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Five years in the making and twice postponed by COVID lockdowns, a cannabis theatrical concert dedicated to celebrating marijuana, and raising consciousness around the plant, has opened in New York City. Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville<\/a><\/em>\u00a0uses music and projected images as well as dialogue to trace the journey of cannabis from the herblore of ancient India and China through European bohemia, American prohibition, youth counterculture and finally legalization (in many states).<\/p>\n Running through July 31 at\u00a0La Mama Experimental Theatre Club<\/a>,\u00a0a venerable venue in Manhattan\u2019s East Village, the show is written by Baba Israel, who serves as MC, with music composed by Grace Galu, who performs on vocals and guitar as the \u201cSativa Diva.\u201d Israel\u2019s longtime outfit\u00a0Soul Inscribed<\/a>\u00a0serves as the back-up band, and there\u2019s also an ensemble of dancers.<\/p>\n After a brief passage covering thousands of years, in which cannabis went from the earliest botanical references of the ancient world to being the muse of French poets including Balzac and Baudelaire, the herb crosses the Atlantic to the Americas\u2014woven into the \u201chair of the enslaved.\u201d This refers to the tradition of African crop seeds\u2014including cannabis\u2014being smuggled onto the slave ships by this means during the Middle Passage.\u00a0<\/p>\n The link between marijuana prohibition and racism is emphasized in this cannabis theatrical concert. African American culture nurtured cannabis, as manifested in musical samples such as Fats Waller\u2019s \u201cThe Reefer Song\u201d (with its refrain \u201cWhen you\u2019re a viper,\u201d jazz slang for herb aficionados) and Ella Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cWhen I Get Low I Get High.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Louis Armstrong\u2019s rendering of \u201cLa Cucaracha\u201d speaks to the use of cannabis by Pancho Villa\u2019s troops during the Mexican Revolution. But this meant backlash north of the border, with \u201cmarihuana\u201d mixed up in the white mind with subversive Mexican immigrants. Lurid newspaper clips from the period inform us that California criminalized the herb amid such fears in 1913, followed by Texas in 1919.\u00a0<\/p>\n And when crusading federal bureaucrat Harry Anslinger launched his successful campaign to criminalize cannabis nationwide in the 1930s, he played to the most blatant and ugly stigmatization of both Mexicans and Blacks\u2014again portrayed in period images.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But the beatniks were starting to popularize weed among white folks just as the civil rights movement was taking off in the 1950s. And it all came together in the countercultural explosion and youth rebellion of the \u201960s, punctuated by Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cRainy Day Women\u201d (with its refrain \u201ceverybody must get stoned\u201d) and the Beatles\u2019 \u201c(I Get High) With a Little Help from My Friends.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This, again, meant a governmental backlash in the War On Drugs and mass incarceration Nixon and Reagan eras.\u00a0<\/p>\n The origins of the legalization movement are depicted in the groundbreaking efforts of San Francisco activists Dennis Peron and Mary Jane \u201cBrownie Mary\u201d Rathbun, who provided cannabis to people with HIV\/AIDS who needed it to survive, in an open challenge to the authorities. The final generation of the narrative takes us from San Francisco\u2019s 1991 voter initiative to allow medicinal cannabis use in the city to the 2021 law legalizing weed in New York state. The transformation is set to anthems such as Bob Markey\u2019s \u201cKaya.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n This chronology is inspired by Martin A. Lee\u2019s 2021 book\u00a0Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n After much didacticism, the cannabis theatrical concert has its poignant moments. One uses an improvisatory excursion and expressive dance to depict a war veteran\u2019s journey from PTSD to relief from pot. In another, Israel describes how his mom, Pamela Mayo Israel\u2014a veteran of the pioneering experimental\u00a0Living Theatre<\/a>\u00a0troupe, now suffering from dementia\u2014uses cannabis to overcome confusion and tantrums. She now has a fanbase for video streams of her dancing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The cannabis theatrical concert, developed through a residency at\u00a0HERE<\/a>, the same Lower Manhattan theater that was an incubator for\u00a0The Vagina Monologues<\/em><\/a>, explicitly aspires to be a vehicle for activism. Each performance ends with a short presentation by a representative of New York\u2019s cannabis community.\u00a0<\/p>\n The night I attended, July 20, this was Zulai Romero of the Brooklyn cannabis start-up\u00a0Muz<\/a>, who expressed her hope New Yorkers \u201cwill support communities of color as the MSOs move in.\u201d This is a reference to the multi-state operators now preparing to swoop on New York\u2019s market. That day also happened to be Grace Galu\u2019s birthday, and there was Manhattan cheesecake to go around at a small afterparty.\u00a0<\/p>\n Asked for a few words at the afterparty, Galu said: \u201cCulture, community, celebration! But also, grief, for those who died in prison or during arrest or of illness because they didn\u2019t have access to cannabis\u2014all those who didn\u2019t make it to celebrate legalization.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Summing up the spirit of the production, she said: \u201cSo, come see a razzle-dazzle play about cannabis. But it\u2019s not frivolous\u2014it\u2019s about the profound consequences both of its use and its prohibition. We think that theater should be somewhat uncomfortable and confronting.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Cannabis Play Traces History and Culture<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Five years in the making and twice postponed by COVID lockdowns, a cannabis theatrical concert dedicated to celebrating marijuana, and raising consciousness around the plant, has opened in New York City. Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville\u00a0uses music and projected images as well as dialogue to trace the journey of cannabis fromContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":56091,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2252,16352,50,99,1093,16353,3939,470,13792,593,16354],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56090"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56092,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56090\/revisions\/56092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cannabis History in Music, Word and Image<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\nConfrontational Theater<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Cannabis Play Traces History and Culture<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"