ATLANTA
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David Walter Banks for The New York Times
Big Boi with members of the Atlanta Ballet Company.
THE rapper
Antwan Patton was sitting in the sleek black Courvoisier Lounge tucked into the back of his recording studio here. Mr. Patton, better known as Big Boi, one-half of the progressive hip-hop duo
OutKast, was taking a break from finishing his debut solo album, due out this summer. But he wasn’t talking music. He was talking ballet, zeroing in on its image problem.
“I’ve always seen the ballet as being, ‘Here’s a little tea pot, short and stout,’ ” he said, singing and miming the typical gestures of the nursery rhyme with his heavily tattooed arms. “Very, very step-by-step.”
Mr. Patton’s unassuming brick studio is on a sleepy side street, just a short drive from the Atlanta Ballet’s midtown headquarters. But judging from the glass-encased bottles of Cognac that stud his dimly lighted lounge or the OutKast posters trumpeting platinum-selling records and Grammy Awards, the cultural distance is immeasurable. What could tulle-clad classical dancers and a rap superstar possibly have to say to one another, after all?
On Thursday Atlanta will find out. That night, at the fittingly grandiose, neo-Moorish Fox Theater, Mr. Patton will perform with the Atlanta Ballet, the first major collaboration between a hip-hop luminary and a ballet company. The name of the production, of course, is “big.”
The title refers to the show’s star, but it could just as easily apply to its mission. Mr. Patton and the Atlanta Ballet say they are seeking to expand the horizons of their respective forms, without compromising them. It’s a tall order, and it comes as ballet companies and the hip-hop industry are casting about (not always gracefully) for new directions and new audiences.
On paper this mixed-media spectacular, which includes local children, video and a series of complicated set pieces, and integrates the loose narrative of a child named “Little big” with mythic characters like Theia, seems like a recipe for disastrous cultural misunderstanding. After all, before “big” Mr. Patton’s ballet experience began and ended with an elementary school outing to see “The Nutcracker,” and the new work’s choreographer, Lauri Stallings, had never listened to hip-hop.
But Ms. Stallings and Mr. Patton, who have bounced ideas off each other throughout the process, share an exploratory sensibility. He, with his OutKast partner,
André Benjamin (better known as André 3000), has been expanding hip-hop’s boundaries since the early 1990s through musically omnivorous, intellectually curious songs and in their 2006 movie, “Idlewild.” And she is a ballet-company resident choreographer whose major dance-making influence is the contemporary Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin.
So when John McFall, the ballet’s artistic director first approached Mr. Patton with the idea of a collaboration, the rapper said, “I’m down to try anything once.” (Except, he later added, wear tights; he may be a progressive, but he’s still got some street cred to maintain.)
Unless the spirit strikes him Mr. Patton will not be doing any jetés either. Instead he and a coterie of local musicians attached to his Purple Ribbon Entertainment label will weave among the dancers, performing tracks that include OutKast’s “Liberation,” Janelle Monáe’s “Metropolis” and “Sir Luscious Left Foot Saves the Day,” an unreleased song from Big Boi’s new album.
And, unlike some fusion ballets of the past, the dancers will not be performing half-baked hip-hop moves but Ms. Stallings’s earthy, syncopated choreography, which, as the company veteran Christine Winkler said, in some ways works better with hip-hop than with classical music.
Hip-hop and dance fans alike expressed hope that the work would have an impact beyond a spotlight for its weeklong run.
“My gut reaction is ‘bravo,’ ” said Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at
Georgetown University and the author of, most recently, “Know What I Mean?,” a critical examination of hip-hop music. He said with a chuckle, “Even if it falls on its face.”
Professor Dyson, echoing several young Atlanta artists who weighed in on the project, sees in “big” an opportunity for hip-hop to re-examine some of its more self-destructive tendencies, including violence and “the blitzkrieg of misogyny that passes for commentary on gender.” If anyone could get hip-hop to open up, he said, it would be one of the adventurous stars of OutKast.
