(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - What's up, family?

We are back with another episode of "Flow" and today I'm talking with the Marc Bamuthi Joseph, vice president of social impact at the Kennedy Center, right here at the Makers Union in the Wharf District of Washington, D.C. Come with me.

(upbeat music) - First of all, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, thank you so much for being here today.

- Right on, fam.

- I'm super excited about this conversation.

You're a person I wanted to talk to for a very long time.

- Right on.

- I was mentioning right before we got started that the first time I met you was about like six years ago.

And that was a whole coast ago when you were still at Yerba Buena (Center for the Arts) at the time and I saw you when I was there doing a program as part of Stanford's Impact Program for Arts Leaders, which I don't think they even do anymore.

And I just, what I remember the most about meeting you is just how gracious you were with your time, with your knowledge.

I also remember that you're an avid, like, hip-hop head and like hip-hop culture.

So, hopefully we get into a little bit of that today.

But I guess before I get too deep into it, you know, I'm very familiar with you and your work, but would you share just a little bit about your background for the audience?

- Yeah.

Anne Marie Deltor is my grandmother.

Mackay Rising is my father, is my son.

I'm Mackay Rising's father.

My people come from the unceded territory of the Taíno, which is presently known as Haiti.

I was born and raised in New York City.

I am an artist.

I'm a writer.

I write for performance and also do long form nonfiction.

I am a person who uses the arts for non-arts outcomes, as you mentioned, more than being a hip-hop head, I was born and raised at the same time that hip-hop was born and raised.

So part of what that means is a certain musicality and in terms of the way that I conduct my business, the way that I love, the way that I cook and parent.

But it also means that my political consciousness and awakening was soundtracked by Chuck D of Public Enemy and KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions, that a lot of my aesthetic attitudes were also forged by this incredible music and fashion driven culture.

So I'm currently the vice president of social impact and the artistic director of cultural strategy at the Kennedy Center here in Washington, D.C., the unceded territory of the Nacotchtank people.

And I'm really happy to be here with you, man.

- Well, we're very happy to have you for sure.

In some ways, this "Flow" series wouldn't be complete without you and bringing your brilliance and everything that you are to it.

So, yeah, so Marc, so you were definitely a multi-hyphenate before being a multi-hyphenate became something like, you know, a cool thing to do.

- Right on.

- Right?

And all of a sudden now, it's like apropos, like everybody wants to do that.

But what was your first sort of artistic discipline that you would say, like your gateway artistic discipline, if you would?

- My gateway was theater.

When I was very, very young, growing up in New York City, I did commercials.

I was on the circuit.

So you know, if it was Procter & Gamble, I hocked it.

- Whoa.

Okay.

- You know, cookies, toothpaste, they had all sorts of stuff.

In the kind of cycle of auditioning for different things, I auditioned for a show that was on Broadway called "The Tap Dance Kid" and got the part and was trained to dance while being part of the company.

And that was the first time that I had to embody the moment.

And, you know, you talk about a kind of multi-hyphenate existence, there's so much in our culture that's available to us.

There are all these different vectors that are available to us to express ourselves critically, analytically, creatively and so forth.

But I remember coming out of the theater, the Minskoff Theatre on Broadway where "The Lion King" is playing now.

And we come out, and this was 1985, 1986, right around then, and there'd be cats spinning on cardboard, you know, dancing on cardboard right outside the theater, and they'd catch all the audiences coming out of the matinees and coming out of the shows and so forth.

And it was that thing.

It was the thing of having to embody a particular character through musical theater on Broadway as like a 10, 11, 12-year-old, but then coming right outside and being connected to an emerging culture that was also captivating, that also was electrified by incredibly talented, mostly Black and Brown bodies.

So right away, the notion of a hip-hop theater was present for me as a 10, 11, 12-year-old.

And then in high school, I really started to fall in love, not just with dance, but with writing.

And in high school I read a piece by a woman named Ntozake Shange called, "For Colored Girls Who've Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf."

And this fusion of poetry and dance made a lot of sense to me.

