BWW Blog: Kellie Williams - An Interview with Rafael Casal

Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to interview Rafael Casal, co-creator of #BARS workshop currently in association The Public Theater. He is a rapper, poet, actor, playwright, teacher, and musician. His highly socially-conscious work combines elements of hip-hop music and theater in a unique way. It was only fitting to have the interview in The Public Theater.

Rafael is not shy about using his platform-both in his art and his social media-to make people aware of what's going on in today's world. "This idea that when you can see wrong, or clear injustice or hypocrisy, and you are one of the lucky ones who can use language to phrase it in different ways to try and get people to connect to it and see it the way they need to see it. For all of us, at some point it clicks, either because it is a circumstance that's oppressing us, or it's a circumstance that we're close enough to that we can see the nuance of the oppression, empathize with it, and wanna be on the right side of resolving it. And like in any story, no one ever thinks they're the villain. And you don't wanna treat anyone like the villain. You have to give them the space to be the hero, and find the heroic nature of coming to a positive resolve and information."

While he doesn't underestimate the power of social media as a language tool, he believes that theater is the place to really get people thinking: "the real power is getting people into a room or getting them to invest in a show or a story and having enough time with them where their minds can be exposed to other sides of things. So you leave a theater or a play thinking, 'I relate to that but I hadn't thought of it in that way.'"

Lyrics have always been the most important part of music and poetry for Rafael, but his favorite quotable line isn't from a song or a poem at all. It's a quote from James Baldwin: "The role of the artist and the role of the lover is the same. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see. In so far as that is true, in that effort I become conscious of the things that I do not see and will not see without you and vice versa....An artist is not here to give you answers, but to ask you questions." About this quote, Rafael says it "is the guidepost of everything that I do. It keeps me humble, it keeps me from trying to profess things, but rather just to say, 'This is an interesting way to look at this. How does that make you feel?' And then people find their way to resolve on their own."

One of his latest projects is #BARS workshop, which recently completed a second session. The idea for the workshop was actually initially a joke between Rafael and his friends, casting director Daryl Eisenberg and fellow rapper/actor Daveed Diggs. Eventually Daveed and Rafael decided to compile the curriculums they'd been using for teaching in the past, set up a website, and see what would happen. They were very excited about all the talented people who took part in the first session, and they made a medley that generated a lot of buzz. Time Warner, the Kennedy Center, and The Public Theater took notice of the workshop, and the second session was held at the Public. For this session, the numbers of cast, crew, and audience members of the medley more than doubled. This time around, the final film project features guest stars from Hamilton and other Broadway shows, and rapper Pharaohe Monch. When I asked about the future of #BARS, Rafael said he "would be shocked if we didn't just start again very soon."

Rafael is also currently working on a new musical. The show discusses many topics, and one of them is toxic masculinity. When I asked why he chose that topic, he said: "I have so much writing, story, and interest in talking about the very conflicted existence I've had with what I feel like I was taught men are versus who I've felt I've been becoming my whole life and the moments where those have just not lined up and what I've learned in those moments and watching other men that I know struggle with these things. The writing that's in there now investigates these institutions that we've looked at growing up: for me, what did the rap world do and say to me about what it meant to be a dude? What do movies and TV shows and imagery on billboards tell us about who we're supposed to be as men? And how does that trickle down into the way we talk to the people we love, and the way we think about the world, and the way entitlement works, and the way violence works?"

When I asked Rafael about teaching, he emphasized how important it is for him to keep building the community of artists. "As a practitioner myself, I think the teaching element is homework. It goes back to the idea of the need for activism in art. Teaching is really important for people's art. You can't just absorb information and mentorship and lessons and rituals because you have to karmically pay those back. Because what happens is, my students become my cast members. My cast members become my directors, or producers, or people who find me places to do things. The art scene goes from your students to being your peers. And the lessons that I taught them and that they learned from other people come back and re-teach me again, through the lens of whoever taught them stuff. And we get these different pedagogies of art that funnel and feed back into the scene. Every time you learn something, it's selfish to keep it in your head, you gotta throw it back into the pond and let everyone get a sip. It just makes the scene rich with information and different ideologies and approaches to art that inform my own work. Teaching really just feels like paying it forward."

You can follow Rafael on Twitter @rafaelcasal.