Shakespeare goes hip-hop

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MOBO award-winning UK hip-hop artist and social entrepreneur Akala introduced Hip-Hop Shakespeare to India at a LitLive gig, a combination hitherto thought unimaginable. How on earth does one combine someone as classical as Shakespeare with something as contemporary as hip-hop?

“The idea came because I feel that hip-hop and Shakespeare’s works are two art forms that are often grossly misrepresented; in that Shakespeare is mostly viewed through a lens blurred by all the baggage that subsequent academia has attached to his name and hip-hop has stereotypes attached to it that have very little to do with the actual quality of the poetry that people like Rakim or Nas or Saul Williams produce.”
In September this year, Akala visited India to shoot his episode of The Dewarists with Piyush Mishra, and through the British Council, ran a three-day residency with eight public school teachers from Mumbai using music as a medium to teach English literature. “The teachers were warm and friendly and very open, so hopefully they gained as much from the exchange as I did. The idea of educating people via the arts is something that teachers from both the UK and India are keen to develop and explore further and as an organisation, we are grateful to be a conduit of this process,” he says.
While the teachers may have learnt a lot from this process, Akala believes there is no better way to teach students than through the arts.
“It is extremely effective and from my understanding for most of the recorded history of human education, the arts, particularly music, poetry and song have been an integral part of carrying serious academic ideas. The allegorical myths of much of the ancient world, the works of Homer, The Epic of Sunjata all this was originally performed as song and poem. So in essence what we are trying to do with THSC is nothing new. In fact I would go as far as to say the idea that the arts are not intrinsically connected to ‘academic’ pursuits is entirely absurd.”