Festival Adds Some Hipness to Riverside

Riverside, hip?

Break dancers, graffiti artists and deejays are grooving this week at the fourth-annual hip-hop theater festival at UC Riverside, one of the few events of its kind in Southern California.

The five-day CaliFest ‘05, which continues tonight and concludes Saturday, includes a hip-hop dance-off, a collection of spoken-word artists and a reprise of four one-act plays that debuted Tuesday.

Organized by Rickerby Hinds, a UC Riverside assistant professor of playwriting, this year’s convergence of amateur and veteran playwrights, B-boys (break dancers), beat boxers who create rhythmic sounds with their mouths, poets and spoken-word performers from throughout the Southland is the longest and most ambitious yet.

“There’s a need specifically within the Inland Empire and Southern California for a performance that engages both the mind [and] society as well as culture,” said Mark Gonzales, 29, featured on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam” series and a playwright and performance lecturer who acts in an original short play this week.

At CaliFest, young performers can articulate their daily struggles “in a public forum instead of being relegated to the underside,” Gonzales said.

Through an amalgam of artistic forms, Hinds hopes to convey the nuance of hip-hop’s urban youth culture beyond “bling and the booty” commercialism and sexuality served up by many mainstream rap artists.

Rather, the artists Hinds has assembled are united by an urgent originality and authenticity, he said.

Hinds, an accomplished playwright, also hopes to expose a new, younger audience to the theater through this year’s hybrid program.

Local sponsors of CaliFest ’05 are glad to add relevance and a little edge to Riverside’s image.

“People tend to think of arts and culture in very dated terms,” said Janice Penner, executive director of the nonprofit Riverside Downtown Partnership. “I would hate to think that Riverside was simply very static in how it defines art.”

And a homegrown arts festival can lift the cultural spirits of an area often overshadowed by Los Angeles’ star wattage.

“There’s no need to drive all the way to L.A. when we have so much talent here,” said Jequetta Bellard, office manager for the Black Voice News, a weekly newspaper in the Inland Empire and a CaliFest sponsor.

The festival’s opening performance Tuesday was a series of plays that combined dance, song, poetry and other elements with social commentary.

The first staged reading, “Dreamscape or Girl, You Dreamin’,” written by Hinds, examined the 1998 shooting of Tyisha Miller in Riverside in a one-woman show from the perspective of Miller and the police.

“Soon as I hear the cop siren, first thing that pop into my mind: I wish I was a white girl,” said actress Noni Limar, playing a character based on Miller. The performance included recitations of police and coroner’s records from the night of the shooting.

Another short piece, “Then and Now,” recounted the evolution of hip-hop through the jelly-limbed acrobatics of break dancers Rhythm and Leon Clayborne.

The three hours of unconventional drama drew a multicultural, intergenerational crowd of more than 100.

“When you hear hip-hop, you tend to think black culture. It’s beyond that,” said Roy Whitaker, 30, a philosophy professor at Riverside Community College whose brother Rhythm performed Tuesday. Whitaker described the genre as “more of a global movement ... beyond the borders of the ghetto or inner city.”

Hip-hop “means a voice, it means a culture that is angry, that is excited, that is excluded, that wants to be seen,” said Carolyn Ball, 45, of Rialto, whose brother Clayborne was in Tuesday’s show.

The show will be reprised Saturday night.

The festival has drawn 700 to 800 people to Riverside in past years, Hinds said, and he hopes to expand both the audience and the scope of his brainchild to regular Saturday night gatherings.

In the Inland Empire and beyond, he said, hip-hop has expanded far beyond its South Bronx origins and can sprout up anywhere.

“It’s really about making the space that you exist in do what it is that you need to exist and to thrive,” Hinds said. “Eventually, everyone will come to Riverside because this is happening.”