Dahlak Braithwaite: Remix as an Act of Faith
Almost two years ago, I had the honor of a conversation with Dahlak Braithwaite after a performance of his show, Spiritrials. In Spiritrials, Dahlak depicts his encounters with the American justice system and court-mandated addiction treatment and reflects on them with original spoken word and hip-hop pieces, and a live DJ onstage. Ritual and religion run through it like another layer of the soundtrack. Spiritrials was presented in Portland by Boom Arts, and the hope was that our conversation would live on as an Eavesdrop podcast episode. Due to technical challenges with the recording, and the Eavesdrop podcast hiatus, the episode was never released. So I’m glad to share, at long last, an edited version of conversation I had with Dahlak and the audience, post-performance. The concerns of the audience, four months after the current administration had taken office, still feel quite relevant.
Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo: Interfaith Muse is an organization that is all about asking spiritual questions through creative arts and civic dialogue, so when I heard your show was coming to town I was super excited about it.
Dahlak Braithwaite: Awesome.
EHF: Thanks for being willing to talk with us a little bit. In your show there were different kinds of church: you talked about Catholicism and you talked about Pentecostal-style, speaking in tongues, so it seems like you’ve had a couple different interactions with institutions, that maybe have been positive or not so positive.
DB: I was raised Catholic at first and then entered into a kind of a traditional Black church, where folks, you know, catch the Holy Ghost and run up to the altar and speak in tongues. And I think at some point I began really contextualize Christianity in the historical sense. It was like about 12–13 years ago. I was just searching. I was like: where’s the truth? I need to find this truth! I need to understand what I believe because I don’t think I believe in Christianity anymore. And at the end of this search I think I just settled on: I don’t know, I’ll never know, no one knows! It’s kind of what this play is all about: take what you can from all of it, take what you can from any of it, and then try to make it your own.
EHF: I see a lot of us take that sample-style approach with religion now.
DB: Right, right.
EHF: Like, I like this piece, and I like this piece, I’m going to layer them… Both of those traditions you describe are super performative. Do you feel like you draw on any of that experience?
DB: Yeah, yeah. I don’t think I realized the ritual of those sort of processes until I went to court, until I was in trial, and everything was so like …eh… eh…<gestures back and forth.> Like, they ask the question and they already know the answer to it. It was like everybody was in this little game and I was just watching, feeling like I was watching them perform a ceremony — on me though! You know what I’m saying? <laughter> My girlfriend at the time was studying psychology and she was like, where else does like ritual exist besides church? And I was like, well, court! That was a kind of the first time I really put those two things together. Then I started to think about when I was 5 years old, 6 years old, and all the stuff that they did at the Catholic church — just how rigid it was and how fixed and unchanging and done… to death. I think this play is also about how certain rituals can be done to death. How we could do them blindly. And I think there’s a danger to that.
EHF: By done to death you mean that we just do it without thinking?
DB: Yeah, like there’s no life in it anymore. They’re asking questions they already know the answers to, but at some point they really asked the question because they didn’t know the answer! <audience laughter> These things really meant something to us once. Like in Exodus: all your generations will do this from now on. I appreciate the Jewish faith because they really teach everybody: this what Passover was, this is the history, this is why we do each and every thing. I don’t think I got that too much, especially in the black church or even in the Catholic church. I didn’t understand why I was doing certain things. It was just, do it! And don’t ask questions.
EHF: Do you feel like performance is a ritual?
DB: It’s a ritual but one that I can’t let die. Even before getting on stage today I was like — I have to go through it all again. Here’s my life story all over again. I have to get through the process every time and I have to make that real to me or I’m sure it dies. These lines — they’re in my body, these words, the music — it’s all in my body now. So I think that’s how I related to the musical elements of black traditions, in terms of being so comfortable with what you doing that you begin to start freestyling. You begin to let loose. I think that’s where the power really is for me, when I’m not thinking about it anymore. I’m getting free through it. And I’m able to shift, I’m able to make movements, I’m able to make adjustments. And so the ritual is, getting so tight that you can start to let go .
EHF: That’s a lovely way to put it, that the ritual has to be tight enough to feel safe to improvise. Where do you see that in hip-hop, because flow is such a part of it, and freestyling?
