He's the Band
Beatboxer Yuri Lane blends harmonica, blues and hip-hip into an infectious and thoroughly original sound.
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“I’d love to get down with Rahzel,” Lane says. “Not challenge him, because I respect him enough that we would do something like spar or collaborate. He is the Godfather of Noise, and I’m inspired by other beatboxers.” Although he’s not interested in making a career out of the competitive circuit, Lane says he’s always up for a challenge. “If anyone wants to spar with me or battle with me, I’m always down.”
Lane has lived and breathed hip-hop since he was a kid growing up in San Francisco. He started beatboxing in his sixth grade math class because he sucked at algebra. “Beatbox was always a great way to not get beat up,” he says with a laugh.
In middle school, Lane and his friends would play Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at parties and teach breakdancing moves to the suburban rich girls who went to the private school across the Golden Gate Bridge.
Trained as an actor at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, Lane has worked in theater, improv, even miming. He created and stars in two plays that tour the country, Soundtrack City and From Tel Aviv to Ramallah. Soundtrack City is a one-man hip-hop play in which a street harmonica player on the brink of homelessness takes us on a journey through the neighborhoods of Chicago. From Tel Aviv tells the story of two young men—one Israeli, one Palestinian—whose lives intertwine despite their being separated by military border crossings. In each show, Lane’s beatboxing helps narrate the story.
Both plays are products of collaboration between Lane and his wife Rachel Havrelock, a Hebrew Bible scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Havrelock wrote and directed both plays. “She was very interested in theater, so we combined forces,” says Lane. From Tel Aviv is based on their travels in Israel. The two met at a baseball game in San Francisco. Then Havrelock left to travel in Israel for the next year. “She said, ‘Oh yeah we had this love affair of the summer of ’97 but, by the way, I’m going to Israel for a year. Bye!’ So I’m thinking, ‘I gotta go out there! Or she’s gonna come back with some Israeli motorcyclist!’”
They traveled together from city to city in Israel and Palestine, meeting friends from both sides along the way. “At the end of each day, I would sort of rewind the day back in beatbox, all the different places we’d gone to.” Thus begat From Tel Aviv to Ramallah.
The play tours theaters, colleges, community centers, and synagogues all over the country. In universities, From Tel Aviv is often co-sponsored by the Muslim Student Association and Hillel (the Jewish student group on campuses nationwide). Lane sees this as a huge step in the right direction toward opening dialogue between Muslims and Jews both here and in the Middle East. Expressing his own views on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he says, “Oppression doesn’t work. Occupation never works. For me, the Zion is a state of mind. And the Zion is for everybody.”
In Lane’s plays, beatboxing drives dialogue and hip-hop becomes a strong force of storytelling. Dr. Daniel Banks is the director of the Hip-Hop Theatre Initiative in Undergraduate Drama at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He says hip-hop theater generally includes one or more of the five performance elements of hip-hop: MCing (or rapping), b-boying or b-girling (hip-hop dance), writing (usually aerosol art), beatboxing, and DJing. Banks describes the genre as ritual theater for hip-hop culture.
