Justin Woo and LeDerick Horne
Photo Credit: New Street Collective
LeDerick Horne and Justin Woo each had experience as spoken word solo artists when they began their artistic collaboration. Devised in response to a commission to bring young people into the theater, New Street Poets melds the infectious rhythms of spoken word poetry with the dramatic structure of classical drama.
Their production, playing this month at the CSV Cultural Center, calls to mind operettas, precursors to the style of musical theater that now dominates Broadway, which featured songs strong together with plot. The interminable popularity of love songs easily led to a lot of operetta love stories, and consequently, most musicals in history are about love.
Love is also a popular topic of spoken word poetry -- and so are identity, politics, and urban life. It follows, then, that New Street Poets, originally developed in 2006 as the first New Street Collective production, addresses gentrification and its impact on an urban arts community. I spoke with Horne and Woo about their collaborative process, the challenges of remounting the production, and what else they have on their artistic to do list.
What are the origins of your production?
LH: The idea for New Street Poets began in the spring of 2006. My spoken word CD Rhyme Reason and Song had been out for a year and a copy of the CD made its way to Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, NJ. Crossroads (like many regional theaters) recognized it needed to bring in more young people, so I was asked to develop a poetry show that would appeal to a younger demographic.
I began writing and running community based open mics for the local residents and Rutgers University students in New Brunswick during the late nineties. Over the years I had experienced the way the city was slowly been gentrified and redeveloped into a place that I no longer recognized or felt connected to in a meaningful way. Infect, the small cafe that I read my first poems at, had been taken by eminent domain, demolished and replaced with a very nice parking deck. So when I was offered the opportunity to develop a show that would be staged in the heart of my creative (and literal) birthplace, I decided to create a drama that would tell the story of a community of artists who were struggling to keep their artistic home alive while the city around them was being reinvented.
I was more of a poet then a playwright so I started looking for a group of writers that could help me shape the idea I had into two act play. The first person I ran into was Justin Woo. Justin was a featured poet at a Katrina benefit I attended. We met after the show and I pitched him my idea. Justin had also been a college student at Rutgers University who had come of age in the open mics on and near campus that catered primarily to students. Justin and I recruited two other poet-actors, Reginald S. Burch (aka Mikumari of the Ilumeni hip hop crew) and Scott Tarazevits (of Mayhem Poets). Justin and I worked on developing the show's arc and a series of writing prompts to help us all create poems that would drive the story's plot forward. And in less than two months we created and staged New Street Poets. The first version of the play was staged as a one-man show. We sold that show out and then started looking at ways to expand the play to tell the story of cities and communities throughout the country. We brought in two more poet-actors, Isis Phoenix and Michelle Seabreeze, both Manhattan residents, and together we rewrote the play to be what it is today.
JW: I had been going to open mics like Verbal Mayhem in New Brunswick since 2001, and they really helped shape me as an artist. I was a Rutgers University student, so I was there for four years, and it was strange seeing how drastically everything was changing. When I go back there now, five years later, the change is profound. The town went from a rugged, grungy, spunky college town to a polished, condo-and-yuppie haven, with rapidly shrinking community neighborhoods, gradually being replaced with student housing and new condos. As a student, you're only tangentially involved in directing gentrification, even though much of the blame for gentrification can be laid at the feet of Rutgers.
Appropriately, it was the open mics that I participated in at Rutgers that booked me for the Katrina benefit where I met LeDerick. The original crew of LeDerick, Scott, Reggie, and myself all found each other via open mics before we united for this project. So I can confidently say that without open mics, this project may never have happened.
Has the changing economic climate had an impact on the show?
JW: We've always attempted to keep the show as up to date and relevant as possible. In the original play, we made reference to the possibility of the New Jersey Nets being moved to Brooklyn as part of the enormously destructive and manipulative Atlantic Yards redevelopment project. We specifically mentioned Jason Kidd, at the time a prominent NJ Net. He's since moved on and we've had to change things around a bit. That's just a minor example, but I think it points to what we're trying to do.
The economic crisis hit between productions of the play, so during the run up to CSV, we've been doing some tweaking. My character, Aiden, has a major moment in the second half of the play wherein he has "sold out" so to speak, and has joined an ad firm. He has a job and makes good money, but hates it, and immensely dislikes how his life has turned out. While that worked great in 2007, where materialism seemed absolutely rampant, and America still hadn't gotten over its love of the SUV, in 2010, after the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, no one's going to have much sympathy for someone who has a job, health insurance, and a steady paycheck. So I moved the focus of that part of the play away from the job and more towards a sub-narrative about how his parents have absolutely rejected him because of his choice to major in English and get involved in activism in college. This was also meant to speak to the issues of community (and what happens when it disappears) that are at the core of our play.
