A bridge of stories: Will Power remixes the elements of hip-hop and theater to explore the relationship between generations.

EVERY ARTIST HAS ONE QUESTION that he returns to over and over again throughout his life--so says Will Power, the New York-based performer and writer widely hailed as a pioneer of hip-hop theater.

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"That question may take on a different array of forms," he continues. "My question is, what is the relationship between one generation and another?"

Power burst onto the national stage in 2001 with his show The Gathering, in which he brought to life the places "where Black men talk"--the barbershop, the corner, a jazz club, a basketball court--performing all 18 characters himself.

"It was about how do these different generations in the African American community, these men, how do they communicate? What do the generations have to teach each other?" Power recalls.

The characters came from close observation growing up during the '80s in San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood. Power, born William Wylie, is the child of parents radicalized in the '60s. His mother was a Communist, his father a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Born in 1970, their son caught the tail end of that era's life of, as he puts it, "on the picket line, hell no we won't go, nahmean? Demonstrating." His parents were also heavily into drugs--his father was a heroin addict, his stepfather died of an overdose--and many in their circle lived "the excesses" of the '60s. The teenage Power often walked the eight blocks from his home to a nightclub called the Upper Room on the edge of the Tenderloin. The crack epidemic was raging through the early '90s, and he watched it manifesting in a "real sick, twisted dynamic," with young people selling the drugs to an older generation of addicts.

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Power found a way to create and survive through the live atmosphere and thriving arts community of the Upper Room. To this day, he credits the club for his beginning as an artist. "The so-called pioneers of hip-hop theater, we all came out of these little local spaces," he says. "The Nuyorican, The Point in the Bronx, the World Stage in L.A., Red Clay in Atlanta, Freestyle Union in D.C.... It was a return to live stuff. It was too expensive to record. And this was a way to survive all the drama going on in people's families and neighborhoods."

Before he began writing and performing in what would become known as hip-hop theater, Power was an MC with his band Midnight Voices and with the jazz musician Omar Sosa. He began experimenting with rhymes, music, turntable beats, and breakdancing, as well as narrative and character, in his subsequent stage plays: The Gathering, The Seven, and Flow.

What is hip-hop theater? Power broke it down thusly in a 2003 interview with Vibe: "It's theater that uses one of the elements of hip-hop culture: breaking, graffiti, emceeing, and deejaying. And some people say beat boxing--that's like A-E-I-O-U and sometimes Y. It's not a cat doing a piece about people who happen to be in the hip-hop generation."

The Seven, which is an adaptation of Aeschylus' Greek tragedy Seven Against Thebes, deals with the theme of ancestors and the baggage of the past. In Flow, which revolves around seven neighborhood storytellers, Power says he also wanted to look at the past's beauty and wisdom--the echoes of blues and gospel and jazz that you can hear inside hip-hop--and how to take those stories and make them new.

To him, the real role of his generation--the children of the '70s--and the role of the art form it created--hip-hop--is to serve as a bridge for carrying on the unfinished work of social change.

"A lot of my stories wrestle with that question in different ways. I'm a storyteller, that's what I do. Stories about my neighborhood, families. Things I've seen, things I've heard."

Tram Nguyen is executive editor of ColorLines magazine.