It’s All Academic?
Last week I talked about how this time is the time for hip hop theater. This week’s blog is about current trends that will cement hip hop as the dominant force of the theater of the future. Specifically, how hip hop theater at the university level is starting to gain traction.
The university level is where the theater practitioners of the future are being trained. The students realized that there was a disconnect between who they are as aspiring artists and what they were being taught. In many instances they have taken the lead in working to incorporate hip hop into the creation of new work.
Here are just a few examples from a few universities:
- In 2004 undergraduates at NYU asked a faculty member to support the work they had been doing outside class in hip hop theater and combine it with their academic studies. They had been working on their own, because the traditional university curriculum was not meeting their needs. This led to the creation of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative.
- The University of California Santa Barbara established the Califest Hip-Hop Theatre Festival to celebrate hip hop culture.
- The University of Wisconsin Madison has the First Wave Spoken Word and Hip Hop Arts Learning Community. It has created a four year scholarship program for students to work with faculty and hip hop and spoken word artists to develop their craft.
Not all of these programs will be successful. But a lot will be.
I believe that this is just the beginning – watch for more hip hop theater productions happening all over.
Do you have other programs that we should know about? Let us know by commenting below