Aaron Jafferis: Hip Hop Poet and Playwright

Getting Iller

aaron — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:19:36 +0000

On Monday, April 9^th, 7:30 pm, a 35-minute excerpt of HOW TO BREAK will be performed by Adam Matta, Kwikstep, Rokafella, Rona Figueroa, Gio Perez, Christopher Edwards, and Aaron Jafferis at NYTB at the D-Lounge, a monthly showcase for musical theatre writers. 101 E. 15^th St. at Union Square East. $10, plus 2-drink minimum.

HOW TO BREAK, a finalist for the 2012 Thomas Barbour Playwright’s Award (thanks to HERE and the Episcopal Actor’s Guild), tells the story of two hospitalized teenagers – a b-boy with sickle cell and a b-girl with leukemia – breaking through their diagnoses in search of a gut understanding of what it means to be “ill.”

Apparently, STUCK ELEVATOR flunked…

aaron — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:12:04 +0000

…our first Sundance Theatre Lab (Spring 2011 in Banff, Canada), so they’re bringing it back to try again. This time, they’re bringing me and Byron, director Chay Yew, dramaturg Polly Carl, music director Vadim Feichtner and company to the 2012 Sundance Theatre Lab at White Oak, a nature preserve in Florida. My mom: “How come your play is being performed at such a venue? Have you added jaguars and okapis to the script?” Good question, mom. Not yet. For the rest of you, here’s an okapi and its tongue, with which it can lick its eye.

We are a pilot.

aaron — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:07:48 +0000

NEFA selected STUCK ELEVATOR as one of their National Theatre Pilot projects, which may help you with $ if your venue wants to be part of our world tour (which begins at HERE in January 2013, then goes to the 2013 International Festival of Arts & Ideas and beyond).

I am not “busy.”

aaron — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 02:04:01 +0000

I’m doing a lot of things. “Busy” was my catch-all negative word, code for “overwhelmed,” or “the exasperating buzzing noise of many projects mobbing each other in my brain,” or even “the *&%$! reason I can’t hang out/do your project/eat.” Using the word “busy” made me feel “busy,” so I’ve stopped using it. Now I do a lot of things, one by one. Ahh.

In summer 2011, my collaborators and I: expanded the New Haven León Theater Project to include Teatro Foro en Nicaragua and A PEASANT OF EL SALVADOR (by Peter Gould and Stephen Stearns) in the U.S.; workshopped a brand-spankin new version of KINGDOM at the Atlantic Theatre Company; workshopped HOW TO BREAK at CAP21 and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

charge

aaron — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 04:09:40 +0000

This summer, I’m performing my hip-hop poetry at a venue near you (That is, if you happen to be in New Haven on July 1st for Free 2 Spit, or GIA in Castleton, VT on July 7th, or the World Fellowship Center in Conway, NH on July 16th.) Jon Rua and Yayo Serka collaborated with me on the above piece, Charge, when I should have been working on Stuck Elevator at the 2011 Sundance Theatre Lab in Banff, Canada. They will not be at any of my upcoming performances, however, because they were traumatized by elk in Banff, and elk are related to moose, and moose are in New England, and New England is where my performances are.

Still stuck.

aaron — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 18:45:50 +0000

STUCK ELEVATOR has been selected for the 2011 Sundance Theatre Lab. Me and Byron’s comic-rap-scrap-metal-music-theatre-craziness will be trapped at Sundance’s 2011 Theatre Institute in Banff, Canada from March 27-April 17.

Be ill.

aaron — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:52:01 +0000

Hip-hop choreographers Kwikstep and Rokafella, human beatboxers Adam Matta and Yako 440, director Christopher Edwards and I are creating HOW TO BREAK – using hip-hop movement, rhyme, vocal percussion, and theatre to tell the stories of teenagers learning to live while their bodies are breaking.

HOW TO BREAK was born at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2010 Mixing Texts workshop. After a few more devising/rehearsing sessions (thanks, Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance, the Parachute Factory, and NYU!), we performed a 45-minute workshop at The Big Room’s Take Your Time fall festival in New Haven. It was so ill, we cannot wait for our next break.

Refuge(es)

aaron — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 14:38:21 +0000

From Iraq, Afghanistan, Ghana, Congo, Cuba, Somalia, Guinea, Eritrea, Chad, Bhutan…

I’m working with my hometown drama crew – Collective Consciousness Theatre (CCT) – and New Haven’s refugees – persecuted people from around the world – to create STORIES OF A NEW AMERICA – a series of multicultural, multilingual monologues and vignettes capturing true stories about people starting over in New Haven. STORIES OF A NEW AMERICA premieres as part of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services’ (IRIS) celebration of World Refugee Day on Wednesday, June 22^nd, 2011.

Nicaragua

aaron — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:34:48 +0000

I spent a week in León, Nicaragua when I was 15, 16, and 17. That revolutionary city blew my mind. This February I went back, and began a theatre collaboration with the New Haven / León Sister City Project, Bregamos Community Theater, and the Yale Council of Latin American/Iberian Studies. We’re doing Theatre of the Oppressed workshops in New Haven and León, creating new theatre in both places. Email me if you want to join us. Here’s more info. Here are a couple of poems I wrote about our connection to Goyena, a rural community outside León where workers from the sugarcane plantation have been dying of kidney disease.

Elevator Institutionalized

aaron — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:59:03 +0000

STUCK ELEVATOR (music by Byron Au Yong, libretto by me) played two sold-out workshop performances at the 2010 International Festival of Arts & Ideas after being selected for a two-week workshop by the Yale Institute for Music Theater. Director Chay Yew took the “work” part of “workshop” rather seriously. Byron and I were stuck in the lovely Yale rehearsal rooms re-writing every waking hour. It was great. We were churning out new material so last-minutely that someone had to run onstage to make a cameo as a rapping bladder and General Tso. It seems this is no longer a solo show. Heads up for the next workshop, in which our brave stuck deliveryman gets an ensemble of three to torment and delight him.