A Word Is Born


Danny Hoch

Artist Bio

Performed by actors, dancers, and a live band, A Word Is Born is a large-scale music theater piece about the birth of hip-hop culture. Chronicling the cultural, political and economic forces at work in New York City’s outer boroughs during the 1970s, the piece is conceived as a series of short scenes, songs and dances. A Word Is Born synthesizes the musical styles and immigration trends that fueled hip-hop’s emergence and maps its development into one of pop culture’s most dominant forms.


Discipline
Musical Theater
Award Year
2006
Status

In Progress

Danny Hoch

Brooklyn, NY

Danny Hoch is an acclaimed solo performer whose multi-character monologues include Some People and Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop. His work has been presented in more than 50 U.S. cities, and internationally, including Berlin, Havana, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Danny is the founder of the Hip Hop Theater Festival and a senior fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics. His grants and awards include two OBIEs, a Drama Desk Nomination, a Sundance Writer’s Fellowship, an NEA Solo Theater Fellowship, an Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Performing Americas Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation/Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. His writings on hip-hop, race, and class have been published in American Theater Magazine, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Nation, Harper’s, and One World.