CNP Artist in Residence Series
THEATER: Join writer/performer Dahlak Brathwaite and director Roberta Uno for a conversation around their current developmental workshop of Brathwaite’s play Spiritrials.
Roberta Uno is a theater director and the Director of Arts in a Changing America, a national project on changing demographics and the arts based at the CalArts. Dahlak Brathwaite is a multi-faceted hip-hop artist maximizing his abilities as musician, actor, poet, and educator within the transformational space of the theater.
Inspired by Dahlak’s hip-hop album of the same name, Spiritrials layers characters, poetic verse, and dialogue over the content of the songs to create a theatrical piece that blurs the lines between hip-hop and dramatic performance. InSpiritrials, addiction, religion and the law intersect at a state sponsored rehabilitation program. The piece examines the factors that have mis-placed young Black men in a rite of passage through the criminal justice system, chronicling the journey of criminalization and the struggle for vindication and decriminalization in the eyes of the law and society.