So I would take the hyphen away- - Mm!

- And just say, you know, I make culture and use whatever parts of my body or my experience that are available to me to make something poetic and legible that hopefully moves culture forward.

- Oh.

Kind of like keeping along this a little bit, you know, you are a Morehouse brag.

- I am.

- What was that like?

You know, going to Morehouse, like '90s, we talking the early '90s.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Atlanta, early '90s.

- Notorious '97, shout out to all of my people.

Today as we record this, today is Spelman's Founder's Day.

So shout out to- - Shout out.

- All my Spelman sisters.

Yeah.

So, I did go to Morehouse College.

I was there in the '90s.

Maybe even as important as the AUC experience, is the HBCU experience.

I was in Atlanta in the years preceding the Olympics.

I was, my freshman year was the last great Freaknik.

- The last great?

(laughs) - It was the last great Freaknik.

You can go ask somebody, Freaknik '94.

- Make Freaknik Great Again.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, I don't know if you can make Freaknik anything again, but I was there.

And so, you know, it's one thing to have gone to a school of great artists.

So, you know, when I first got to Morehouse, my hero was Spike Lee, who is Morehouse class of '78, I want to say.

And Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" was one of the first pieces of art that I saw that made me think that I could have social impact through creative practice.

So I was very much informed by that.

This is also the School of Atlanta Mayors, you know, Maynard and Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young and so forth.

Also the school of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., right?

So there's an extraordinary legacy.

Morehouse is a school, all Black, all men, and there aren't very many places in our culture that are intentionally breeding grounds and contested sites of maleness, manhood, and masculinity inside of the Black experience.

And a large part of that, you know, not only is Morehouse's adjacency with Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown and Spelman College, but a kind of historical explosion where we have an opportunity as a next generation of Black male leaders to start to define Black future for ourselves.

So all that is kind of like the cosmology around HBCU and the cosmology around Morehouse, but it was also Atlanta.

And my freshman year was the year that OutKast's first album came out.

While I was in Atlanta, Jermaine Dupri and So So Def, and, you know, those records started to come out and Atlanta as a cultural capital became very real to me.

And then maybe the last thing about that experience was, it was the first time I got to kick it with Black folk from D.C. and Chicago and Detroit and Oakland and Seattle and all throughout the South, you know what I mean?

So it was also a kind of capital of African America.

So a lot was cracking, man.

The Wu-Tang album came out that year, my freshman year.

Tribe Called Quest, "Midnight Marauders" came out that year, you know what I mean?

The Fugees album came out before I graduated.

So it was like hip-hop, Black experience, Black maleness, great Freaknik, you know, the politics and the economics of the Olympics.

There was a lot happening and praise God, I survived it.

- Right?

(Marc and Durell laugh) - There were some times.

- I believe it.

- Where, you know, we, there was some fragile moments, there was some fragile moments, there were some vulnerable moments for sure.

But it's absolutely informed how I continue to operate in the world.

I wouldn't change that experience for anything.

- Wow, I mean, I would say even better than like, surviving it, you're thriving.

Like seriously, and maybe we can talk a little bit more about your current work and what you're doing now.

- Sure.

- You mentioned, you know, social impact.

- Mm-hmm.

- And that's a part of your title at the Kennedy Center.

So what does social impact mean to you?

And I guess, a two part question, what does it mean to you?

And then also how do you measure it?

- Yeah.

Well, you know, our, the culture in the United States of America is built on theft and plunder.

It is built on mountains of social pathology that demean or stripped the dignity of what are now historically minoritized or historically marginalized populations.

Underscoring the theft and the plunder and the injustice is an incredible American promise.

Ideas, the idea of a government for the people, the idea of justice for all, the idea of a collective pursuit of happiness, as a premise, is really inspiring and really fascinating.

So to me, the idea of social impact is any kind of work that honestly and candidly confronts the pathologies that minoritize or demean or lessen the dignity of certain people, you know, work that acknowledges those truths and seeks to tether close to the promise, seeks to create an expansive, inclusive environment with a wide cultural radius that tethers closer to both the promise of America and the premise of America.

