Recently, co-directors BRT Artistic Director Keith Baker and Donald Byrd and composer Justin Ellington sat down for a radio interview regarding BRT’s production of WHAT YOU WILL. Some fascinating details emerged. What follows is an excerpt of the interview as told to Jason Pfeifer, Arts/Theater Reporter for WRTI Radio.

Read the rest after the jump!

JP: Could you briefly describe the genesis of this project?

KB: I had an idea a couple of years ago after hearing some hip-hop performers perform some of their work in a comedic vein and I had never heard that before. There seem to be places where hip-hop has possibilities, where hip-hop wants to go and is trying to go, but we haven’t been there yet because hip-hop has not been exposed to it yet. So I was wondering what would happen if the energy and spontaneity of that work was combined with classical text. Given that they are both language based forms, what would they have to offer each other? Could the forms illuminate something in this 500 year old language of Shakespeare? I realized that what I needed was a collaborator and our development director suggested that I meet with a choreographer named Donald Byrd. Over a period of time we came to a conclusion that this was an interesting project and then went about choosing what we would like to work on. We have done multiple workshops in New York, working with different actors in an experimental mode. We discovered our way of working gave a very American voice to the project

JP: Why Twelfth Night?

KB: Twelfth Night is about music and has many musical possibilities. We wanted something that would be absolutely delightful and utterly entertaining. The language and characters of Twelfth Night live in a fantastical world, not unlike a contemporary club scene and all that goes on there. Shakespeare called it What You Will because it was a bit of a trifle and it was entertaining.

DB: We actually had a conversation before you (Keith) came to Seattle about what you were thinking. I was really intrigued by the place where Shakespeare and hip-hop might meet, this place in the middle where they might converge. We started the workshops not being absolutely convinced, “this might work.” After the second workshop, we looked at each other and said, “This can work.” I think we were actually working with the sonnets and had devised a series of exercises before jumping into one of the plays. We added beats to the sonnets and asked the actors to manage the iambic of the Shakespeare and the 4/4 time of the hip-hop to see where they overlapped. We started to hear some fascinating things that resonated with us.

KB: It is interesting about this business of hip-hop and 4/4 because any good Shakespearean actor knows that the iambic pentameter is used to find the intent of the words. But what he ends up doing eventually is choosing two words that have emphasis. That turns into 4/4. Once we get the emphasis in line, it makes the rapping much easier.

JP: Donald, have you done a lot of this fusion of hip-hop and classic text in the past?

DB: I had a really interesting moment in a Jet Li movie with Bridget Fonda that took place in Paris. It had a great fight scene at the end of the movie. The scene was cut to Mystikal (hip-hop artist). I was exhilarated by how the scene moved to that beat. I went back to the studio to see how classical ballet would look when inflected with hip-hop. It is a gray area in which I have worked before.

KB: Susan and I were in New York and we were speaking with many people and kids about this work and we saw that they were fascinated by the idea of Shakespeare as the rap artist of his time. The way he played with words and themes is very similar to what contemporary artists do today. We can make sense of the language through the rhythms and sounds that we use.

DB: Hip-hop is a sensibility and way of looking at the world and it manifests itself in numerous ways. It seems to me that we all in some way see the world from a hip-hop perspective because of the time in which we live. We have access to aspects of hip-hop without being conscious that we do. It is always there and always present.

JP: Hip-hop is a term that is just thrown around. As a composer and writer how would you describe it?

JE: I really can’t say it better than Donald. It is a culture more than just a thing. It is informative. It tells you how to talk, how to move how to give, how to take. There is something about hip-hop that is perfect for this show because hip-hop is the one culture that draws from all of these different cultures, particularly in the music. Hip-hop is often based on samplings from different styles. You may take away the best and hear classical music, which lends itself perfectly to this project. I could score the entire piece to Elizabethan style music, then add a beat and make a hip-hop score from it. The beat grounds the music in a style, in a region and the drum beat represents the grounding and world of the music and the things on top of that represent the atmosphere of that world. Keith and Donald wanted Shakespeare’s words intact. Hip-hop true to form and Shakespeare true to form; let’s see what happens when we bring those together. After researching Shakespeare and looking at the words and stories I saw that Shakespeare was telling timeless stories and that it worked so well with what hip-hop does.

JP: What is the challenge in making this work accessible to your traditional audience or younger audiences that may not be into hip-hop culture?

DB: We talked earlier about that place where hip-hop and Shakespeare converge. We also wanted this production to be about that place where generations converge. It’s the place for people who knew Shakespeare as part of the Western canon. It’s also about the idea that Shakespeare will help that audience get a better understanding of the hip-hop generation and vice versa. We hope to see diversity in all of its magnificence in this theatre during the production.

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