Pirouettes and Street Cred: Atlanta’s Hip-Hop Ballet

NYT
April 6, 2008
Dance
Pirouettes and Street Cred: Atlanta’s Hip-Hop Ballet
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

ATLANTA

THE rapper Antwan Patton was sitting in the sleek black Courvoisier Lounge tucked into the back of his recording studio here. Mr. Patton, better known as Big Boi, one-half of the progressive hip-hop duo OutKast, was taking a break from finishing his debut solo album, due out this summer. But he wasn’t talking music. He was talking ballet, zeroing in on its image problem.

“I’ve always seen the ballet as being, ‘Here’s a little tea pot, short and stout,’ ” he said, singing and miming the typical gestures of the nursery rhyme with his heavily tattooed arms. “Very, very step-by-step.”

Mr. Patton’s unassuming brick studio is on a sleepy side street, just a short drive from the Atlanta Ballet’s midtown headquarters. But judging from the glass-encased bottles of Cognac that stud his dimly lighted lounge or the OutKast posters trumpeting platinum-selling records and Grammy Awards, the cultural distance is immeasurable. What could tulle-clad classical dancers and a rap superstar possibly have to say to one another, after all?

On Thursday Atlanta will find out. That night, at the fittingly grandiose, neo-Moorish Fox Theater, Mr. Patton will perform with the Atlanta Ballet, the first major collaboration between a hip-hop luminary and a ballet company. The name of the production, of course, is “big.”

The title refers to the show’s star, but it could just as easily apply to its mission. Mr. Patton and the Atlanta Ballet say they are seeking to expand the horizons of their respective forms, without compromising them. It’s a tall order, and it comes as ballet companies and the hip-hop industry are casting about (not always gracefully) for new directions and new audiences.

On paper this mixed-media spectacular, which includes local children, video and a series of complicated set pieces, and integrates the loose narrative of a child named “Little big” with mythic characters like Theia, seems like a recipe for disastrous cultural misunderstanding. After all, before “big” Mr. Patton’s ballet experience began and ended with an elementary school outing to see “The Nutcracker,” and the new work’s choreographer, Lauri Stallings, had never listened to hip-hop.

But Ms. Stallings and Mr. Patton, who have bounced ideas off each other throughout the process, share an exploratory sensibility. He, with his OutKast partner, André Benjamin (better known as André 3000), has been expanding hip-hop’s boundaries since the early 1990s through musically omnivorous, intellectually curious songs and in their 2006 movie, “Idlewild.” And she is a ballet-company resident choreographer whose major dance-making influence is the contemporary Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin.

So when John McFall, the ballet’s artistic director first approached Mr. Patton with the idea of a collaboration, the rapper said, “I’m down to try anything once.” (Except, he later added, wear tights; he may be a progressive, but he’s still got some street cred to maintain.)

Unless the spirit strikes him Mr. Patton will not be doing any jetés either. Instead he and a coterie of local musicians attached to his Purple Ribbon Entertainment label will weave among the dancers, performing tracks that include OutKast’s “Liberation,” Janelle Monáe’s “Metropolis” and “Sir Luscious Left Foot Saves the Day,” an unreleased song from Big Boi’s new album.

And, unlike some fusion ballets of the past, the dancers will not be performing half-baked hip-hop moves but Ms. Stallings’s earthy, syncopated choreography, which, as the company veteran Christine Winkler said, in some ways works better with hip-hop than with classical music.

Hip-hop and dance fans alike expressed hope that the work would have an impact beyond a spotlight for its weeklong run.

“My gut reaction is ‘bravo,’ ” said Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of, most recently, “Know What I Mean?,” a critical examination of hip-hop music. He said with a chuckle, “Even if it falls on its face.”

Professor Dyson, echoing several young Atlanta artists who weighed in on the project, sees in “big” an opportunity for hip-hop to re-examine some of its more self-destructive tendencies, including violence and “the blitzkrieg of misogyny that passes for commentary on gender.” If anyone could get hip-hop to open up, he said, it would be one of the adventurous stars of OutKast.

For a venerable but struggling regional company like the Atlanta Ballet, meanwhile, “big” is an impressive coup and a chance to reach an audience that has typically stayed away from ballet.

