Youth Speaks’ The Living Word Project Presents
the 7th Annual
Living Word Festival
RACE IS FICTION
A 10-day Festival
Curated by Artistic Director
Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Featuring New Performance Works, Live Music, and a Host of Outreach Activities
Including Workshops, Panels,
and a Live Graffiti Battle
October 17-26, 2008 in San Francisco and Oakland
Featured Artists and Participants Include Mos Def, Goapele, Chinaka Hodge, Rafael
Casal, Daveed Diggs, Nico Cary, Jason Samuels-Smith, Los Rakas, The Kev Choice
Ensemble, Delina Brooks, Jacinta Vlach, SF Jazz Youth All-Stars and
Guillermo Gomez-Pena
The 7th Annual Living Word Festival features the premiere of War Peace: The One Drop
Rule, a youth driven hip hop theater piece that imagines the Bay Area as a potential war
zone in a time of protracted drought. Directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, War Peace is
collaboratively written and performed by Chinaka Hodge, Rafael Casal, Daveed
Diggs, and Nico Cary. Now in their early 20s, these four artists boast work published
in journals such as McSweeney’s and Newsweek, hold performance credits that include
appearances on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry for HBO, and hold undergraduate degrees
from Berkeley, NYU, and Brown. They all grew up participating in programs by Youth
Speaks, the nation’s leading nonprofit presenter of spoken word performance,
education, and youth development programs.
War Peace features an original score by the SF Jazz Youth All-Stars, while Emmy
award winning choreographer and tap sensation Jason Samuels-Smith joins the cast
and performs a percussive tap and modern movement vocabulary to underscore the
work’s spoken language.
“The Living Word Festival is committed to presenting groundbreaking new
interdisciplinary work rooted in spoken word,” said Festival Curator Marc Bamuthi
Joseph. “War Peace is another extraordinary new work that manipulates the spoken word form and introduces other collaborators and artistic disciplines to complete their
narrative scope.”
War Peace is the Living Word Project’s eighth, verse-based interdisciplinary work, and
joins critical successes such as the break/s, In Spite of Everything, and the Robert
Moses’ Kin collaboration Cause. War Peace takes place at Theater Artaud on Thursday
and Friday, October 23 and 24. Additional programming on October 23 is a new solo
work by spoken word pioneer Regie Cabico, directed by playwright, poet, actor,
director, and founding member of the Pomo Afro Homos, Brian Freeman. Additional
programming includes an excerpt of Beauty, the Beast by Delina Brooks, featuring
Jacinta Vlach and Liberation Dance Theater.
On Saturday, October 25, The Living Word Festival presents the San Francisco premiere
of Mapa Corpo2, a new work by acclaimed performance artist, writer, activist, and
educator Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra at Theater Artaud at 8pm.
The Living Word Festival’s Workshops & Educational Activities
The Living Word Festival kicks off on October 17, with workshops and performances cohosted
by SF Green Festival, Global Exchange, and Grind 4 Green at the Museum of the
African Diaspora (MOAD) in downtown San Francisco. The workshops are followed by a
lunchtime outdoor concert with Goapele, Urban Word NYC, and the Kev Choice
Ensemble at Yerba Buena Gardens at 12:30pm.
The Festival’s outreach activities continue on October 18, when the Living Word Festival
presents red black and GREEN, an Environmental Caucus and Concert at deFremery
Park in Oakland. The thematic focus of the day will be eco-equity, committed to the
position that poor communities and communities of color be logistically and
psychologically included into the new, clean and green economy.
The day will feature the 2nd Annual Estria Invitational Living Word Graffiti Battle,
a partnership with Samurai Graffix. Twenty contest participants will be given a 6x8 foot
canvas, biodegradable materials, and non-aerosol, non-toxic paint and will be charged
with creating environmentally themed, graffiti style tags around the park. The work will
be sold at a silent auction to benefit Youth Speaks. An outdoor performance in the park
featuring MOS DEF, Los Rakas, and DJ Leydis will be held concurrently.
The day also features Bamboo Architecture, an educational partnership with Global
Exchange that will teach youth about the environmental strength of bamboo, and
charge them with building bamboo structures (to be later displayed at the San Francisco
Green Festival in November.)
Living Word Festival 2008
RACE IS FICTION
Calendar
October 17-26, 2008
OCTOBER 17, 2008
10am
Museum of the African Diaspora, SF MoMA, Yerba Buena Center
685 Mission Street (at Third), San Francisco
Workshops and performances co-hosted by
SF Green Festival, Global Exchange, and Grind for the Green.
12:30pm
Yerba Buena Gardens
760 Howard Street, San Francisco
Lunchtime outdoor concert with Goapele, Urban Word NYC and The Kev Choice
Ensemble
OCTOBER 18
11am-5pm
red black and GREEN
Environmental Caucus and Concert at deFremery Park (aka Little Bobby Hutton Park)
1651 Adeline Street
Oakland, CA
Featuring the 2nd annual Living Word Graffiti Battle, Bamboo Architecture, Against Eco-
Apartheid: A Speaker Series and a free outdoor musical concert featuring Mos Def, Los
Rakas, and DJ Leydis.
OCTOBER 23, 2008
7pm
Theater Artaud
450 Florida Street, San Francisco
Regie Cabico in a new solo work
And War Peace: The One Drop Rule
OCTOBER 24, 2008
7pm
Theater Artaud
450 Florida Street, San Francisco
Jacinta Vlach Liberation Dance Theater presents Animal Farm
and War Peace: The One Drop Rule
OCTOBER 25, 2008
7:30pm
Theater Artaud
450 Florida Street, San Francisco
Beauty, the Beast (excerpt) by Delina Brooks.
AND
Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s La Pocha Nostra in MapaCorpo2
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