Philadelphia Live Arts Festival director Nick Stuccio ongoing mission is to cultivate multi-genre experimental works. One of the festival centerpieces, Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s "red, black & GREEN: a blues," ingeniously directed by Michael John Garcés, proved nothing less than a transformative theatrical experience.
The audience is onstage inside Theaster Gates’ morphing sets, what he calls ’shotgun houses.’ They break away from dilapidated rural structure to think tanks of urban artisans. The structures are maneuvered by the cast into four structures where the performers -- Traci Tolmaire, Tommy Shepard aka Emcee Soulati, Yaw and Joseph -- tell dramatic stories of African-American communities in overlapping song, dance and spoken word.
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