Sarah Jones - Sarah Jones, performance artist - Brief Article - Review

Interview, July, 2000 by Nick Charles

SPOKEN WORD SPOKEN TRUE

Channeling more personalities than Sybil, Sarah Jones, poet/playwright/performer/hottestspoken-word-diva-on-planet-New-York, gives flesh to the multihued, multiaccented, multiculti twenty-first century. In Surface Transit, her one-woman, eight-character tsunami of language and attitude, which is the centerpiece of the first NYC Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Jones introduces audiences to a bubbah who can't understand why her grandson wants rap at his bar mitzvah and a cop who despises the men holding hands on his West Village beat. "I'm just out here trying to tell the truth, every which way," says the twenty-six-year-old Jones, whose show runs through August 26. "Forget about the melting pot...multicultural is not a buzz word. This is reality, not just a PC culture."

Born mixed-raced, Jones finds the thread for her stage quilts from her own experience. "I'm taking large risks with the stereotypes....It's easier that they're based on real people." The Baltimore native attended Bryn Mawr College and then came to New York and began doing spoken word, winning the Nuyorican Poets Cafe's Grand Slam Championship in 1997. Her anthem, "Your Revolution," a sexually charged reworking of Gil Scott-Heron's poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," clouts misogyny upside the head, while allowing women to celebrate hip-hop without having to be a "bitch" or a "ho."

She's been compared to Whoopi Goldberg and John Leguziamo, but Jones counts Lily Tomlin and Tracey Ullman as influences, and her show is presented by Danny Hoch, her precursor on the edgy performing scene. While her career spirals upward--she has landed a part in Spike Lee's Bamboozled--Jones says her main mission is to let everyone know "we're all shopping at the same art."

Nick Charles is a New York-based writer.