Arts & Entertainment
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Queens Central To Hip-Hop Actor’s Life |
By MICHAEL CUSENZA
Danny Hoch knows Queens; he lived here for the first 18
years of his life.
Though the 36-year-old artist now calls Williamsburg,
Brooklyn home, Hoch still has affection for and strong ties
to the diverse borough in which he was raised.
For him, it’s all about Queens as the quintessential melting
pot.
“Queens has been the most polycultural and polyethnic county
in the entire world for something like 80 years, and it
still is,” Hoch asserted. “I think that is something I
loved, and I still love – I go to Queens all the time –
about Queens that you find in Brooklyn to some extent, but
not as much as Queens. I think it’s priceless; I think it’s
completely responsible for my lens on the world and my
understanding of the world.”
Hoch grew up “right between Lefrak [City], Rego Park, Corona
and Forest Hills; nobody wanted to claim it, and everybody
did all at once,” he said with a laugh. He attended the
LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in
Manhattan where he trained to become an actor.
Hoch said the stage has always been his first love.
“When you’re on stage live you really get to interact with
people and you get to have a real ceremony,” he explained.
Hoch is an accomplished actor, poet, playwright and
director. He has penned award-winning plays like “Some
People,” “Pot Melting” and “Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop,”
which was also released on DVD.
In addition to his theater work, Hoch has appeared on the
silver screen in such major vehicles as “Bamboozled,” “Black
Hawk Down,” “American Splendor” and “Lucky You.”
He is also a senior fellow at the New School’s Vera List
Center for Art & Politics and his writings on hip-hop, race
and class have appeared in “The Village Voice,” “The New
York Times,” “Harper’s,” “The Nation,” “American Theatre”
and various books.
But perhaps Hoch’s greatest, or most prized, achievement is
his founding of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2000. HHTF
has presented and toured more than 75 plays from around the
world addressing issues relevant to the hip-hop generation,
and appears annually in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C.
and the Bay Area.
“I feel the main thing that separates hip-hop theater [from
mainstream] is the issues are hip-hop generation issues,”
Hoch said. “And you don’t really see that in mainstream
theater; whether it’s on the Broadway stage or the
off-Broadway stage, or the regional theater stage. The
theater world has by and large ignored the hip-hop
generation and our stories and our issues.”
Hip-hop culture is the common thread in the fabric of Hoch’s
extensive work. He grew up listening to Grandmaster Flash &
the Furious Five, the Fearless Four, Mantronix and T La
Rock, among many others.
The omnipresent culture’s influence on Hoch is tangible and
it permeates his stories that use its birthplace as their
backdrop.
“A lot of the roles that I was going out for at auditions
had nothing to do with the communities of New York City, let
alone the hip-hop generation, so I started to create theater
that I felt was about both,” Hoch said. “A lot of my stories
are New York City-centric stories, outer borough stories,
and they’re also a lot of hip-hop stories.”
Hoch’s latest stage brain child is called “Till the Break of
Dawn.” Presented by Culture Project, and written and
directed by Hoch. It’s a straight two-act play that tells
the story of Gibran, an Internet hip-hop activist who leads
a group of his New York friends on a trip to Havana, Cuba to
attend a hip-hop festival. There the group learns learn the
true meaning of self and activism.
“They come back to Brooklyn at the end of the play with a
greater sense of who they are and how to move forward,” Hoch
said.
The play opened last month and runs through Oct. 21 at the
Abrons Art Center in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
If you can’t catch “Till the Break…” you can still see Hoch
at any number of his favorite Queens haunts, like S’Agapo in
Astoria, or Jackson Diner in Jackson Heights, or up and down
Steinway Street for Jordanian pastries and Arabic coffee,
and Minangasli, an Indonesian restaurant in Elmhurst.
This busy Brooklyn boy has Queens covered. It’s where he’s
from. It’s what he knows.
For more info on Danny Hoch and his projects visit
dannyhoch.com.
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LIC Fake Art Show Takes On Art
Snobs |
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By BRAD GROZNIK
It turns out artists have the same problem most people have with
art – sometimes they don’t get it.
Installations, paintings, sculptures, new/old media can be
pretty “out there,” but in a museum setting the piece is
supposed to be digested as a masterpiece.
“I just think a lot of it isn’t any good,” said Kristy Schopper
who helped organize a rebuttal to the “corporate art world.”
A collective of 23 artists got together and are presenting at
The Museum of Fake Art (MoFA) exhibition at 8 p.m. Saturday at
the CivicSpace, 28-10 Queens Plaza South in Long Island City.
The exhibition displays more than 50 pieces by artists fed up
with the snooty art world’s standards and practices.
“It’s about having fun, laughing and pushing each other to think
about art differently,” Schopper said.
The opening will continue with an after party where the
attendees can schmooze with both real and fake artists.
The artists in the show said the fake art is supposed to be
taken seriously but not too seriously.
“We’ve had hours and hours of discussion about what fake art
is,” Schopper said.
The origins of the fake art movement began when one of
Schopper’s friend’s was preparing for an art show. Someone threw
out the idea that it is impossible to make a piece of art that
is not art. Then someone took a toy backhoe, an egg slicer and a
dollar bill, arranged them together and said “yes, you can.” The
piece is on display this weekend.
Fake artist Luigi Marrozzini, which is not his real name but a
fake artist persona he preferred to be referred to as, said the
art world has become an institution – who defines and what is
art has become increasingly finite. So much so, that an artist,
like himself who has had shows in SoHo, are boxed in.
To make fake art, Marrozzini said he had to have a totally
different state of mind.
One of Marrozzini’s pieces is seven small stuffed animals
sitting around a fake campfire. One bear sits in a rocking chair
and looks as though he is telling a story to the other animals.
“I usually make art that is very geometrical – straight forms,”
he said. “This is the opposite of that; these are lumpy cute
figures.”
Marrozzini said it is okay to laugh at the pieces, they are
meant to be funny.
For those who attend Saturday’s opening, an audio tour will be
given detailing each piece.
Buckminster Crowley, another fake moniker, said it was difficult
for him to let go of the seriousness he usually takes with his
work.
“I’ve totally been affected by the thought process,” he said.
In making his art, Crowley said, he would add a theoretical
argument after the fact to a piece he felt was weak.
Schopper said she is surprised by the types of people who
understand what the collective is hinting at.
“We have businessmen who will laugh out loud and totally get
it,” she said. “Then we have artists come in here and be utterly
confused.”
Music sponsor New Amsterdam Records will present
simulated-superstars Mohair Timewarp and Dancigers also on
Saturday. The bands are also jumping on board with the fake art
scene.
Brad Kemp, an artist and musician, said the lead singer of one
of the bands, lip syncs the whole time.
“They really got into the whole fake band persona,” he said.
“They guys are all Yale and Princeton educated musicians; they
were happy to do something not so highbrow.”
The MoFA is sponsored by The Space, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to the transformation of abandoned and underutilized
buildings in Long Island City into exhibition and studio spaces
for artists.
Currently The Space has five spaces in LIC but the MoFA space is
slated for demolition in January.
“This is the last time anything will be shown in this space,”
Schopper said.
Tickets for the event are $15 or $10 for students and seniors.
For more information visit www.licspace.org or call (718)
752-9320.
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