Marc Bamuthi Joseph, shown at center during the "Life is Living" festival, Chicago, 2009. Photo by Bethanie Hines.

“The movements for social change and environmental accountability are one and the same,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph. “And focusing on steps to sustain the planet will ultimately force us to envision a pathway to sustaining humanity.”

Finding that focus is the goal of the stage show red, black & GREEN: a blues, which Joseph and a host of collaborators present in performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 27-28, at the Lewiston Memorial Armory, 65 Central Ave.

Bates College and the Bates Dance Festival present this widely acclaimed multimedia production that brings to life personal stories about the impacts of a deteriorating environment. Doors will open at 8 p.m., and the piece begins with a 20-minute immersive audience experience on stage.

Tickets cost $20 for the general public and $10 for students, and are available at batestickets.com. Learn more.

Called “as smart and provocative as it is breathtakingly beautiful” by the San Francisco Chronicle, rbGb combines spoken word, music, dance and a stunningly dynamic stage design. Such eclecticism reflects Joseph himself — a true Renaissance man equally talented as a poet, a dancer, educator and activist.

April 24, 2012: Marc Bamuthi Joseph in a half-hour interview with Maine Public Broadcasting’s Suzanne Nance.
April 20, 2012: Joseph is one of 21 artists nationwide to receive the prestigious Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Award.

This full-length performance piece is designed to jumpstart a conversation about environmental justice, social ecology and collective responsibility in the climate-change era. Joseph, one of America’s vital voices in performance and arts education, brings the piece to Lewiston as part of an ongoing relationship with Bates.

“rbGb breaks new artistic ground and delivers a powerful message,” says Laura Faure, director of the Bates Dance Festival. “We’re honored to have had a sustained relationship with the brilliant Marc Bamuthi Joseph over the past nine years, and are thrilled to bring this remarkable work to Maine.”

rbGb reunites seven artists from the acclaimed 2008 work the break/s: a mixtape for stage: writer-performer Joseph; director Michael John Garcés; choreographer Stacey Printz; turntablist/percussionist Tommy Shepherd; documentary filmmaker Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi; lighting designer James Clotfelter; and media designer David Szlasa.

Joseph will be joined onstage in the Lewiston performances by Shepherd, dancer-actor Traci Tolmaire and vocalist Yaw.

Stories for rbGb were developed from material gathered at a series of festivals, held in four cities across the U.S., that use participatory arts and action to advance social and environmental justice in diverse and underserved communities. Under Joseph’s artistic direction, these Life is Living events in Oakland, Calif., Harlem, Chicago and Houston have yielded residents’ testimony as dramatic source material — specifically, the voices of people often left out of discussions about “living green.”

Interviews, poems, films and murals from Life is Living have become words, dance and images that express the challenge of living green where violent crime and poor education are more of a threat than ecological crisis, and that reveal emerging definitions of environmentalism in these communities.

Set into designer Theaster Gates’ malleable stage installation of repurposed building materials and clay objects, and heightened by Jacobs-Fantauzzi’s vivid films and vibrant graffiti murals from Life is Living, rbGb is driven by the idea that valuing your own life, and the life of your community, is the first step to valuing planet Earth.

The production is composed of two sections. Titled “the colored museum” (inspired in part by the George C. Wolfe play of the same name), the first invites spectators on stage to look into the windows of installations that represent four urban regions, and stories and movements from these areas.

In “colors and muses,” audience members return to their seats and watch as the piece extends beyond conversation and focuses on central figures in Houston, New York, Chicago and Oakland.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph engages with his audience in the aisles of the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. (Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen)

For a performance Jan. 13, performer, educator, activist and slam poetry champion Marc Bamuthi Joseph took the Olin Concert Hall stage—only to leave it again.

“This place is really fancy,” said Joseph, jumping off the stage into the audience. “I believe in ‘not fancy.’ ”

Joseph offered a staged (or off-staged) reading of his acclaimed performance piece red, black & GREEN: a blues in the evening event, part of Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at Bates.

The piece is usually performed on a circular stage, with large “houses” on wheels representing different American cities. His Bates reading performance included two of the four acts, Chicago and Oakland. (The Bates Dance Festival presents the full-blown production April 27-28.)

Joseph called upon the Bates audience to fulfill the roles usually performed by the other artists working on the project. For one poem, the audience was split into four sections, each with a verse of “I’ve Got Peace like a River.” Without breaking cadence, Joseph would conduct the audience in singing while he moved around the room telling the story of a woman who emigrated to the U.S. from Sudan to escape the violence there, only to have her son murdered in Chicago.

Along with the excerpts from rbGb, Joseph offered original poems from previous projects. In tribute to King Day, he began with a piece dedicated to the civil rights leader. Using quotes from some of King’s greatest speeches, Joseph asked how far America has come in realizing King’s “dream.”

When an audience member asked Joseph how he came to be a performer, he answered with a rap from the album that, he says, changed his life, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy. “Chuck D gave me a whole new vocabulary for liberation,” said Joseph.

But his last piece of the evening, a story from his time in Senegal, also shed some light on his emergence as a performer. After realizing his vulnerability to street hustlers and theft, Joseph encounters an American woman who is fighting the traditional practice of genital mutilation.

While visiting one village, that friend asks him to distract an impromptu village dance party while she negotiates an end to genital mutilation with the village elders. As a poet, Joseph is unsure how to “distract” a crowd of dancing locals. On a whim, he breaks into the hip hop dances he learned growing up in New York City–and the village is won over, as was the Bates audience by his re-enactment.

Joseph performs on the Olin stage.

Joseph worked his magic in a more intimate setting the evening prior to the Olin performance. While plows cleared the streets after the winter semester’s first snowstorm, Bates students congregated in the student-run coffee house, the Ronj, to enjoy an evening of hot chai, music and poetry from Joseph and student performers.

Sponsored by the Arts House, the evening was a successful turnout of student talent.

It was one of several opportunities for students to interact with Joseph, who also visited anthropology, dance, environmental studies and rhetoric classes during his four-day visit.

Standing in the middle of the room rather than onstage, Joseph performed two energetic spoken-word pieces that combined dance with storytelling and role-playing to captivate the room.

Humorous but introspective, Joseph’s pieces tackle questions about identity: What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be “hip hop” outside of America? Joseph danced, contorting his body to show pain, pleasure and confusion, his arms and legs swinging out over the heads of students sitting on the floor around him.

Eleven students representing all class years read original poems. Although some seemed nervous, the room was supportive and everyone got a hand. Many students admitted it was their first time reading in front of their peers.

“All of the student readers and performers were incredibly talented,” said Emma Timbers ’14, a creative writing major who co-organized the event with fellow Art House representative Doug Welsh ’14. “And it was exciting to see so many freshmen sharing their work.”

For some, reading has been an important aspect of their time at Bates. Seniors Charlotte Simpson and Alana Folsom, both members of the Bates Authors Guild, read from their creative writing theses. About half of the readers performed original slam poems and invited the audience to join their new slam group.

As for student musicians, Sawyer Lawson ’12 kicked off the evening with a bluesy acoustic guitar set. Also performing were Grace Glasson ’14, who performed folksy covers and originals on ukulele, and Hansen Johnson ’13, who performed covers and originals on acoustic guitar.

– by Erica Long ’12