You don’t normally associate Shakespeare with hip-hop, but thanks to the talent of the Q Brothers, that’s exactly what you get with Othello: The Remix, a modern rendition of Shakespeare’s work.
The Chicago-based duo — JQ and GQ — will be performing their act at the Abu Dhabi Theatre on Thursday for one night only, part of the 2015 Abu Dhabi Festival, which will feature a number of talented artistes from around the world performing in Abu Dhabi throughout March.
“What we do is a musical hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s Othello, we call it Othello: The Remix. It’s like a hip-hop opera because there are major musical numbers in the piece, and all of the material between those musical numbers is rapped and is over music as well. [Our take is] an updated version of Othello, so instead of soldiers going into battle, it’s a crew of MCs and rappers that are on a national tour,” GQ said in the capital on Wednesday.
Some might be taken aback when they hear about mixing Shakespeare with hip-hop, but according to GQ, once people actually listen and see the play for themselves, their opinions change, and for the better.
“They are surprised when they hear about it. [But] I think they are pleasantly surprised once they see it, but there is definitely resistance to the idea at first. Most people either don’t like hip-hop or don’t like Shakespeare, or they don’t like [them together].
“[However,] we’ve heard from people who have been members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and they told us that what we’re doing is closer to what Shakespeare was doing at his time.
“We have so many 60, 70, and even 80-year-olds who come to watch our work and that is one of the biggest kicks I get. One time there was a British lady in her 80s at the Globe [Shakespeare’s theatre in London] who said she had been ushering there for 15 or 20 years, and she stayed after to tell us what she saw was the closest thing to Shakespeare that she has ever seen, so you can’t help but love when that happens,” he added.
Both performers are also keen to stress that it’s unfair to view hip-hop in a bad light because of negative things usually associated with it. They say the genre is an art form to express yourself or to tell a story.
JQ says, “People often judge the merit of a piece art based on the type of art it is, and I don’t think that’s fair. There are a million terrible playwrights out there, but if you say that you’re a playwright, somebody might be like ‘oh, that’s great’. However, if you say that you’re a hip-hop artist, there’s already less credit to that art form. There’s bad hip-hop, there’s bad plays, there’s bad people, there’s bad Americans, and there’s bad Arabs. Everybody knows that there’s bad, and so the idea is not to dwell on that, but to do something great, and hope the people enjoy it.”
GQ echoes the sentiment, “It’s easy to judge hip-hop based on what you currently see on the TV, and it’s guns, cars, women and drugs. The true art form though, for hip-hop, the true culture, is not those things, we didn’t grow up to that as our culture of hip-hop. It’s telling a story through a specific art form.”
The uniqueness of their show and its increasing popularity has allowed the Q Brothers to travel and perform around the world, including bringing them here to the Middle East to perform in Abu Dhabi for the first time.
JQ tells tabloid! that the entire experience is very humbling, “It’s amazing, it’s a blessing, and we’re super humbled by it all. All of the words we say on stage have been used before, they all already exist, just rearranged and said in a different way, and because of that we’re able to travel the world and do what we love which is just mind blowing.”
JQ also says that such plays can help bridge different cultures and bring them together. “I think that’s what you always try to do with your audience regardless. You’re trying to bridge a gap between your audience and this story, a character they may have not understood and let them see the motives of many different people, and in this particular story how human betrayal, jealousy, and selfishness can be a downfall.”
