By Melina Paris, Music Columnist
Spiritrials, Dahlak Brathwaite’s one-man show is an awakening. It is also a timely exploration of the criminal justice system that dispels myths and false narratives about felons. Brathwaite, accompanied by DJ Din Decibels kept the Los Angeles’ REDCAT Theater audience spellbound for 90 minutes on Feb. 11.
Brathwaite, a spoken word artist, gained prominence after he won the international Brave New Voices poetry slam. He has performed on the Tavis Smiley Radio show and Russell Simmons rebooted Def Poetry Jam on HBO for two seasons.
As a member of the groups, iLL-Literacy and Youth Speaks, Brathwaite has performed parts of this performance that merges hip-hop, theater and spoken word on stages throughout the world. He has released five musical projects including his full-length albums, Dual Consciousness and Spiritrials.
Brathwaite captured the undivided attention of a notably diverse crowd and held it up to the last moment of his show.
Spiritrials chronicles the encounters of a young African American man who is stopped by the police repeatedly with no clear cause. It’s on the tenth stop that the young man is arrested and gets entangled with the court system, jail, attorneys and probation officer with potentially transformative results. Through creative prose, drama and insightful humor, Brathwaite narrates his criminalization and his struggles within that, to rise above in both the laws and society’s eyes.
“I’m not an addict,” Brathwaite said shortly into his performance. “I’m pushed down this assembly line, cookie cutter justice, sent to a government sponsored, spiritually centered recovery program. I’m not an addict.
I could be down, without the man holding me here.”
Brathwaite’s performance was impeccable. In addition to providing his own narration, Brathwaite portrayed different characters in the protagonist’s recovery program, including an old man who walks with a limp and his right hand shakes uncontrollably, called Pastor. Brathwaite calls Pastor a cautionary tale, “that he doesn’t want to be, living a life being fucked up and now he’s been forgiven.” Brathwaite seems to channel the late comedian, Bernie Mac with Pastor’s characterization. But there are others, including Mary, a Puerto Rican girl, Brathwaite plays with a spot on dialect.
Another character, Steve, is a white guy who has a fetish for white powder in bags and speaks with the Brooklynese of an Al Pacino character.
Then there’s Sanford, a talkative guy with one eye who incessantly uses the term “nigger.” Sanford sounds like comedian, Katt Williams.
Brathwaite and these characters evolve throughout the play. The characters are over the top with their absurdity and troublesome quirks. Progressing through the performance, Brathwaite lays bare these characters’ emotional life by illuminating their pain and confusion. These characters are a reflection of the very real issues that the “addicted” and afflicted felons face. Brathwaite portrays them with affecting clarity.
Beyond being a musician, an actor and a poet, Brathwaite is an educator.
In an interview days before his show, he discussed his role as an educator in his poetry.
“In this play there is both information and opportunity to learn, maybe beyond a personal story or an experience,” Brathwaite said. “There are also facts, new ways of thinking and perspectives and an argument that’s being offered here. So I consider myself an educator as I’m performing as well.”
Being labelled as a criminal intended him to be shamed into silence. This is what led him to create this work and tell his story.
He came up with the name, “Spiritrials,” while working on this project in fall of 2010 as student at Ithaca College.
“It was an experiment, the trial of spirituals and what they can do for me in terms of helping me break a bondage, get me over the hump of incarceration and criminalization,” Brathwaite said.
The music aspect plus the religious and legal intersections of this work made him feel like Spiritrials was the only title that would work.
“What could it do for me as it has done so much for many others in the past?” He asked.
This work helped me overcome embarrassment and enabled me to speak when this (issue) became a national discourse,” he said in reference to the deaths of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
“To (offer) this when it has been part of my story could aid humanity.”
Details: www.thisisdahlak.com; www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nL2HGUoF1c