it demonstrates the wider whole of the human experience, how everything ties in.
C2: Can you explain that a little more?
BB: Hip hop and theater audiences traditionally aren’t the same audience. Hip hop appears in the inner city with Black and Latinos in the early nineteen hundreds; classical music is music that came out of Europe from 1500-1900—and that’s the period during which my ancestors were being enslaved. I think contrasting what’s seeing as “high civilization” with what has unfortunately received the stereotype of being “low civilization” or “low art” shows on some level that they come from a similar human need to express something that’s beyond ourselves.
C2: I know that part of your play deals with a potentially wrongfully imprisoned man on death row whose sentence may be commuted to life. Is there any news on his case?
BB: Nanon Williams was incarcerated at seventeen for murdering someone during a bad drug deal. He’s admitted that he was part of the drug deal, but insists that he has not killed that person. For the last five years a newspaper revealed a series of fabrications revealing a lot of botched evidence in both his case and others involving the Houston Police Department. He’s having a new hearing around his case; his attorneys have gotten the court to rehear his case on January 11 of next year. There’s another man, Troy Davis, in a similar predicament. Seven out of nine witnesses in his case have recanted. When seven of nine say that they were lying…[unamused laugh].
The point is, though, even killing someone who has committed murder isn’t justice. We should be thinking of restorative justice. An eye for an eye is barbarous. Their cases are important, but they also raise the question, “what kind of society do we want to be?” Should one of the most modernized societies in the world still be using medieval methods to deal with social problems? Especially when it’s been established that the criminal justice system disproportionately incarcerates, murders, etc. people of color. It’s important to raise awareness where people would doubt a person of color, just because they might say that you’re only upset because that person looks like you.
C2: There are a couple of main themes that run through your show—race/ethnicity, the human experience, what it means to be an artist, an African-American—what do you think are some of the most important themes?
BB: I think there are a few themes that run throughout the show. One of the main themes appears right at the beginning: things are often not what they seem. All too often, we see people on the outside, take things at surface value, when in reality, there are always sublevels, I mean layers and layers […]. It’s wrong to suggest that people are anything otherwise, that we aren’t multiple layers; people of other backgrounds are of a far more complex background than we know. At the same time, at some point, we have this common essence. Some people believe that we are our bodies that have a soul. I don’t. I don’t think we have a soul, I think we are a soul, and our souls have these bodies. If you have that basic point, that we have the is underlying spirit that’s beyond all this, that—at least for me—forces me to not assume that I understand the journey of someone else’s soul, however many years, decades, hundreds of years that might be. I think that the show is getting that the idea that, though it’s almost cliché to say that we can’t judge a book by its cover, we forget, we need to be reminded of it. Give folks the benefit of the doubt, motivating folks beyond what we see on the surface of things.
Another overall theme is the of the inhumanity of a society that is the most powerful, most technologically advanced society in history, yet still feels the need to strip more people of their rights than any other country. I mean, they put a 17 year old kid on death row; that just doesn’t happen with white kids. If white men were incarcerated with the frequency of black and brown, it would be a national crisis; we’d have analysts trying to figure out how to solve the problem. But that’s the thing. We weren’t brought here to become the president, we were brought here to be exploited. That calls for a central message of human justice. At the same time that I have all these serious topics, there’s a whole lot of humor, because we have to laugh to keep from crying. I certainly don’t take these topics lightly, but humor is an aid, a part of the process.
In the end, it comes down to the idea that “We are because I am”; there is no individual without his or her community. I think the piece is showing that. [Being wrongfully incarcerated] was an experience that changed my life, and so it’s an iteration of that experience and the folks to had the greatest influence on my life.
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