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Leading hip-hop theater artist will present his latest solo show
Danny Hoch, a New York-based actor, playwright, and director, is bringing his new solo show, Taking Over, to the Williams Center for the Arts 8 p.m. Nov. 7-8.
Tickets are free for students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $15 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the William Center box office at (610) 330-5009. Future performers in this year’s Footlights series are Urban Bush Women and Jant-Bi Feb. 12, $22 and the Paul Taylor Dance Company April 8, $25.
Hoch has performed twice at the Williams Center. He presented sections of his much-praised HBO special Some People in 1997 as part of a “PS 122 Field Trips” anthology program of cutting-edge New York work. He then presented his full-evening work, Jails, Hospitals, & Hip Hop, here in 2001.
His latest work, Taking Over, commissioned by Berkeley Repertory Theater, is a hilarious and heartbreaking look at gentrification in the new millennium. His characters include invading artists, hipsters, developers, and community folk, all of which are examined through the lens of one of this generation’s leading hip-hop theater artists.
Hoch’s plays Pot Melting, Some People, and Jails, Hospitals, & Hip-Hop have garnered many awards including 2 OBIES, an NEA Solo Theatre Fellowship, Sundance Writers Fellowship, CalArts/Alpert Award In Theatre, and a Tennessee Williams Fellowship. His theatre work has toured 50 U.S. cities and 15 countries. His writings on hip-hop, race, and class have appeared in The Village Voice, New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation, American Theatre, and various books: Out Of Character, Extreme Exposure, Creating Your Own Monologue and Total Chaos. His book Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop is in its second printing by Villard Books/Random House.
His writing and acting credits for television and film include Bamboozled, Washington Heights, Prison Song, Subway Stories, Thin Red Line, Whiteboys, Blackhawk Down, American Splendor, War Of The Worlds, Lucky You, HBO Def Poetry. He stars alongside Joaquin Phoenix, Robert Duvall, Eva Mendes and Mark Wahlberg in the recently released We Own The Night and also HBO’s new series Wyclef Jean In America.
The 2007-2008 Performance Series at Lafayette College is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, J. Mahlon and Grace Buck Fund, the Croasdale Fund, the Class of ’73 Fund, the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour; the F.M. Kirby Foundation, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.