A lot of what I do at the Kennedy Center is to think about a transformative future, to think about a cultural future, and who it is that we need to invest in now to create an equitable horizon.

And who are the artists, who are the artistic intellects, who are the creative bodies that we invest in now that are having candid conversations with our history, but are also thinking about a transformative future.

And maybe the midpoint for me in that pursuit, and one of the guiding, you know, a kind of north star, I would say, you know, kind of like ground zero in the moral compass is the Constitution itself.

The Kennedy Center is a living memorial.

You think about the Washington Monument, you think about the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson Memorial, the Kennedy Center is a memorial to the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

And so in moving to D.C., I've had to think a lot about like the D.C.-ness of arts work and the federal adjacency around this arts work.

And I think about the Constitution, I think about the 14th Amendment, I think about the clause in the Constitution that enfranchises us all, particularly as crafted then, articulates a kind of permission structure for Black people entering the American promise.

And so like, you know, the 14th Amendment assures equal protection under the law and just equal protections, period.

So it makes me think like, do we all have the right to literacy?

Do we all have the right to clean air or clean water?

And in the case of the arts, do we all have a right to inspiration?

Can you be an American if you don't have access to the creative impulse, or you don't have access to creative acts and inspiration?

So my work at the Kennedy Center in terms of this interface with history, in terms of impacting the future with a clear regard for our past is to invest in people that are making a landscape where we all can be inspired.

- Oh, that's so beautiful.

You know, you're reminding me of one of my favorite quotes by the late congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

- Mm.

- What the people want is simple, an America as good as its promise.

- Yes.

- Right?

And like in its simplicity, it's brilliant in that.

- Yeah.

- You know, I'm wondering, how much of your background being Haitian also informs your ideas of freedom and liberty and justice?

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, that makes me think of Dessalines.

You know, we have chosen to be free.

Let us be thus by ourselves and for ourselves.

You know, my people are slave boat people.

My people are upset people.

Dessalines is the general that defeated Napoleon, probably the greatest military upset ever.

And I come of that in terms of blood memory.

But much closer to that, and maybe even apart from my specific ancestry, I'm a child of immigrants.

I'm the first person in my family to be born in this country.

And my folks didn't migrate here for me to not be dope.

You know what I mean?

(Durell laughs) So there are any number of people who have either immigrated to this country or whose parents or grandparents immigrated to this country all ultimately wanting the same thing, you know?

Somehow, and this also I think speaks to this idea of impact, somehow, you know, some of us have gotten it in our heads that if your people immigrated here from Country X and these people immigrated here from Country Y, somehow we don't want the same thing.

Immigration is not about violence.

Immigration ultimately is not about conflict.

Migration is a measure of how far someone is willing to go to be free.

And so that is the kind of prevailing or animating force behind the work.

You know, it is honoring how far my peoples came, not just historically, but just within their lifetimes.

Not in terms of like anything related to ontology or cosmology, but just the need to move away from a dictatorship and to seek freedom.

So, you know, freedom is, because it's not something that's legislated, freedom is ultimately something that you have to find in your body and in your psychology.

Art has been the way that I've gotten free.

It's the thing that working with young people or working with other artists, it is the common pursuit that I've found with my collaborators, and, you know, including young collaborators in the classrooms, we're all trying to get free.

So, it's that immigrant mentality.

And sometimes the lengths that you'll travel are miles or kilometers, but sometimes the lengths that you'll travel just, you know, the width of an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper, at the end of that 11 inches, at the end of that 8 1/2 inches, that's where freedom is and that's really what propels my work.

- Oof.

You said something earlier that I want to go back to.

You talked about blood memory.

- Yeah.

- And I wanna get into that a little bit.

- Yeah.

Let's do it.

- And like the epigenetics of it all.

- Mm-hmm.

- Right?

And I want to tie that into a lot of the work that you do creatively now, which is around, you know, healing or at the intersections of the art and healing.

