National Slam Champion, Marc B. Joseph
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a National Poetry Slam champion, Broadway veteran, GOLDIE award winner, and inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship which annually recognizes 50 of the country’s “greatest living artists.”Smithsonian Magazinenamed him, in 2007, one of the Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences.
Originally from New York City and currently living in Oakland, California, this acclaimed performer and arts activist has toured nationally and internationally including a performance at the 1st International Spoken Word Festival in Tokyo and in Santiago de Cuba where he joined the legendary Katherine Dunham as a part of the CubaNola Collective.
Bamuthi entered the world of literary performance after crossing the sands of “traditional” theater, most notably on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Stand-Up Tragedy.”
His most recent work, the break/s has been acclaimed as a new level of hip-hop theatre. A mixtape for the stage, the break/s is a multimedia infused theatrical journey and international travel diary across planet hip-hop, based on Can’t Stop Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang. Bamuthi developed this piece while completing the prestigious Arts Institute Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and it premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays
In 2007, Bamuthi’s work, Scourge, was presented internationally in Belgium, Italy and Netherlands. The performance reflects
Special Guest, Marc Bamuthi Joseph
on the plight of Haiti in the post-colonial New World and was developed while Bamuthi was a Phillis Wattis Artist-in-Residence at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Collaborators for Scourge include renowned choreographer Rennie Harris, Grammy-nominated composer John Santos, dramaturg Roberta Uno, and director Kamilah Forbes of the New York City Hip Hop Theater Festival.
His other evening-length works include Word Becomes Flesh,De/Cipher and No Man’s Land. Bamuthi’s works, which have been performed on stages from New York’s Lincoln Center to the Contemporary Theater in Seattle, have been described as everything from “electrifying” (The Houston Chronicle), to “ever-elegant” (The Washington Post) and has compelled The Seattle Times to name him their “cutting edge performer of the year” for 2003. In their review of Word Becomes Flesh, the New York Times declared his work to be “eloquent…seamless…and remarkable.”
Check out an excerpt from Marc performance of “the break/s” at the National Endowment for the Arts
Click here: “the break/s”, Written and Performed by Marc B. Joseph at the Walker Arts Center, April 2008
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