Dahlak is a multi-faceted hip-hop artist, working primarily in theatre.
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Since launching onto the national spoken word scene by appearing on the last two seasons of HBO’s Russell Simmons’ presents Def Poetry Jam, Dahlak has showcased his seamless blend of hip-hop, theatre, and spoken word at over 100 universities throughout the United States and Europe, The Smithsonian, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, The Apollo, The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Artist, REDCAT, MCA Chicago, