Hollywood Boulevard on a Friday Night is, perhaps, most famous for its proximity to performance art: from the TCL and El Capitan Theaters to open air venues like the iconic Hollywood Bowl and The Ford — the latter of which came alive under the stars and against the applause of the concert crowd across the street, thanks to Get Lit – Words Ignite’s latest live presentation, If I Awaken In Los Angeles.
Described by Get Lit as “a one-night-only, immersive celebration of L.A.’s soul through spoken word, music, dance, and film,” calling If I Awaken In Los Angeles a stage play would be diminishing its vision. One part Broadway musical, one part feature film, and fully semi-autobiographical to all its performers, If I Awaken In Los Angeles is an emotionally rousing multimedia show that left me hoping to relive it as soon as it finished.
Billed as a love letter to the City of Los Angeles, the show is helmed by director Gina Belafonte (the legendary Harry Belafonte’s daughter, and a pioneer in her own right), and features Dante Basco (Hook, Avatar: The Last Airbender), spoken word legend Sekou Andrews, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez, rapper/activist Jason Chu, poets/singers Monique Mitchell, PJ Bucknor, Jasmine Minchez, Lev Allan Blitz, and Olivia Martinez, among many others. Get Lit founder and show producer Diane Luby Lane and the signature Get Lit Players also make appearances.
Aiming to explore and expound on Los Angeles’ ethnic foundations and its vastly diverse history, If I Awaken In Los Angeles takes us on a sensory journey through South Central, Boyle Heights, the Canyons, and more, through the eyes of the groups who live there.
“I just flew in from vacation,” said Sekou Andrews, who contributed to the show, “[Diane] called me to consult. She was like ‘can you help to flush out the script?’ And I helped them flush out some of these characters and I created the Tour Guide character. Then she called, she was like ‘can you be the tour guide?’ And I was like ‘No! I have no time, I’m getting ready to launch my album. I’m coming on vacation. I’m launching a podcast. I got all these things!’”
“I was like, ‘I can only do it if you do X-Y-Z.’ Tried to make it ridiculous… and she came back like ‘X-Y-Z’ is done.’ And I was like ‘All right. I guess we are part of this.’”
The Tour Guide is one of the pivotal characters of the production, the one who literally and figuratively gives watchers context to the deeper meanings of the world we’re lead through. Andrews’ particular, full-throated brand of acting serves as an entertaining and instantly charming precursor to the emotive and physically expressive choreography and set pieces that fill the hour-plus long showcase, proving to be very inspired casting on Luby Lane’s part. The world Sekou Andrews’ character inhabits is one filled with riddle and rhyme, a history lesson and an open invitation to anyone who chooses to accept it.
“Fred Again [British DJ and producer] did a show, and it sold out in three days,” Get Lit founder Diane Luby Lane recalled of the inception of If I Awaken In Los Angeles, “And it was his music with a DJ and all these clips of spoken word. And I was like ‘wait a minute, why can’t we do that?’ And just put the spoken word more upfront… and we can splice in the music.”
“So just creating that kind of art… that speaks to young people in the whole world — that’s what should be for everyone and exciting and a party and deep and all those things at one time.”
The duality of such a world is reconciled through the eyes of multiple generations, with one segment jointly presented by former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez and Jasmine Minchez Lopez. I asked them, individually, what the power of a mentor is and how that filters through their perspectives.
“There was actually a woman — a librarian — named Henley, and I don’t know her last name, who used to bring me books. She saw this scruffy little Chicano kid in the library and she would just bring me books. And that’s what, I think, my saving grace was: reading all those books,” Luis Rodriguez immediately replied, with his customarily calm temperament. “I think poetry is really about language, but also emotion and about making sense of the world. It’s different in the sense that prose can do a lot of things, but poetry really has to be a depth. There’s layers there. And I find that young people are almost natural for it; they’re almost all poets. I think they got it inside of them.”
