Best known as a poet/novelist/alternative theatre performer, and recording artist, Carl Hancock Rux detonates the boundaries between contemporary and classical theatre, between theatre and performance poetry, and between jazz, dance and literature. He builds cities of illusion—born out of urban realities and mythological structures—in which anything is possible, and has collaborated with artists as diverse as Urban Bush Women and Jane Comfort. With language and musicality at the core of his aesthetic vision, he examines his own politics by shaking down the truth of the past. Rux’s incantatory work stirs currents deep below the surface and remains in the body of memory.

"If my work is non-linear it is because I have never inhabited linear space. As an African-American male who came of age in foster care and a hip-hop generation, my attraction to Greek mythology, the novels of Proust, Baldwin, Gayl Jones, the poetry of Modernism, Post-modernism and negritude, was an attempt to reach outside of myself in order to understand the geography of my existence. The constructs of race, family and community were given to me as preoccupations, which is to say I inherited a way of seeing that I am still in the process of trying to disinherit. I’m invading my own privacy and trying to write a theater—not a play—of pluralism, in which I can survive emancipation. Writing is the only means of cultural resistance and cultural acceptance I know."