Use spoken word to challenge and love an ancestor you carry with you. Aaron Jafferis messes with the space-time continuum in an attempt to hear what - if anything - he and his ancestors have to say to each other. Hear an excerpt from the resulting work-in-progress (a collaboration with Dahlak Brathwaite and Daniel Bernard Roumain), then create your own.
Migrating Souls
Aaron Jafferis
Aaron Jafferis is a hip-hop poet and playwright whose shows The Ones, Trigger, (Be)longing, Stuck Elevator, How to Break, Kingdom, Shakespeare: The Remix, and No Lie have won a Creative Capital Award, Richard Rodgers Award, Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship, NEA Art Works Grant, NEFA National Theatre Project Grant, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, and multiple MacDowell Fellowships.
A New Haven native, Aaron began working with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas as an interpreter for the Ballet Folklórico Nacional de Cuba in 1997. Since then, he’s written shows about his (and New Haven’s) relationship with race, class, language and activism including No Lie (Arts & Ideas 1999) and his trilogy with composer Byron Au Yong – Stuck Elevator (Arts & Ideas 2013), (Be)longing (Arts & Ideas 2017), and Activist Songbook (Arts & Ideas 2020).
Current projects include Smooth Criminal – a musical (about white people) to end all musicals (about white people) in development with Arts & Ideas, Collective Consciousness Theatre, Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University, and Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth; Tell, in development with co-author Antonio Fernandez and director Chay Yew; and the opera version of Stuck Elevator at Hawai’i Opera and Knoxville Opera.
Aaron is Writer-in-Residence in the Arts for Healing Program at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, where he supports adolescent patients creating poems and raps; this experience inspired his collaboration with breaking pioneers Kwikstep and Rokafella on How to Break, a musical about hospitalized teenagers fighting for control of their bodies.
A former Open Rap Slam champion at the National Poetry Slam Championships, Aaron founded The Word youth poetry program in New Haven, which supports young people using hip-hop and spoken word as engines for justice and liberation.