So could you speak a little bit about the healing aspects of your work and how that is used to, not mitigate some of this, the trauma that might've been generational and passed down.

- Sure.

- But how to effectively use that in a creative pursuit?

- Yeah.

We all are processing our lives at our paces, given the tools that we have, and generally speaking, against all odds.

I'm very fortunate in my life that I have found a modality that enables me to process trauma or process struggle.

And generally, that is the written or spoken word.

So it's become a lifelong pursuit to make environments where others can also process trauma or struggle, but also find and center joy.

You know, I remember it seems like not so long ago, but it's probably 10 years ago now, my kids were performing in a Black History Month assembly.

And my stepdaughter was, her whole class was performing a Bob Marley song.

And I was like, "Bob Marley's not Black history."

Like, I know Bob, you know?

But when I think, at the time, when I thought about history, it was kind of in amber.

It was, you know, black and white images in amber.

When I think of James Baldwin, even, I think of James Baldwin in black and white.

I don't think of James Baldwin in color.

But we are living histories and all these histories get updated.

I think it's been, you know, someone told me the other day that the time between 1936 and 1980 and the time between 1980 and now are the same or something like that, you know, give or take around the math.

But the point is, is that, we can't stay stuck in traumatized pasts.

We have to figure out a way to move forward and as I alluded to earlier, I think, intentionally, begin to make future together.

It's hard to heal at the site of your trauma.

It's one of the things that I think for people that have been hurt by the patriarchy or hurt by white supremacy, or hurt by, you know, a heteronormative kind of hegemonic center, it is hard to heal from that particular pain when you're still living in the pain.

And so the alternative, I think, is to either create sustained or systemic environments that have alternate social physics, or at the very least, to cultivate spaces, even in the span of 30, 60, 90, you know, 120 minute increments that have alternate social physics, where joy and healing are centered.

And that has really come to a head for me in a post-pandemic moment, where there's been so much emphasis on public health, the infrastructure of public health from vaccinations to hospital stays, but there have been very few points of emphasis around public healing, around the idea of healing together in public from a trauma that we've all sustained, literally at a global level.

So part of the healing through art, having moments where joy is the purpose, those are ways that we mitigate the collective environment of hurt and struggle that we happen to be in.

But the same way that we've been talking about these systemic pathologies, they're systemic because they've been designed that way.

Someone has to design the healing.

And sometimes, that design takes place, for me, in the form of an opera or the form of a spoken word concerto with symphony.

Sometimes it takes place through the modality of a public program at the Kennedy Center, sometimes it's a conversation with a brother that I cherish and respect.

But we have to make and design these environments so that we can heal together in public.

- Whoa.

You know, I was reading somewhere that a generation is really only considered to be like a 20 year span.

- Yeah.

- Right?

Like two decades.

That's a generation, like thinking about history.

And you know, I was kind of thinking about you and your work.

You know, you may not consider this for yourself, but I think it's pretty safe to call you the voice of a generation.

(Marc laughs) - I'll sip to that.

- If you think about the work that you've been able to do and sustain over quite a few of them.

And you said this term earlier, which you've talked about a lot, this idea of making culture.

- Yes.

- And in being sort of like this voice, you know, could you unpack what make culture really means for you?

And then, you know, the ways that it's manifested over your very illustrious career.

- Thank you, fam.

I think it's one thing to make a glass or a jacket or a hat or a pair of pants.

It's one thing to make an object.

And maybe that object is a song or a dance or a play or a book, right?

There are any, there are time-based creative outcomes that are essentially cultural products.

And there are many people that are extraordinarily talented at making cultural products.

Strategically and interdependently, I think that there are a web of people, and this really goes back to my time in Atlanta.

There are a web of people that consider the kind of interconnectedness and intersection of cultural products in proximity to one another that are thinking about their cultural outcomes, their cultural products, in more of an ecological way.

Strategically and as an organizing modality, I call this the creative ecosystem.

And thinking about it ecologically, the same way that nature loves diversity, culture loves diversity.

