The Orange County Great Park, in collaboration with Arts Orange County, presents The Orange County Premiere of "The Spoken World: Poetry in Motion with the Award-winning Marc Bamuthi Joseph"

The inaugural season of Arts Happenings at the Orange County Great Park’s new Palm Court Arts Complex concludes with an audacious and astounding “poetry in motion” program featuring United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award winner Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

Using his signature art form of “choreopoetry,” a highly theatrical and mesmerizing blend of spoken word and dance movement, Marc Bamuthi Joseph articulates the story of achieving manhood in the United States through the lens of hip hop, global travel, and urban environmental health

The Spoken World is a three-part experience that includes an excerpt of the award winning Word Becomes Flesh, which examines pregnancy through the eyes of fatherhood. In five phases, the actor reflects on the moment of learning his child was male, the legacy of negativity among black boys, his own childhood, the practice of natural childbirth, and the relationship between his son and his grandfather.
Part two, taken from the 2008 premiere the break/s, is a travel diary across planet hip hop. The actor recalls voyages to Senegal, Haiti, Bosnia, and Japan, examining the way hip hop culture has transformed the perception of American citizenship across the world.
In part three, Joseph performs the first section of his 2011 premiere red black and GREEN: a blues. This section uses poetry and movement to connect the dots between a mourning mother at festival for life in Chicago and a motherless vocalist learning about environment in Sudan.
 

About the Artist
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is one of America’s vital voices in performance, arts education, and artistic curation. In the Fall of 2007, Bamuthi graced the cover of Smithsonian Magazine after being named one of America’s Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences. He is the artistic director of the 7-part HBO documentary “Russell Simmons presents Brave New Voices” and an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, which annually recognizes 50 of the country’s “greatest living artists”. He is the 2011 Alpert Award winner in Theater and in April 2012, he was one of 21 artists to be named to the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artists. He currently serves as Director of Performing Arts at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco.

After appearing on Broadway as a young actor, Joseph has developed several poetically based works for the stage that have toured across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Africa. These include Word Becomes Flesh, Scourge, and the break/s, which co-premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays and the Walker Arts Center in the Spring of 2008. Bamuthi’s Word Becomes Flesh was re-mounted in December 2010 as part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ “American Masterpieces” series. Joseph’s current evening length project, red black and green: a blues documents the eco-equity movement towards green collar jobs in Black neighborhoods and is a featured project in the 2012 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life through hip hop arts and focused environmental action.
 

**Come hungry!  FLIP TRUCK will be there from 5pm - 8pm serving up some really REALLY good sliders and fries!**