The Multimedia Troubadours of Modern-Day Griot
A griot was a kind of traveling storyteller in West Africa— “troubadours who went from village to village dispensing witticisms about current events, chance incidents, and history through oral tradition,” as the Fort Greene-based Modern-Day Griot Theater Company explains it. “We are… committed to moving the story of the African Diaspora forward by using the age-old storytelling tradition of the West African griot,” communications director Liza Bulos tells us, “but with a modern twist—by incorporating various media such as visual arts, video, music, theater, and dance to create an experimental, multimedia, sensorial experience for our audience. We believe this experience will leave them walking out of the theater with a different perspective than when they walked in. Our goal is to provoke, inspire, move, delight, educate and entertain our audience, thereby creating theater that is, by its very nature, transformational.”