The further away that we move away from a monocultural existence, the more opportunity there is, the more rays of light there are to come into a common sun or a common star.

So who are the people that I don't want to just, like, make products with, I wanna make culture with, who's in the ecology?

What does it take?

Who am I inspired by?

Who do I love?

Do we need to share the same values, or do we need to share the same intent?

This too comes from hip-hop culture.

Like, the culture isn't rap, you know, the culture isn't graffiti.

When I think about heaven, I imagine a loft party in Brooklyn at like two, 3:00 AM, the lights are red, and everything is happening at once.

Everything is happening at once.

It's sexy and fashionable.

It's bass heavy and sweaty.

The rappers are there, the visual artists are there.

Everyone is there at once.

So, you know, this idea of the multi-hyphenate makes a lot of sense when we think about different people with the capacity to create several cultural outputs.

That's how kind of cultural practice is made through one body.

But making culture is the design of putting all those bodies in one room strategically and intentionally towards the end of an equitable horizon.

It's thinking about different modalities in place in a song.

It's, you know, and I'm sure you can relate to this, you grow up where you grow up, you learn what you learn, you read what you read, you end up, if you're in a body like yours or mine and have the experiences, some of the experiences, that you and I have shared, even continents apart, you just learn mad literacies.

You're able, even that term, mad literacies, like you just, you know, you just able to talk in many different ways and be legible to many different people at once.

So if you can do that in terms of your outputs, you can do that in terms of the culture that you seek to build.

You can make a community the same way that you can make a dance.

You can make that community live both in physical and digital space, but also in spiritual and academic space.

And that's ultimately what I think I mean by making culture, using it all to build a creative ecosystem bent on the transformative future.

- Oof.

Thank you, thank you for sharing that.

- For sure.

- So what's waking you up these days, MBJ?

The real MBJ.

- That is so funny.

- And you can't say your alarm clock.

- No, it's very rarely my alarm clock.

Okay, well, I will be 49 this year.

- Congratulations.

- Thanks.

You know, I may get there and I hope to, and you know, oh, I have a 97-year-old grandmother.

I had a 94-year-old grandmother, my grandfather, you know, according to the genetics, I'm at about halftime.

- Okay.

- And even with that, understanding that tomorrow's not promised, I am at an age where, as some of my peers are transitioning and becoming ancestors, it is deeply sad and gut wrenching and surprising, but not shocking.

So part of what wakes me up is mortality and the kind of peace that I wanna have, the kind of environment that I wanna make for those who outlive me.

And the idea of executing on the purpose that, you know, there are some of us that spend their whole lives searching for purpose.

And I'm really, really lucky that that is not my ministry.

I am doing what I'm supposed to.

But I would be remiss if I didn't do it all, man, or at least try.

So just thinking about the fragility of the physical body and how I make the most of this really precious gift.

How I make my spirit, how I appease my spirit.

When my spirit returns to the universe that birthed it, what will this body have done in service of that spirit, in service of that light?

By pedigree, I've done a lot.

But on God's time, there's so much more to do.

And so sometimes, it's not an alarm.

Sometimes it's God's clock that wakes me up and I'm like.

- All right.

- All right, man, yeah, let's get after it.

Other times, I'm just hoping that Barcelona wins the Champions League this year, I'm worried about, you know, like Steph Curry, like he's great and he's, you know what I mean?

Like, he's tremendous, but I worry about Draymond and just like, bro, like, you know, can we get past the Play-In Tournament?

You know?

- Yeah.

- It's deep.

- It is deep.

And layered.

- It is deep, it's layered, but it's also, you know, like the Yankees are off to a good start.

Like, you know, and I'm outing myself 'cause I just name checked Barcelona, the Yankees, and the Warriors.

So, you know, those of y'all who know, you kind of know what kind of individual I am.

But it's all the things, man.

It's all the things.

It's all the things.

You know, maybe, to be very secular about it as well, this is calendar year 2024, and I live in Washington, D.C. and there's a piece that I just premiered with Wendy Whelan, a phenomenal dancer.

