Thanks to the industrious and radical Aaron Jafferis for making sure that the blogging these days isn’t all about those tyrannic Tonys.
Aarron’s theater has always been street, even when it’s Shakespeare (he did a solo rap routine based on the bard) or trapped in an elevator. His most recent musical, Stuck Elevator, got a prestigious developmental workshop at the Yale School of Drama last year, resulting in a staged reading presented at part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. His earlier musical Kingdom, based on real-life stories of members of the Almighty Latin King & Queen Nation, was developed in New Haven (where the Latin Kings have had a presence for decades) through the Bregamos Community Theater and has been seen internationally and at the 2006 New York Musical Theatre Festival.
Jafferis teaches at New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts magnet high school, and writes to tell me that:
Peter Loffredo and I have been leading a class at ACES ECA in which high school students use hip-hop theatre to create an original play about Education that they will perform on May 5th and 6th at 7 pm in the ECA Arts Hall. They wrote scenes exploring their personal experiences with education, researched contemporary educational issues in various media and presented their findings via hip-hop theatre. Michael DeBarge, a hip-hop musician, has worked with the students to develop music for their written work – incorporating human beatboxing, body percussion, and melody into the hip-hop scenes, and choreographer Yotam Kafri has helped them explore hip-hop movement.
Thanks, Aaron! You’ll recognize Peter Loffredo’s name from Connecticut Heritage Productions and as one of the directors/performers/overseers of the Connecticut Stories on Stage playwriting competition mentioned in this blog a couple weeks ago.
The hip-hop education is piece is what Aaron’s up to this week. Next week—May 11 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the John Slade Ely House (51 Trumbull St., New Haven) he’s part of a fundraising performance, discussion and party to help the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project and the aforementioned Bregamos Community Theatre create a theater initiative “to create plays as a rehearsal for social justice” in both New Haven and its Nicaraguan sister city. The project will utilize the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques developed by Brazilian director Augusto Boal in the 1970s. (Go look it up—brilliant stuff, which I’ll write more extensively about here some other time.)
Taking it to the streets, via a high school and a 50-year-old community arts center. Go, Aaron!
The ECA Arts Hall is at the corner of Orange and Audubon streets. The Ely House is at 51 Trumbull St., both in New Haven.