DB: I have this poem in my kids’ show [version of Spiritrials] that I do. The poem is called y’all don’t freestyle no more and I freestyle the whole poem. I’m just like,
y’all got your phone… and you spit that little written that you came up with
and you call it a freestyle, but it’s not a freestyle,
ya’ll don’t freestyle no more.
We used to beat on the lunch tables
and freestyle and mess up,
and back then we didn’t have no Youtube
so nobody would document it forever
we wouldn’t be scared it’ll be be stuck and recorded
y’all don’t freestyle no more, ya’ll don’t freestyle no more. <laughter> And I think that’s my biggest problem these days. I think folks have forgotten that art. It’s so crucial to the whole tradition, the whole legacy which hip-hop comes from. So in doing that show for kids, I say, raise your hand to give me a word and then I’ll freestyle. And sometimes it’s horrible! <laughter> But you know, it’s of part of the show.
EHF We get gospel music in your show along with hip-hop, and live beats [from the onstage DJ.] There’s the Pastor [character] who is clearly a bit of a send up but there’s also respect there… How do you feel about using music that comes from that tradition?
DB: I think that’s part of of my whole journey, this journey of spirit trials, of trying Spirit, trying spirituals. That was kind of the whole impetus at the start of the project. I started the album and the play at the same time and so even though I’m not a Christian anymore, this is music really speaks to me. And also this music is the foundation from which the music that I do now comes, so I really wanted to interact and go back and confront — how does a whole album, a whole soundtrack, sound when we are relating it to the music that is supposed to be its foundation? Sampling, trying it again.
And so I tried anything I considered a spiritual. I let it be a wide net. There’s Just Like a Ship, there’s Stand, which are very traditional gospel songs. But then there’s also Love from Musiq Soulchild, it’s an R&B song that kind of references gospel phrases and thoughts and ideas. The Creator has a Master Plan — that’s a crazy jazz song, but I consider it a spiritual. It’s music from the black tradition that’s confronting and negotiating and having a conversation with God. I wanted to have the same conversation, and I wanted to use the folks who have used it before and had that conversation before as as a template, to try again, to remix.
EHF: Thank you for all of that that. (To audience) What would you like to know?
Audience member: I love when you drew the parallel between court and religion. Here’s my question: despite the rise and noise being made by the Religious Right, there is such, what I sense, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, there is such contempt for people who are religious or even a spiritual bent. How do you deal that, with individuals who might have contempt for your belief in God or a higher power?
DB: Yeah, I think with this piece I really take people the whole way through it, like, I felt that same contempt too! I’ve been resentful, I’ve been bitter at [religion]. I often listen to Bill Maher — I watch the show a lot and he’s always against religion. And I just always want to talk back to him. Like, you’re just being as extreme as the other side when you’re just throwing it all aside and throwing it all away. And this idea that, ‘ I don’t know what spiritual means.’ Just because the dogma in the template that was given to you before doesn’t work all the way, doesn’t mean we have to throw the whole thing out. So this play is kind of my attempt to speak back at people like that. To be in that shoe, where, you know — I have been oppressed by the system, I felt outcasted by the system, just like [by] Christianity, just like [by] Catholicism just like [by] America. I’ve been cast out, I’ve been oppressed, I’ve been put down by these systems, but I can’t stop believing in them. I still believe that there’s something, a ‘more perfect.’ The message that I hope to get out is that, we just got to keep trying at it, we got keep remixing it, we got to keep taking from what we can and making it our own. Hopefully people leave with that. I hope folks that come in [to the show] like, “I’m not that… I don’t believe in God… I’m atheist….” I hope they can start to see. It’s just a hope.
Audience Question: Do you have anything that you consider to be a personal ritual or personal practice?
DB: On every good day, on every day that I’m not rushed, I get on my floor and I meditate for 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes longer. Then get on my knees and and stretch, and then pray. And sometimes when I do it so much, that that’s when the ritual has to be made new again.
