If you're one of the prosperous few that can afford to subscribe to TigerTV's Total Tiger Movie Package, perhaps you ought to have tuned in to HBO last Sunday night for the season finale of "Def Poetry Jam." Well, even if you missed it, you'll still have the chance to see Joe Hernandez-Kolski '96's performance in the early hours of the morning for the rest of this week.
"Def Poetry Jam" is currently in its fourth season and continues to provide a forum for the less publicized strands within the larger hip-hop movement.
"I feel that hip-hop is a blessing to our youth and this generation," said Hernandez-Kolski, an active Theatre Intime member during his time on campus, "and it's my goal to do my part to keep it vibrant."
"Def Poetry Jam" highlights the verbal elements of hip-hop in unconventional ways and is able to provide a more attentive focus on aspects of the art form that sometimes fall by the wayside in media coverage, a focus Hernandez-Kolski sees as crucial to the balance between commercial and artistic goals for hip-hop artists.
Hernandez-Kolski is a half-Mexican, half-Polish, Chicago native with a penchant for hip-hop, though he says it wasn't always this way. When asked what turned him on to it, he resoundingly replied "Princeton."
While attending Whitney Young High School in the west of the city, he listened mostly to guitar-oriented rock — groups like Van Halen, Anthrax and Living Color — finding that he just "didn't dig hip-hop."
A self-described "metalhead," Hernandez-Kolski found that when he arrived at Princeton, he felt like a fish out of water. Though his high school had had a substantial African-American population, he found himself unable to relate to black cultural phenomena at that age. That all changed when he got to Princeton. Once on campus, he felt drawn towards minority groups both socially and culturally, hanging out at the then Third World Center and Theatre Intime, gradually gaining an interest and appreciation in artists such as Public Enemy and Ice T.
Hernandez-Kolski didn't see this as the fundamental shift that some might. For him, it had always been about the political and social consciousness of the music, not a fixation on the techniques used to produce it. He felt that hip-hop was rooted in the "same sense of dissatisfaction with the world" that his previous tastes had been — and this, for him, was paramount to critical appreciation and enjoyment of music.
His nascent interest in African-American issues was nurtured by faculty members Dean Nancy Malkiel, Cornel West and Toni Morrison, who had an enormous impact on his intellectual life, which culminated with a thesis on civil rights in the history department. His website (www.pochojoe.com) demonstrates the lingering affects of his Princeton education, featuring praise from his mentor, Professor West, who describes Hernandez-Kolski's work as both "honest and insightful."
It is this active stance towards art that led him to Los Angeles after graduation to work at after-school art programs, hip-hop culture workshops and, of course, to continue seeking theatrical work. Hernandez-Kolski always firmly believed that one ought to "Speak with actions, not with words," a philosophy that governed his community role first at Princeton and now in Los Angeles.
His hard work in the city of "glitz and shame," as he humorously refers to L.A., paid off in recent years with a part in a critically acclaimed touring production. "The Bomb-itty of Errors" — a hip-hop version of Shakespeare's "A Comedy of Errors" — was performed in both the United States and Britain, winning the STAGE Award for "Best Ensemble" at the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival in Scotland. But his accolades don't end there.
He was also awarded the NAACP theater award for best choreography for 2000's "2 Gs," a hip-hop adapation of Shakespeare's "Two Gentlemen of Verona."
But how and why did this lead him to "Def Poetry Jam"? The show presented by hip-hop veteran Russell Simmons is a spoken word showcase. It's poetry, not drama. But Hernandez-Kolski insists that the work performed on the show is, in fact, "a marriage of poetry and performance."
Slam poetry is a competitive performance art rooted in hip-hop culture in which poet takes on poet before an audience. For him, it is an opportunity for dissent and commentary outside the commercialization of the mainstream, an opportunity for a new form of dialogue.
It is in this spirit that he's returning to campus in November for Latino-Heritage month, where he'll be performing his own material, another opportunity to tackle racial issues with the hammer of art.
He is rightly proud of the diversity of his achievements, citing his directorial credit for a production of the "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom" at Theatre Intime as one of his most memorable moments.
He said his other high point, however, highlights his focus on the fusion of art and information, of artistic and social consciousness: his performance in the perennial Princeton favorite "Sex on a Saturday Night."
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