It's called "Carnival of the Animals."

And "The Carnival of the Animals" is a 100-year-old composition by a French dude, Saint-Saens, and it's like 14 different mini suites and each suite is dedicated and inspired by a particular animal in the kingdom.

So there's like an aviary and there's a swan, and there's like tortoises and you know, there's a cuckoo and all this stuff.

Our version of "Carnival of the Animals" takes place on January 6th in the Capitol.

It's a chamber orchestra, a poet, and a dancer who consider who the animals were that invaded the Capitol that day.

And one of the first lines in "The Carnival" is, when you're in Washington, D.C., you quickly learn that the artists are the actual politicians, and most of these politicians are just performance artists.

And it's true.

So another thing, maybe the last thing that wakes me up maybe with a start, is living at, you know, the very fragile end of democracy and kind of having a first row seat to all these performance artists that are passing themselves off as legislators when we have things like, you know, the climate crisis and women's health and education in this country that are literally on fire and need to be tended to.

So the way that, to bring it all back around, the way that democracy works is it requires participation and dedication.

And we are in a moment of epidemic loneliness in this country.

The democracy can't work if we're isolated in our loneliness.

Democracy only works if we're in this thing together.

And so I try to make things, or foster environments, where inspiration is possible because the thing that makes all the negative things that I just mentioned, the thing that makes them possible, is a certain kind of apathy or numbness.

And if we're inspired together in public space, you can't be either apathetic or numb.

So that's part of the making of the culture, that's part of the design of, you know, an equitable future, it is the intentional cultivation and fabrication of programs and art pieces and friendships and relationships, environments that are ultimately going to save the democracy because they are environments of inspired collectivity.

So I wake up wanting to make that stuff happen.

- So we're rounding third here.

- Yes.

- As a baseball fan, you'll appreciate that.

So like, on final thoughts, I wanna do some imaginative thinking here.

- Sure.

Let's do it.

- So, let's jump in the DeLorean.

- Okay.

- We're gonna travel back, back in time.

- All right.

Okay, okay, okay.

- What would 10-year-old MBJ say to you today, coming up on this milestone birthday, you know, God willing.

- Mm-hmm.

- What would 10-year-old MBJ say to you today?

- 10-year-old me would have a question, would have questions about my knees.

(Durell laughs) - Wait, did you say needs or knees?

- K-N-double E-S. - Okay, okay, okay.

- 10-year-old me would be like, "Why didn't you take care of our knees?"

- That's real.

- And I would then reply to 10-year-old me, "Bro, why didn't you take care of our knees?"

(laughs) So, boom.

Yeah, like, I think the younger me, the, you know, the middle school me would be surprised and impressed.

Surprised because whatever it is that I do wasn't a vocation as far as, you know, like in 1984, 1985, 1986, like whatever it is that I do wasn't like a job.

I didn't major in whatever it is that I do.

So not so much impressed by like, the great people that I've gotten to work with and talk with and talk to, but impressed that I just managed to find a way to be me and to be me in a way that was in service, so, because I've now fathered people who are older, but who were once 10-year-olds, I also know that 10 might be like, one of the last times that you're actually cool to your kids.

It's come back around, my kids think I'm cool again, but I think, I hope, 10-year-old me would think old man is pretty cool.

- Well, Marc, I definitely think you're pretty cool, for what it's worth.

- Thanks, man.

That means a lot.

It's worth a lot.

(Marc and Durell laugh) - For what it's worth.

And yeah, I just wanna say thank you again.

You know, I'm in D.C. for this conference with the National Guild.

- Oh, word up.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- And the theme of the conference this year is Seeding Fractals, right?

- Oof, yeah.

- Seeding Fractals.

And you know, if the fractals that we are seeding are fractals of hope, then dare I say, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, you are the sun lighting the way.

And so thank you so much.

- Sure, thank you, brother.

- Thank you.

- Thank you, family.

Appreciate you, bro.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)