“They call me a hip-hop theatre pioneer,” playwright and director Rickerby Hinds tells me over a call from LA. “I always joke and say that just means you’re old,” he laughs, “but I’ve been a practitioner of hip-hop theatre since I started writing for the stage. It began instinctively.”
Hinds, a professor of playwriting at the University of California, Riverside, is regarded as one of the founders of American hip-hop theatre, and he speaks about his practice with a warmth that naturally draws you in. We’re discussing his latest piece, Blackbox, described as “a play disguised as a magic show”, which will see its UK premiere at this year’s Fringe.
“I just decided one day I wanted to write a play that has people who look and sound like me on stage, and that meant influences from hip-hop culture,” he explains of his early days in theatre. “This was in the 90s, and so the way my work evolved was essentially looking around and telling these stories around me, and using the rhythms and the elements and the flavour and the feel and the dynamics of hip-hop culture, putting that on stage as storytelling tools.”
For Hinds, hip-hop has never simply been a musical influence. It is a framework for understanding narrative, movement and performance. Over the years, he has incorporated everything from MCing and DJing to beatboxing and dance into his work, allowing each project to determine which elements it requires.
That relationship with hip-hop stretches back to his teenage years in LA. Having immigrated from Honduras as a young boy, he found himself carefully observing the culture around him, absorbing language, behaviour and identity.
“I became a sponge,” he says. “I started to try to learn what a 13-year-old who looked like me in Los Angeles should know and how they should speak, and how they should dress. It wouldn’t be for another nine or ten years that I would start writing plays, but that observing, that being a fly on the wall, that being outside of myself while interacting with life, I think became my writing tool.”
With this in mind, it is perhaps fitting that Blackbox centres on a figure whose story also speaks to reinvention and transformation. Combining spoken word, gospel music, stage illusion and historical testimony, Blackbox is a reimagining of the extraordinary true story of Henry ‘Box’ Brown, the enslaved man who famously mailed himself to freedom in 1849. The production follows Hinds’ successful Fringe appearance last year with Dreamscape, a two-hander inspired by the 1998 shooting of Tyisha Miller, and promises another bold fusion of performance and hip-hop poetics.
“I knew about Henry ‘Box’ Brown,” he says. “Then I started reading more deeply into the story and realised how compelling it was.” Instead of going for a conventional historical retelling, Hinds chose to make use of a theatrical device that would allow him to explore Brown’s journey through the lens of illusion and performance.
“I’ve always wanted to use magic on stage,” he notes. “I decided the narrative would be a magician’s journey from not being very good to being good enough to make themselves disappear. And once I knew that, the play wrote itself in so many ways.”
In Blackbox, each stage illusion becomes a gateway into a different chapter of Brown’s life, and the result is a powerful piece that combines historical narrative and emotional storytelling in a way that feels uniquely suited to Hinds’ creative vision.
While Blackbox is rooted in 19th Century America, Hinds believes its themes resonate strongly in our current moment. “This is an interesting political space we’re in,” he says. “We being Black Americans, and it being the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. For me, it’s about not allowing these stories and histories to be erased. By telling them in a way that resonates with audiences, those stories can exist in more bodies than they did before.”
While many continue to associate hip-hop primarily with rap music, Hinds sees a much broader artistic legacy at work, which enables that all important audience connection.
“I’ve always felt, and I’ve always believed that the dynamics and the power of hip-hop storytelling – there’s nothing like it.” He points to productions such as Hamilton as evidence of hip-hop’s growing influence within mainstream theatre, though he notes that his own work often employs the form more subtly.
“Blackbox isn’t overtly hip-hop,” he explains. “But it uses the rhythms of hip-hop as manifested through other Black American forms of expression. For me, it’s just the art form my mind goes to when I’m being creative. August Wilson said that he wrote in the rhythm of the blues, so for me it would be that my writing has the rhythm and the feel of hip-hop at its core.”
Returning to the Fringe after the success of Dreamscape last year, Hinds’ ambitions for Blackbox are clear. When audiences choose to attend a play, he believes they are making a significant investment of their time and attention.
“What you’re asking someone to do is get dressed, transport themselves to the theatre and sit in the dark for an hour because you have something compelling to show them,” he says. “My job is to earn their time.”
It is a philosophy that underpins both his artistic practice and his hopes for this year’s Fringe. As Edinburgh audiences prepare to encounter Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s remarkable journey, they will also experience the work of a creative who continues to expand the possibilities of what theatre can be.
“I’ve seen plays where I just want to linger in the space because of what it’s done for me as a being,” Hinds says. “With any work of art, it’s always layered, but really I would love for a person to sit through this thing and go – yo, that was cool.”
Blackbox, Underbelly Cowgate, 5-30 August (not 17), 12.40pm