“I Know I Can”: Using ‘Freestyle Theater’ Techniques for Theater-in-Education Workshops!

Article by Nicole “Nikol” Hodges

    Be, B-Boys and girls, listen up.
    You can be anything in the world, in God we trust,
    An architect, doctor, maybe an actress …
    (“I Can”, Nas)

For the past year, I have been conducting experimental theater workshops in local Los Angeles high schools with youth that are given the poisonous label of “at-risk”. “At-Risk” of what? After spending six months of my life with these kids, my definitive answer is that my kids were “at-risk” of losing their unlimited potential. Our youth need art to help them discover their relationships to their environments and one another; without it, as Tupac, warns us, it’s hard to grow like a rose from concrete.

My workshops tested a method using Hiphop pedagogy that I have named “Freestyle Theater”. My method for developing these theater-in-education workshops borrows from the Hiphop technique of “sampling” where I create a re-mix of critical pedagogies and improvisational theater techniques. The workshop consisted of using Hiphop songs as text to engage youth to create solutions to problems they faced in their environments everyday. In response to Greg Dimitriadis’ call for educators to rise to the challenge of developing new ways to address the complex relationship of youth to popular culture (Dimitriadis, 2001), “Freestyle Theater” is an attempt to make a positive intervention to create curricula that help youth negotiate the meanings of Hiphop texts in relationship to their everyday lives. Freestyle Theater is different from Hiphop Theater because the dialogue is not pre-written, but completely improvised based on given scenarios. Students “write” their dialogue on stage first and then commit it to memory.

All of the classes I teach take place in underserved communities where the youth do not have access to the theater in or out of school. Youth, ages 15 to 18, participated in three phases in the Freestyle Theater workshop: 1) Developing observation and critical translation skills of Hiphop texts and learning basic performance techniques; 2) expressing and critiquing personal and social issues; 3) creating and performing personal and collective narratives of shared social experiences. Using Hiphop as text, Hiphop Pedagogy builds on critical pedagogy and challenges the production of knowledge, values and collective identities that take place and/or are created within particular social, historical, cultural, institutional and textual formations (Giroux and Mc Laren, 1994). Hiphop music’s “freestyle” element, where rap artists must maintain a level of “lyrical fitness” and social awareness in order to respond to their surroundings spontaneously, is directly correlated to concepts of critical consciousness found in critical pedagogy.

In the initial phases of the workshops, students learned the basic foundation and language of Improv Games and began to incorporate that language into their performance vocabulary. These skills parallel the “call and response” component of Hiphop music formats and illustrate the recursive nature of interaction and communication between students (Dimitradis, 2001, p18). Students learned about the theater and the stage in the initial phases of the workshop so that they would feel comfortable in later performance settings. I used traditional theater exercises such as body and vocal “warm-up”, but changed the emphasis to Hiphop. Each week, students participated in an activity I called “breakdown”. The “breakdown” exercise required students to play a Hiphop song and listen for key Improv components. Students identified “who” or “what” was playable in the song.

Participants made connections between the community and the urban environments depicted in the songs. For example, Manny, age 18, said: “We live in the ghetto. All this stuff happens all the time. Homies get shot and shit. I mean you know what I mean. I’m just trying to get out.” While questioning his own relationships to the music and the community, Manny made connections that I identified as dialogue he could present on stage. He and his “crew” in class improvised a three-person scene about a friend getting shot by a rival crew. The scene ended with the youth thinking about organizing a truce to stop the violence in their community. The youth made sure to leave the ending of the scene open to interpretation by the audience. The characters in the scene said they would think about a truce. Faced with the dichotomy of violence and peace, these youth began to look at their situations, open a dialogue and take small steps to incite change in their community.

Overall, my experience with youth in my community has been amazing and overwhelming. I tell my “at-risk” kids how they are perceived by the status quo. Once aware of how they are viewed from the outside, students began to stand and claim their own potential. At the end of each ten-week session, I find youth telling me that they will direct a play or a movie one day. One student told me “I can be better than Pacino if I wanted to.” Maybe he’ll be an actor on Broadway. Better yet, maybe he’ll take action in his own community and run for mayor. All I know is that Hiphop Pedagogy is a vital tool for theater-in-education. Theater and Hiphop provide a way for youth, to paraphrase Nas, “to be what they want to be, if they work hard at it.” Art can save the kids y’all.


References

Dimitriadis, Greg. 2001. Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice. New York: Peter Lang.

Giroux, Henry A., and Peter Mc Laren. 1994. Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.


Contact: Nicole “Nikol” Hodges hodges@hiphoparchive.org