Hip Hop and Shakespeare Face Off

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by | Jun 25, 2006 11:57 pm

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Posted to: Arts

A sassy, rhyme-writing teen challenged this frilly-sleeved ghost on the question: What do books by a dead white man have to do with hip hop? William Shakespeare’s ghost got hip and won over a crowd at ECA as part of Arts & Ideas’ Urban Hip Hop Mini Festival.

Shakespeare: The Remix, written by local poet and teacher Aaron Jafferis, pitted the rhymes of a strong-willed high-schooler against Shakespeare’s dusty texts.

Shayla (JenÃ© Hernandez) is a tough young woman serving school detention for punching a friend. To her, the tights-clad man who emerges from behind a chalkboard is wrinkled and bygone, and so are his texts: “My English is blazin’; yours is whack!”

Why do Shakespeare’s women always kill themselves over men? How come he has to use such cumbersome words? And get some rhythm, Mister, she demands.

Leaping on chairs and between different voices and wigs, Shakespeare (Jafferis) whirls around the room, now Macbeth, now Portia, trying to prove his relevance. After initial protests—“‘It’s not that I’m ‘scurred,’ it’s that the whole idea is absurd”—he agrees to compete on Shayla’s terms in a beat-box-backed rhyme-off. The result’s not too shabby, especially with Hernandez’ American Idol pipes and quick-spitting pizazz.

At first, it looks like Shayla’s got it in the bag: Shakespeare “shoulda stayed in the Elizabethan era,” he “coulda saved himself the plane fare-a.” But as the battle advances, Shakespeare proves he’s got flow-cabulary of his own: He’s “bigger than Biggie and Tupac put together,” he “invented more words than any man ever.”

By the close of the showdown, the two have arrived at a somewhat reductive conclusion: Hip Hop and Shakespeare are the same. The rhymebook-toting tough girl and the 16th century dramatist, both attuned to the power of words, belong to the same club.

“When I say ‘Shake,’ you say ‘Speare!’ When I say ‘Hip,’ you say ‘Hop!’” Shayla calls out.

The show is meant, admits Jafferis, for a middle or high school audience â€” the pair has unrolled it at schools around the country. The themes and lessons clearly targeted that crowd, but the rhymes and jokes still got Friday’s audience, silver-haired ladies and four-foot-tall boys, to whistle and hollar back.

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