Word Made Flesh

"...if you are a child of hip-hop, the simple truth is that in the beginning was the word, and the word was spoken in body language."

From "(Yet Another) Letter to a Young Poet"

"...it's only in the delirium of the dance that things make sense,"

From "(Yet Another) Letter to a Young Poet"

"When I'm moving/More inclined to nourish the body/Than to feed the mouth/When I am in a cycle of pushing my body consistently it is temple/I am devout."

From Secrets 1 written by Marc Bamuthi Joseph; composed and arranged by Daniel Bernard Roumain

Had you come from a dance background?

MBJ

I grew up in musicals. I was an understudy in The Tap Dance Kid. I did an Ntozake Shange play called Betsy Brown. Yes, I grew up studying jazz, ballet, a lot of tap and then eventually modern. In college, I started studying Haitian folkloric movement, West African dance and Cuban folkloric movement. Narrative has always been alive in my body. Doing the poetry slam, you're kind of restricted to the microphone stand and the mike. So, I started moving away from stillness at the mike and really began thinking about movement.

"An aesthetic is a mode of intellectual energy that only exists when in operation..."

Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion

I experience God as a verb, not a noun. I experience art in the same way. The music doesn't live on a flat disc, it lives in the thing it does to your hips. So it is with my writing.

I compose for embodiment.

I write word with the intent to live it through movement.

At the end of Song of Solomon, Morrison writes, '...if you surrender to the air, you can ride it.' If words are my air, dance is my surrender. In the intersection of movement and text, the collapsed space for breath to speak is like a different kind of oxygen. I am intellectually piqued by the physical journey it takes to meet the spiritual place I wish to occupy.

"A way of walking is as profound as a system of judgment."

Amiri Baraka

My poetry practicum courses rest on a system of nine hip-hop generation elements: ritual, energetic reciprocity, first sound, urgency, dub, (in)visibility, the break, sampling, and style. (Beyond these, there is a tenth insight, magic, which I don't teach, but whose presence I identify, and whose receptivity I advocate for.) Of these core elements, I suggest to students that the most important is ritual, defined less by its physical machinations, than by its intended outcome: transformation...

My own self-transformation is never a dry affair, literally...

Inside the dance, my skin cries salt, I find myself in midair riding an ancestor over drums, and am reborn...

If my mouth is moving, my brain is workin'. If my body is moving, my SPIRIT is workin'.

My poems are just fine, but they don't make complete sense unless intentionally read as spell for dance. It is the way of their walk...

I think there was a time when an artist was viewed as someone who makes something whether it's a performance, a piece of theater, a piece of literature that inspires people or impacts people. What we're seeing now is the role of the artist changing into someone who is a catalyst within our communities. How do you place yourself?

MBJ

As a healthy human being that experiences discomforts and setbacks, those discomforts and setbacks often create the space for my art to flourish. It's in the healing from those setbacks that I find a place for writing, that I find a place for moving.

It's through my sweat that I am redeemed as a human being. I feel reborn in the artistic practice.

Ultimately my role as artist is to reflect that healing through movement and word for the collective. But what I most want to reflect and what most makes me me is my parentage, my intimate relationships, the ones that I don't talk about on stage, or the ones that I might talk about on stage. The more I humble myself to the larger practice of education, the more vital and meaningful and integral my art practice.