“I have introduced friends to poetry through recommendations of my favorite poets like Olivia Gatwood, Danez Smith and Frannie Choi and Chen Chen,” Jasmine Minchez Lopez recalled with bright eyes, “Like, ‘yo, your favorite artists are poets!’ Kendrick [Lamar] is literally weaving a poem throughout To Pimp a Butterfly… There is a stigma, or a stereotype of poetry and a slam as a fedora-hat-wearing, you know… And yeah, there’s culture and history rooted in that. But when it’s kinda just caricaturized, it takes away the power from it.
“So yeah, bringing that back and ground it back into why it is what it is… Have fun with it!”
Monique Mitchell, Director of Communications for Get Lit, Lead Writer & Story Editor for If I Awaken In Los Angeles lent her unique voice to the overall story of If I Awaken In Los Angeles. As a native of South LA, she wanted to portray the region with accuracy.
“I wrote a piece about where I’m from — South Central — Leimert Park, Inglewood, Compton, Watts, all the neighborhoods that I spent time in growing up. And we shopped it around to different poets and we said ‘hey, can you do this about your neighborhood?’ And what we got back was so wonderful. I feel like you can really feel the textures of Los Angeles.”
Dante Basco — actor/poet/dancer, co-founder of the famous Da Poetry Lounge and friend of The Nerds of Color — alongside rapper/activist Jason Chu and poet Ariana Lee also performed an addictively catchy segment centered on the Filipino influence of the county and all the ways that culture has ultimately affected, assimilated with and expanded the DNA of Los Angeles as a whole.
“I’ve always considered us somewhat sister orgs’ [organizations], or something, you know?” Basco considered, taking a quick moment, “A lot of the Get Lit Poets have come to the Lounge and vice versa. So when they reached out to me, you know, it’s like ‘of course. On GP [general principle], you’re like ‘yeah, I’ll figure out how to get it done.’ And it’s for my hometown LA, and this whole night’s a love letter to LA. I’m really proud to be a part of this production.”
Jason Chu proudly spoke: “I turn to rhyme. I turn to lyric to process some of the thoughts that are going on, like, with recent ICE detentions especially targeting immigrant-majority communities, which are Latino and Asians… If you’ve got poets that care about people, having their people heard or care about seeing their society change for the better, then that’s what we’ll do with poetry.”
There’s something incredibly encouraging and chilling about the scope and spectrum of Los Angeles; the same city that can have skyscrapers and luxury cars on one side of the street can, in a single head turn, have lack and dilapidation on the other side. This is reflected in the modern-day visuals that permeated the screen above the stage as the action unfolded, which ultimately morphed from ethnic perseverance to White Americana. And not ironically or as a a critical commentary, but as a homage to the ancestors that brought us to now, through culture, play and music.
“We’re letting folks know that while we have different spices and different food and different colors and languages and tones, we’re all one,” said actress/activist/producer Gina Belafonte on the importance of the play. “We’re one big human family. And I think it’s something that unites us and it liberates us. And I think that, more importantly, we have an opportunity to use poetry to call out some of the injustices that are going on in the world.”
One of the leading actresses on the show, poet Samantha Rios, lent her thoughts: “I think poetry is a huge form of connection, you know? I think we don’t realize it, but everything that we think is the scariest thing that we’d never tell on anybody else, somebody else is thinking it. And I feel like poetry really allows you to put that on a stage and realize the world isn’t that scary.”
The final section of the play, led by folk singer/guitarist Mendeleyev Allan-Blitz, concluded with a song that went from a stirring moan and Allan-Blitz’s booming vocals, to a multi-cultural spiritual that involved the entire auditorium lending their voice in unity and song. Against the foreground of the stage was the backdrop of Los Angeles’ most historical figures: civil rights leaders, poets, politicians, musicians and actors. The branches of LA maps and iconic monuments cut between the familiar faces and gave the sense that somehow this is not only bigger than us, but that it can’t happen without us.
If I Awaken In Los Angeles took its last looks at the origins of its birth and how the African American struggle, Asian immigration, and Hispanic roots gave way to the culture that we can all appreciate across genders, ethnicity and creeds. As its signature phrase echoed throughout the pillars of the script and the columns of the Ford Auditorium, it also stays with you while walking out: “The land remembers.”
