NOTE: This program takes place at Tanglewood in Studio E, Linde Center for Music and Learning, Lenox/Stockbridge, MA
Price:
Tickets: $15 Adults
Kids are free
Join Hip Hop and theater artist Baba Israel, Illustrator Louis Henry Mitchell, Jazz and electronic artist Sean Nowell, bassist Mary Ann McSweeney, Boston Symphony Orchestra percussionist Will Hudgins, and host Rebecca Sheir for an adventure through visual art, storytelling and music. In this interactive program, participants will help shape the creative direction of a series of musical improvisations that create the score for Mitchell’s original illustrations and storytelling performance. The music will combine live instruments, wind and mallet synths, live looping and beatbox. Baba Israel will take audience input, words, and ideas to help shape Mitchell’s improvised drawings of a character whose unique features and storyline will evolve in real time guided by the audience’s feedback. Audience members will be invited to learn to beatbox, play with vocal fx, trigger samples and synths and contribute their voices and sounds to the loops and music created. No musical experience needed just a sense of curiosity and a celebration of our collective imagination.
Louis Henry Mitchell
As Creative Director of Character Design, Louis Henry Mitchell directs and oversees most aspects of character art for Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind Sesame Street. From designing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons and floats to directing Sesame Street Muppet photo shoots, Mitchell has been at Sesame Workshop, full-time, since 2020. Prior to that, Mitchell freelanced for the organization beginning in 1992. Mitchell designed the character Julia, the first Sesame Street character on the autism spectrum. Julia was first designed exclusively as an illustrated character for an autism outreach book and then Mitchell expanded his design and art directed the Jim Henson Company in building the actual Muppet, and her family, for the show. He continues to be the exclusive Sesame Street Muppet designer along with his other duties as creative director of character design. Most recently, Mitchell designed the two new African-American Muppets, Wesley and his Muppet father, Elijah, for Sesame Workshop’s Racial Justice initiative and Ji-Young for the “Coming Together” initiative against anti-Asian violence.
Before his successful ongoing work for Sesame Workshop, Mitchell began his artistic career at 17 years old working for Neal Adams, one of the top comic book and sequential artists in the world at that time. Mitchell continued his career through illustrating children’s books, designing characters and toys as well as teaching and lecturing internationally. Mitchell is also an active member of the Board of Trustees at The Norman Rockwell Museum. Among the skills he uses to accomplish his work are drawing, painting, and sculpting. In addition, he creates and art directs in traditional and digital media.
Mitchell attended The School of Visual Arts, and The Art Students League and resides in Rego Park, Queens.
Baba Israel – Artist.Producer.Educator.Consultant.
Baba Israel was raised in New York by parents who were core members of the Living Theatre. He developed as a young artist exploring spoken word, Hip Hop, and experimental performance at venues such as the Nuyorican Poets cafe workin with artists such as Akim the Funk Buddah.
He next lived and worked in Australia working on community theatre projects, festivals and co-founded Meta Bass ‘n’ Breath, an infamous and theatrical Hip Hop band. During his time in Australia he received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to produce and perform the Hip Hop Theatre production “The Bridge” which was performed in non-traditional venues and toured to juvenile detention centers.
He began his career as an arts educator in Australia and has gone on to be a leading educator and consultant working with organisations such as Urban Word, BAM, and the University of Madison. He has also worked as a cultural ambassador with the State Department delivering workshops and performances across South East Asia, the south Pacific, and in Gambia and Turkey.
As a musician, he has released a number of albums and collaborations with artists such as DJ Logic, Ming and FS, Zion I, Invincible, DJ Kiva, P-Money and long time collaborator Yako 440.
He is co-founder and Artistic Director of Playback NYC Theatre Company who bring theatre to hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, as well as theatres and festivals. The company recently developed projects to support immigrant communities in Long Island in a series of performances and workshops funded by the Hagedorn Foundation.
As a theatre and Hip Hop artist He has toured across the US, Europe, South America, Australia and Asia, performing with artists such as Outkast, Philip Glass, Rahzel, Lester Bowie, KRS ONE, and Vernon Reid.
His debut solo show Boom Bap Meditations was supported by the Ford Foundation and The Hip Hop Theatre Festival which toured the US and Europe. He has worked on sound design for theatre and dance projects with Renita Martin’s It is the Seeing and Rha Goddess’s Meditations with the Goddess. He was also a featured performer in Full Circle’s Soular Powered at the New Victory Theatre.