Rickerby Hinds
Rickerby Hinds is an actor and playwright known for incorporating hip-hop culture into his work. He is a professor of playwrighting at the University of California-Riverside and the creator and director of the Califest Hip Hop Theater Festival. He previously attended a workshop, led by Bill Rauch, at the Oregon Shakespeare that used hip-hop to approach Hamlet.
Interview Excerpts
THE LANGUAGE OF HIP-HOP
RICKERBY HINDS: The irony you—with hip-hop culture is, you know, even though a lot of the artists are, you know, in their forties, and some in their fifties now, you look at the—kind of the street element of the culture, meaning it was something that was—that was born outside of, let’s say academia or outside of your traditional art institutions. But you have these artists who, you know, are choosing to use a—a means of communication that would seem, you know, kind of not what they would choose. So you have emcees who are taking words and making up words and finding ways to use metaphors and similes to tell their stories in creative ways, and you know, inventing words and taking words and—and—and making them part of, you know, the lexicon of the culture.
And so, you know, I think those are two of the ways that these—these seemingly kind of, you know, unrelated forms of—of art are connected. You know, you can make that straight, direct connection.
And you know, you have things like the audiences and you know, the—how interactive they were during Shakespeare times, with the performances. And of course, with hip-hop culture that, you know, call and response and, you know, wanting the audience to be a part of the performance is—is an absolute. And not just with the emceeing, but you know, with—with the dancing, with the movement, where, you know, the crowd and—or, you know, the cipher is—is an active part of what’s going on, what—what the performances are doing.
So whether it’s hollering out things or whether it’s clapping or whether it’s keeping the beat, or you know, you are an active participant in the—the event that’s going on. So, the involvement of the audience, I think, is probably a third—a third element that—that parallels these two art forms.
SHAKESPEARE AND HIP-HOP
RICKERBY HINDS: And this production of Hamlet, I think, is going to be his first attempt at—at really pushing the envelope—to some degree—with—with looking at incorporating hip-hop aesthetics into Shakespeare.
And so what we were doing yesterday is we were exploring how a particular scene—when the players come in to do the—the play—that is intended to trigger the king’s reaction and—and, you know, get him to confess what he’s done. How that scene can—can be done with the hip-hop aesthetic.
So what we were doing is we—we were just playing—you know, taking the—the original text and playing around with it, exploring it using elements of hip-hop culture. So you know, in one—and we were—I think we were staying really language-based. We were—we were really playing with how the words can manifest themselves for the most part.
We did play around with movement to some degree, because most of the artists here have different strengths, so we have, you know, people who are movement people, we have people who can b-box, we have people who are—are writers, directors. So we—we just played around, messed around with the text for probably about three hours—two and half, three hours—to see if in fact this—this could happen.
But also, you know, a lot of the conversation around doing a scene is, you know, whether or not incorporating it or plugging it in there, you know, would—would kind of just seem like we’re just superimposing this art form into it because it’s popular.