“Ballet doesn’t have a choice, other than to let people in,” Ms. Stallings said. “It’s been exclusive for so long. But dance started under the stars. That’s the dance I want to connect America to.”

These are perilous times for the classical performing arts, and many regional ballet troupes have been forced to fold or downsize. The Atlanta Ballet shed its orchestra in 2006 and recently sold its midtown offices to erase a $2.75 million accumulated debt. A result of insufficient fund-raising, that debt points to a larger problem: a difficulty connecting with local constituencies. While hip-hop has developed distinct regional flavors, ballet companies are still grappling with how to remain relevant. The racial makeup of a Southeastern city like Atlanta presents a particular challenge.

“You have to face the truth that basically it has been art for white people,” said Dorothy Gunther Pugh, the founder of Ballet Memphis. “Then you have to say, ‘How can we take the best of who we are and say it’s art for everyone?’ ”

While ballet is more likely to be viewed as an elitist oddity than a part of everyday life, hip-hop is woven into the cultural fabric of the urban South. Atlanta has been regularly turning out stars like Ludacris, T. I. and Jermaine DuPri. Although hip-hop sales, along with those of the rest of the music industry, are sagging, its presence is visible everywhere, from the music throbbing out of open car windows to the giant So So Def Records billboard that greets drivers heading into the city’s downtown.

One week after a tornado tore through the commercial center of downtown Atlanta, the area remained a glass-littered warren of barricaded streets. But close to 800 people found their way to Georgia State University’s Rialto Center for the Arts, where Ms. Stallings had choreographed a 20-minute site-specific preview of “big” for the lobby. The OutKast hit “Ms. Jackson” boomed onto the street, where a line of people, mostly young and mostly black, looped around the corner.

Mr. Patton was not billed to appear, but several members of the Atlanta music scene were there, including Joi Gilliam, a local favorite who has appeared on most of OutKast’s albums and will perform in “big.” “I don’t want to be pigeonholed,” said Ms. Gilliam, who studied ballet as a girl. “The blending of these things is important to me as a woman. I am hip-hop and I am classical ballet.”

People clustered around the lobby’s center platform, only to turn (some with jumps and startled yelps) as a group of children banging on the windows and dancing on the sidewalk signaled the dance’s start. More performers followed, threading their way through the crowd, dancing everywhere but onstage.

After this surprise came another: Ms. Stallings’s visceral, kinetic brew of ballet and modern dance that does not fit stereotypical expectations of a decorous, feminine tradition.

Many ballets have been choreographed to popular music, from the 1993 Joffrey Ballet work “Billboards,” set to Prince songs, to Ballet Memphis’s “Mercurial Balance,” a nod to that city’s hip-hop scene that featured the local spoken-word duo Brotha’s Keepa.

Too often the results have been ghastly, insulting the integrity of both ballet and the popular art form in question, as well as the intelligence of the very audiences that ballet desperately wants to attract. When it comes to hip-hop, everything from the disparate movement styles to the polar-opposite portrayals of women would argue against the two forms’ happily coexisting. Still, for many, the significance of these efforts lies in the attempt.

“It offers a sense of hope,” said Nate Wonder, one of the singers of Deep Cotton, for a musical industry that has grown stagnant.

If younger musicians are impatient to subvert what they describe as hip-hop’s overly rigid rules of behavior, dance artists like Ms. Stallings and Nicole Johnson, in her first season with the Atlanta Ballet, are equally frustrated by classical ballet’s cloistered strictures.

“I’d be happy never doing” another story-ballet, Ms. Johnson said during a rehearsal break. “I want to be doing something new, instead of something that was edgy 150 years ago.”

Ms. Johnson and her colleagues spoke with wonder about performing with a local giant like Mr. Patton. At a rehearsal Mr. Patton, dressed in baggy black clothes, crouched low, then struck a typical macho pose, arms crossed over a thrust-out chest. Instead of the adoring, scantily clad women found in OutKast videos, he was haloed by a balletic swirl of taut extended limbs. The contrast was alien, yet oddly compelling. A seemingly absurd prediction that the ever-confident Mr. Patton had made earlier about the impact of “big” on ballet came to mind:

“They might say, ‘Hey, we’re going to have the New York ballet with Mary J. Blige, or we’re going to have Ludacris perform with Miami,’ ” he said. “This might start a trend. You never know.”