Pageant Of The Masters Gets A Hip Hop Nod At Ucr Sweeney Art Gallery
Laguna’s Pageant of the Masters was the first thing I saw when I moved to Southern California in 1997. Shortly after I moved, my parents came to visit, and they immediately demanded to see the Pageant. Even way out in their rural West Texas home, they had heard of this quintessentially Californian event: part live spectacle, part art history lesson, performed in a gorgeous open air setting, with a Hollywood-esque commitment to the magic of costumes, sets, lights, and craft.
The Pageant recreates famous artworks through the Tableau Vivant—Living Pictures—where live actors merge with sophisticated lighting, elaborate set pieces, an orchestra and narrator to recreate in the third dimension an illusory version of the famed originals. One of its principal strengths is that moment of suspended disbelief, when bodies freeze in front of layered set pieces, lights flatten out shadows and depth, and the audience finds itself in the ambivalent position of knowing that everything is real, material, and in this world, and yet unable to find visual proof that what they are seeing is not a flat image, a false stand in. Binoculars are a common accessory in the audience, trying to sneak a glimpse of a batted eye, a small breath, anything that betrays the carefully crafted illusion miraculously frozen in time.
The Pageant is a long-established tradition and much-beloved. And now, it’s getting a nod from an unlikely source. In Riverside, CA, 60 miles away from Laguna Beach, UCR Sweeney Art Gallery is working with Rickerby Hinds, theater professor and pioneer of Hip Hop Theater performances, to produce Uncovered: A Pageant of Hip Hop Masters.
In Uncovered, life-sized versions of classic Hip Hop album covers will be built and actors/dancers will become Run DMC, Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Salt and Pepa, the Wu Tang Clan, Jay Z, the Notorious BIG, Tupac Shakur, A Tribe Called Quest, and more. “This is kind of an ode to the Pageant, a way of saying it’s dope what you are doing. It’s inspired us” Hinds recently said during a rehearsal in between a choreographer teaching dancers moves from the late 1980s for Run DMC’s Tougher Than Leather and the creative designer explaining how he can paint a body suit to replicate A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory.
Uncovered performances will not just create tableaus of classic album covers. The careful choreography of the visual form, movement, music, and narrative will act as an invocation of the seminal album covers and the way they embodied the spirit of the times when Hip Hop was coming of age and becoming the new American cultural force.
Through movement, music and theater, live actors, dancers, and a DJ will turn the Sweeney Art Gallery into a stage where the unbridled creativity of one the most distinctive American cultural movements in this generation takes flesh, stands up, and is recognized, even if only for thirty seconds flawlessly frozen in time.
Shane Shukis is a writer, art curator, and educator in Southern California. He is currently the Assistant Director at UCR Sweeney Art Gallery. Learn more about Uncovered, a Pageant of the Masters with a Hip Hop Twist visit sweeney.ucr.edu.
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