Givin' Props, cont.

2/12

HOFFMAN: Thank you, Julie. We're going to start with Baraka Sele.

BARAKA SELE: I hate to treat an audience like they’re the student and I'm the teacher (and fortunately or unfortunately I have been a teacher). But I'd like to ask a couple questions before we get started. How many of you would say you know what hip-hop is? Excellent. Whoa! Hands down. How many of you know who KRS One is? KRS One. How many of you know who Chuck D is? Excellent. This is a great group. I think we can go home! One more question: Who would you say is probably the most famous choreographer living today? If you could just give me—shout out some examples.

AUDIENCE: Paula Abdul. [LAUGHTER]

SELE: Well that's pretty close. Because the most popular choreographer in the world, the most well-known choreographer in the world, is Michael Jackson. And I would like you to remember that as I begin.

Robin mentioned that I do everything from consultant work to producing, to presenting—all kinds of stuff. And currently one of the major hats I wear is as curator and producer of an international festival at New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the “NJPAC World Festival.” As performing arts curators, presenters, producers, programmers, critics, writers, scholars, and academics we are all confronted with very sensitive issues of artistic and cultural appropriation, exploitation, neo-exoticism, misrepresentation, commercialization, commodification, definition. Each one of these topics could warrant its own panel. But for the purpose of focusing on the particular issues we have been asked to address this afternoon, I would like to briefly focus on the issues of definition, interpretation, and audiences.

When Karyn Collins [of DCA] first asked me to be on this panel, one of the questions was not only what impact does hip-hop and MTV have on our audiences, their interests and tastes—as well as on the artists and the concert dance world—she also asked, how has hip-hop evolved or been appropriated by MTV? How has hip-hop been appropriated in concert dance work? And is it more of a physical thing or more of an attitude or use of the body itself? And I would dare say that it's not the concert dance world that has appropriated movement from MTV or been influenced by hip-hop or MTV—I would say it's just the opposite. MTV has appropriated and exploited hip-hop movement and dance.

Of course, it has. We know it has. But so has the rest of the world. The rest of the world now frenzy feeds on hip-hop as if it were the last cultural frontier, not just the latest. Whether I travel to Taipei, Taiwan, Tokyo, Japan, Buenos Aires, Argentina, London, Johannesburg, Africa, or New Orleans—I fine hip-hop fashion and language—as well as movement—imitated all over the world.

But do we as cultural critics and practitioners know what we are witnessing, writing about, or critiquing when we look at hip-hop culture? As a person who works a great deal with artists from the African continent, I cannot tell you how often I have been a witness to the frustrations of performing artists from the African continent who find themselves defined, reviewed, and interpreted in relationship to American or European culture and our own intellectual terms, issues, and movements. But we do the same in this country to our own artists, toward cultural constructs we don't understand, to artists with whom we are not familiar. How do we avoid stepping on the land mines of cultural misinformation? I attended an extraordinary panel at this conference yesterday on research. And if you don't mind my being obvious, I would say the obvious answers to these questions are research, of course, and the other thing we know: ask the artist.