New Haven Independent

“When the kids wear buttons, or make memorials,” he said, “they are sending a message: I am next or I am in pain. We need to respond.”

Moses has responded. He has spent many of his 54 years, the last six in New Haven, putting together award-winning workshops and performance to teach about machismo, sexuality, drugs, guns, and their effects of violence on community. The result is Testify! Real Stories, Real People, a multimedia play he’ll perform Oct. 23 and 24 at 7:30 p.m., hosted by the Bregamos Theater, at Erector Square.

The subject is life and death. So is the mission.

Theater originally emerged from the life and death concerns of religion. Moses said the popular theater he is advancing in New Haven can also redeem and save lives by becoming an outlet for those — especially young people — suffering from the trauma of violence.

Moses (pictured) has found therapeutically dramatic ways to use hip hop, rap, drumming, the musical beat of his own African and Amerindian ancestry, and, most recently, video in innovative and award-winning workshops he has been conducting with kids in the Hill and at the school system’s New Horizons Academy.

Many of the young people he works with have had friends or relatives die in shootings right before their eyes. The portraits he evokes in the play are fictional and collective but derive from the real people, living and dead, he has learned about.

“They [the traumatized kids] will resist a formal conversation,” he said of his techniques, “but the music opens them up to talk.”

Moses acknowledged that murder and violence have dropped in New Haven. But shootings haven’t dropped, especially among young people in poorer neighborhoods. The trauma in the shootings’ wake ,especially for young people, is insufficiently treated, he said. In some quarters, the expectation of a short life persists.

If people think they are not going to live long, they try everything and crazy things while they can, he said.

In San Francisco, Moses used performance in teaching the young and the incarcerated, Moses noticed some characteristics of violence’s effects unique to the Elm City when he came here, especially the rituals and methods of young people’s mourning

He also said that compared to a large metro area, the small size of New Haven very much makes violence a family affair that ripples throughout the community

Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch “Only Sixteen,” the haunting rap ballad of lives and potential lost that Moses performs near the beginning of the one-hour show.

The play, which includes video loops featuring Laura Hayes and live music by Paco Records, is directed by Halima Flynn (pictured), whom Moses met when they collaborated on a piece during the Festival of Arts and Ideas two years ago.

After the performances at Bregamos, which has been partially funded by a mayoral arts grant, Moses and Flynn hope to take the show to colleges, high schools, and clinics. Educational talk-backs after the performance will be a key component.

“People still in pain are not comfortable talking about themselves, but can speak about themselves through the characters. That’s the power of art,” Moses said.

Moses said his model in this work is Augusto Boal, a Brazilian who has created what Moses termed “theater of the oppressed,” That is, theater as a means also to do radical community educating and organizing; to answer questions such as: How do TV stereotypes contribute to poor self image in the conducting of boy-girl relationships? Where do the guns in the community come from? Why don’t we trust the police?

“There is a certain destruction happening in popular media. We’re about undoing that damage,” he said. In part that will come through kids seeing pieces like Testify, and turning from being consumers of poor images of themselves to creators of better versions.

Testify! is presented by the PINK & BLUE Arts for Violence Prevention Project to mark October as domestic violence awareness month. To support the play and its aims and for tickets, the contact is rasmo@igc.org, or call 605-0925.