I started those rituals when I started this play and and that was my way of sampling. Because meditation was an Eastern practice, and the way that I stretch probably looks like Islamic prayer to some people, and then I pray sometimes just in that Catholic form. Lately, even though my prayers are structured and I have a thing that I usually say all the time, I’ve been trying to invoke kind of that Pastor spirit, that spirit that I’ve learned from the black church, in terms of a crazy desperate plea for more faith. Like, give me more faith in all the things that I don’t see and all the things that I don’t know that are coming to me, thank you for the blessings that haven’t reached me yet, that that you’ve already put out there in advance. I have to really dig into that particular prayer right now. It really started with this play, understanding how much I need ritual, how much ritual is crucial to the human beings. So when I’m at home it’s: meditate, stretch, pray, run, eat.
Audience member: What is inspiring you these days?
DB: Hmm, that’s a tough one. I’m trying to find it again, to be honest with you. It’s been hard these last couple months. I’m trying to find out what matters again. I’m trying to understand what this performance does for people. Just hearing somebody talk about what they received from the piece or what they get from the piece, what they get from art in general — I need to know this again.
Me and my crew were touring around the country doing these sorts of performances when Barack Obama got elected and honestly we felt like we were a part of that, like we were a part of this generation. But now I don’t feel a part of my generation. I wonder if I’m speaking to anybody or to the people I want to speak to. So it’s really important for me to really remember what art does for me in general, what art ever ever did for me, what a hip-hop does for me, what it plays do for me.
Audience member: In these times that are so horribly disturbing, how do you see spirituality or faith as a response to it? Do you have ideas about how that connects us?
DB: Art is a type of spirituality for me. As I’m trying to discover what art does again, that is that prayer that I’m asking for: more faith, to believe in more, to believe in what I don’t see and what I can’t plan out.
When I was living in New York we performed for this guy named Charles who was part of SNCC, part of the college activists who were really were instrumental in Martin Luther King’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement. And I asked him the same thing! I said, how did faith play into what you were doing? And he said, “it was the only way! It was the only way we could do it! It was the only way!” And I still have yet to unpack it because [he] was almost like, why even ask, those two things are not separate. And like, to even separate them was a flaw on my in my question. He told us this story of being in church and and a police officer coming to arrest them or harass them and they just started singing and almost preaching to the cop. And one of them was with somebody who actually raised somebody in this cop’s family and they had to speak back to him. The way he described it seemed like a sort of ritual, a sort of play, but for real stakes, that they were performing for this cop.
Your question just makes me think of how I’m still trying to unpack what he was saying, about how these two things aren’t separate. If I were to plan out how this [next few years] is going to unfold, it’s going to be negative, it’s going to go downhill. But if I use the Spirit, if I use faith, then there’s something… I’ve always believed that if you’re close to death, something in you starts to act. You get another strength. Some other force course comes into you that wants to save your life, that wants to fight for your life, something that you can’t even access no matter how hard you try if you’re not in that position. I believe that when we’re being pressed down, when we’re at the brink, when we’re at the precipice, that there’ll be another force there to help us. There is a Spirit, there is a backing that we can’t access right now, that we’ll only be able to access at the edge, at the brink.
EHF: Yeah, I think of ritual is being, like — you do the ritual, you do the practice, so that when that moment arrives, you know what to do next.
DB: Right! You’re ready.
EHF: Yes, you’re ready. Well, may it be so for all of us.
DB: Yes! Let’s get ready.
Dahlak Braithwaite maximizes his abilities as musician, actor, poet, and educator within the transformational space of the theatre. Dahlak has worked closely with Broadway veteran and Rockefeller fellow, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, pioneering the emerging genre of “hip-hop theater”. Dahlak has written and performed in several of Joseph’s critically acclaimed plays. As a member of the artist collective iLL-Literacy, Dahlak has showcased his seamless blend of hip-hop, theatre, and spoken word at over 200 colleges and universities throughout the United States and Europe. From 2007 to 2012, Dahlak has released five musical projects, which includes the album Spiritrials that served as a soundtrack to his solo play. In 2014, Dahlak was selected as a musician for a U.S. State Department International Exchange Fellowship called 1Beat. See the trailer for Spiritrials here.
Boom Arts is a boutique presenter and producer of contemporary theatre and performance from around the world. Check out their season at boomarts.org.
