The Venue/Tivoli
Opportunities
Staff and Board of Directors
Partners/Links
FAQ's
Biographies
REPRESENTA!
Authors
Paul Flores & Julio Cardenas
Director
Danny Hoch
Cast
Paul Flores & Julio Cardenas
Paul S. Flores is a published poet, novelist, and one of the nation’s prominent spoken word performers. Raised on the Tijuana/San Diego border, issues of immigration, border experience and Latino identity are central to his work. Flores’ playwrighting and stage performance credits include Fear of a Brown Planet and No Man’s Land. He authored the novel Along the Border Lies, which was awarded the 2003 Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award. He performed at the National Hip-Hop Festival in Havana, Cuba; appeared in Russell Simmons Presents: Def Poetry Jam on HBO; and performed at the Americans for the Arts Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the National Association of Latino Arts Culture Conference in San Antonio, Texas in 2006.
.
.
Julio Cardenas was born and raised east of Havana in Alamar, Cuba—known as the “cradle of hip-hop in Cuba” and home to the National Hip Hop Festival. In 1996 he founded the Cuban rap group RCA a/k/a Raperos Crazy de Almar, which became one of the best known Cuban rap groups. Featured for several consecutive years at the Cuban National Hip-Hop Festival, in 2001 he was one of the first hip-hop artists selected to travel to the United States as part of the inaugural International Hip-Hop Exchange in New York City. He now lives in New York.
.
.
Danny Hoch (Director) is an actor, playwright and director whose plays Pot Melting, Some People, and Jails, Hospitals, Hip-Hop have received many awards, including 2 OBIES, a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Theatre Fellowship, Sundance Writers Fellowship, and a CalArts/Alpert Award in Theatre. He directed Will Power’s Flow at New York Theatre Workshop, and his theatre work has toured to 50 cities in the United States and 15 countries. He is a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art & Politics and 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. He founded the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2000, which has presented over 75 hip-hop generation plays from around the world and appears annually in New York, Chicago, DC and San Francisco/Oakland. He received a 2006 Creative Capital Grant and a 2007 Sundance Theatre Lab’s Playwright-In-Residence award, and is a board member of Theatre Communications Group and the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival.