On August 5 & 6 we took my one-man show, Love & Other Social Issues, back to The National Black Theater Festival. The week-long festival takes place every other summer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It's a pretty awesome experience-they take up every theater, auditorium, and any other conceivable performance space in the city and showcase the best of black theater productions from across the country.
Love & Other Social Issues, which made it's world premiere debut at the National Black Theater Festival in August 2003, is a one man play based on a lot of the poetry that I've been workshopping through the years-but it's not just me standing at a microphone spitting poetry for 90 minutes. My wonderfully talented director, Denise Dowse, and incredible visionary producer, Pamela Warner, really turned the show into a full on theatrical production. There's blocking, lighting, music-everything to make it quite an entertaining theater experience. In 2003, we played a 200 seat theater and sold out all four shows so this year the festival put us in The Arts Council Theater, which is a 541 seater. A big thank you and sincere appreciation goes out to all who came out to support (especially those who saw it before and came back for more). The show is available for touring so maybe we'll see you at a theater in a town near you.
Be sure to check the review in our press section.
I also have to give a big shoutout to everyone who made the midnight Poetry Jam a huge success again. It has become one of the most popular aspects of the festival. A big thanks to Larry Leon Hamlin, the festival's artistic director, for giving us the platform to showcase North Carolina's finest poets. And also big ups to Weusi Baraka, the man who has been organizing the midnight Poetry jams since we started it in 2001. I've become the mouthpiece for the Poetry jams, but he is truly the man who makes it go down lovely every year. And mad love to my co-host for the Poetry jams, the hot poet with the soft voice that will fool ya every time, Helena D. Lewis. Shine.
