photo: John Coyne

The Gray Center and the Chicago Humanities Festival team up to present Marc Bamuthi Joseph in conversation with Logan Center Exhibitions Curator Yesomi Umolu.  Join us for their discussion of Joseph's /peh-LO tah/, a new performance work that seeks to explore the linkages between the sport of soccer with local and global economic hierarchies, fan behaviors, political allegiances and sexual proclivities. aesthetics.

While recent allegations of corruption have tainted FIFA World Cup, soccer – the 'beautiful game' – is a truly global sport that has long inspired its countless devoted fans. In the hands of arts activist, spoken word artist, and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, soccer becomes a site for exploring the ecology of egalitarianism across cultures. From his travels to leagues in the United States and soccer capitals in places like Brazil and South Africa, Bamuthi comes to the Gray Center and CHF to perform excerpts from and discuss /peh-LO tah/, his new work that layers poetic text, movement, images, and music into a fresh theatrical form based on hip-hop aesthetics.

Ticketed event open to the public (CHF members $9, Public $12, Students & Teachers $5). 

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a pillar of American performance, arts education, and artistic curation. After appearing on Broadway as a young actor, Joseph wrote and performed in a series of poetically-based works for the stage that have toured worldwide, including Word Becomes Flesh, Scourge, and the break/s: a mixtape for stage, which co-premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays and the Walker Arts Center (2008). His full-evening theater work, red, black & GREEN: a blues premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2011) and completed touring in 2014.  It appeared at the MCA Chicago in 2012.  red, black & GREEN: a blues was nominated for a Bessie (2013) for “Outstanding Production of a work stretching the boundaries of a traditional form.” The Walker Arts Center says of his work that “it’s socially engaged without being didactic, and utilizes a high-level of self-awareness, self-deprecation and humor that disarms an audience that worries about being preached to.”
 
Joseph’s commissions include Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos (2015), the libretto for Home in 7 for the Atlanta Ballet (2011) and theater work for South Coast Repertory Theater’s “Crossroads Commissioning Project.” His essays have been published in Cultural Transformations: Youth and the Pedagogies of Possibility (Harvard Education Press, 2013); and Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic Civitas, 2007). Joseph has lectured at more than 200 colleges, has carried adjunct professorships at Stanford and Lehigh, among others, and currently serves as Director of Performing Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  He co-founded “Life is Living,” a national series of one-day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life. Joseph has won numerous grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and Creative Capital Foundation. Named one of “America’s Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences,” he graced the cover of Smithsonian Magazine (2007), received the inaugural US Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2007), and was an inaugural Doris Duke artist (2012).
 
He is currently collaborating on new projects with Bill T. Jones and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (We Shall Not Be Moved; BLACKBIRD, FLY).  /peh-LO-tah/ is being developed as an ensemble work for the Living Word Project.

This program forms part of a Mellon Fellowship exploratory & research residency at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.