January 3, 2000
Ad Hoch: The hip Danny Hoch comes to town
By Barbara McKenna
What do a billionaire rapper, a Cuban break dancer, a prison guard, and a young boy
in physical therapy have in common?
 |
| Danny Hoch performs "Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop" on Saturday, January
22, in the Mainstage Theater. Tickets are $20 adults; $17 seniors and students with
ID; $10 UCSC students. For more information, call (831) 459-2159. Photo: Paula Court |
Hoch was recently described as a "white boy with attitude" by Esquire magazine; and a New York Times critic called him "part sociologist, part moralist, and part super-chameleon." Both are apt descriptions for Hoch, who re-creates a variety of characters from the inner-city neighborhood of his youth with compelling force.
For the past ten years Hoch has been performing solo on stages across the country. Hoch, who says he comes from "a long line of Lower East Side Jews," draws from his background to create the characters he portrays.
"Queens is the most multi-ethnic county in the world," Hoch explains. "There were people from 120 different countries living in the projects were I grew up." Also peopling his script are individuals he met during the afternoons he spent at the Bronx hospital where his mother, a speech pathologist, worked. With his chameleon-like powers, Hoch brings those characters to life in his show.
It may seem like a dicey proposition for a white guy to portray the various ethnic characters that Hoch does, but he manages the feat masterfully. His skill lies partly in the fact that he is re-creating real people from firsthand experience, but the vividness and depth of his characters is also a conscious part of Hoch's creative process. He abhors stereotypes and writes with humor and compassion to evoke three-dimensional people to fill his stage.
Hoch's rejection of media stereotypes became a public story some years ago when he turned down the role of a pool attendant in a Seinfeld episode because he was asked to play it as a Hollywood stereotype of a Latino named Ramon. (He turned that experience into one of the segments in Jails.) Hoch also rejected a role in Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk Til Dawn because of a racial slur in the script.
Along with his current show, which he is touring across the country, Hoch is the author of Some People. Also a one-man show, Some People won a 1994 OBIE Award, was filmed as an HBO special, and nominated for a 1996 Cable ACE Award. The texts of the two shows were published in 1998 by Villard Books as Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop and Some People.
Hoch is a presence on the big screen as well. Jails will be released as a feature film in March by Stratosphere Entertainment. Another project, the film White Boys, is due out soon on video. Hoch coauthored and starred in White Boys, which features appearances by such rap stars as Snoop Dog, Doug E. Fresh, and Bonz Malone.
The subtext to all of Hoch's work is Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop was born on the streets of inner city New York in the mid-1970s. The song credited with launching the Hip-Hop movement is the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." And, while Hip-Hop can refer to the background music used in rap, in the 20 years since it emerged, it has evolved into an entire culture that incorporates performance arts (music and break dancing), visual arts (mainly in the form of graffiti art), fashion, and politics.
The signs that Hip-Hop has permeated American culture are everywhere. In November of 1999, Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum launched a major exhibition on the history of Hip-Hop. The billion-dollar industry of Hip-Hop is used to sell everything from Coke to designer clothes. And, perhaps most telling, in 1998, Hip-Hop emerged as the most popular music in America, outselling the previous favorite--country music--by a wide margin.
"Hip-Hop is the last culture of resistance at the end of the millennium," Hoch says. "Hip-Hop came to prominence ultimately during the Reagan presidency and was tremendously influenced by black culture. Even though it has been co-opted by popular culture, Hip-Hop is the movement that voices the demand for change."
Hoch, who was born in 1970, has been immersed in the culture basically since he got out of diapers. And his performances and writings resonate with his experience. "Hip-Hop is the future of language and culture in the multicultural society," Hoch writes. "It crosses all lines of color, race, economics, nationality and gender, and Hip-Hop still has something to say."
When it comes to performance, Hoch is hot-wired, passionate. He not only acts and writes, he spends a good amount of time teaching youth and performing in prisons. As impassioned as he is about his work, Hoch came close to missing his calling.
"When I was a teenager," he recalls, "I was caught up in what every inner-city kid was caught up in at that time: graffiti, break dancing, petty crime." When an opportunity came up for Hoch to audition to attend a performing arts high school, his mother insisted that he try out. "She made me go, and I think that if I hadn't, well, I wouldn't be talking to you now," he laughs.
Thank you, Mrs. Hoch.