How does your writing process use conventions of both spoken word and theater?
LH: Spoken word draws very heavily from theater. Justin was the first person to tell me that when a spoken word poet steps on stage, there are the writer, director, choreographer and actor in a very short play that last the length of the poem. The biggest adjustment I faced was writing to prompts. As a solo poet you can just let inspiration hit you and then you bring your own inner editor to bear on the work. But in order to keep the writing of six different artists cohesive, we had to direct the creative process. And then there was the joy of writing a five page poem you were in love with and having the group reduce it to five good lines that you would revise into a new poem that might be good enough to make it into the show. That was hard but it helped make the poetry and dialogue in the play that much better. Even with the constant editing the first draft of the play came in at over three hours in length. We then cut that down two the two hour show that you see on stage. The play is the best of the best work the six of us could create.
JW: I believe that in every good spoken word piece, the performer / writer will take the audience through an emotional arc not unlike that of a good classically structured play. Using spoken word in theater is a natural progression of the form, I feel. Instead of each individual poem being self-contained, each section naturally leads to the next. I've considered using these poems at open mics or slams, but they don't stand up on their own. They're definitely meant to be seen together, as part of a whole two hour play.
The play also incorporates dialogue as well as poetry, and often, the inclusion or poetry or its absence say something about the emotional place the characters are in. In the first half, poetry is indicative of heightened emotion. In the second half, some of the poetry bleeds away, and its absence is meant to show how the characters have changed after they've lost their artistic and physical home.
What impact do you hope to have on diverse audiences?
LH: Throughout the writing process I constantly asked us to think about what this was going to look like to the audience. I like work that has many levels but is still very entertaining and assessable. So first and foremost I want people to have a good time and be deeply moved by the characters we bring to the stage. The play is also a cautionary tale of what can happen to communities if the residents are not meaningfully involved in how their neighborhood changes. We researched the ways gentrification is being fought by communities in big cities and small towns across the country. The play shows that struggle in a very personal way that cannot be fully captured in newspaper articles or the nightly news.
I have enjoyed hearing how people from very rural areas have connected with the play in the same way as people living in cities. It seems that the story is all the same as if you are losing your block or the family farm to the forces of "progress." It is still the same pain and the same desire to retain what once was.
JW: LeDerick told me once that he really wants audiences to walk away from this play, and look at new developments, new buildings, and ask "What was there before? Who lived here before me?" - because cities are an ever-evolving organism, and it's very easy to forget the past, and lose the history of a place.
In a lot of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, people were pushed out so new people can move in. Despite my artistic endeavors, it would be easy to classify me as a yuppie. I'm middle class. I go to work wearing khakis and spend eight hours in a cubicle. I live near New York City. I am the target demographic for gentrification - not to be pushed out and replaced, but rather people are pushed out and replaced so people like me can move in. A lot of theater-goers also fall into my demographic. I want us to think about what the impact of our presence might be, and perhaps re-examine our assumptions of what is a "good" neighborhood and what is a "bad neighborhood."
Very often, the story of gentrification has strong undercurrents of race. Harlem is being crushed under and replaced with buildings and housing for Columbia through a highly undemocratic process. Atlantic Yards, a high-density high rise luxury housing development has replaced parts of Prospect Heights and Fort Greene in Brooklyn, changing and replacing huge swathes of a neighborhood that has been developing organically for decades. Chinatown's famous Canal Street just got rezoned for luxury hotels, which will begin the process of annihilation for an ethnic neighborhood that is very close to my heart - my grandparents came to New York's Chinatown almost sixty years ago, and used that ethnic enclave as a launchpad to improve their lot economically and ensure that their children and grandchildren went to college. These are stories that aren't discussed in theater because by the time a neighborhood is redeveloped, its spirit and its strength is dispersed and destroyed. The voices of these people cannot speak as a chorus anymore. They become reduced to individual former residents reminiscing - "Remember way back when?"
Why is it necessary to completely remove the old residents of a neighborhood to "improve" it? Why does a minority neighborhood need to be torn down and replaced for it to be considered "good" and worthy of infrastructure investments, business investments, tax breaks, and attention from the city? I want the audience to ask these questions.
What other projects do you have in development?
LH: The New Street Collective is working on a play called Commencement that builds on the work I have done as an advocate for people with disabilities. The play uses spoken word to tell the story of two high school students, one in special education and the other in advanced placement classes. The play forces them to get to know each other and they begin building respect and understanding. We hope to send this show into schools throughout the US as a way to bridge some of the hierarchical structures we have within education and the larger society. Much like New Street, the characters in Commencement will speak primarily in verse. We see ourselves as creating work for the new generation that has come up going to poetry readings and listing to rap on their iPods. Capturing those rhythms and using them to tell relevant stories is what makes us unique as writers.
