Try/Step/Trip uses step to dramatize Dahlak Brathwaite’s court-ordered rehab

Dahlak Brathwaite’s Try/Step/Trip, an expanded group version of his one-man Spiritrials, uses the percussive language of step to tell his story of entering a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program after an arrest. The production is having its New York debut at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Jan.

8–25, as part of the Under the Radar festival. Brathwaite, who graduated from the University of California, Davis and appeared twice on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, said the 2008 arrest — when a police officer found hallucinogenic mushrooms in his car — led to the court-ordered program he has processed through music and storytelling.

Try/Step/Trip adds actors to portray members of the rehab group and uses step, suggested by director Roberta Uno and shaped by choreographer Toran Xavier Moore, as an embodied metaphor for the rituals of the court system and group rehabilitation. In the show Brathwaite plays a narrator called the Conductor, guiding a younger self, Anonymous (Tyrese Shawn Avery), through scenes built from folding chairs, bodies and sampled theatrical modes.

Brathwaite described the work as both communal and cathartic: step began as a musical sample for him and became “a rite of passage” in collaboration, and the show culminates in a full-out step routine that folds together its motifs. He has said the experience with the criminal justice system made him “so much better and so much worse,” and that the creative process has allowed him to transcend shame.

Key Topics

Culture, Dahlak Brathwaite, Spiritrials, Step, Drug Rehabilitation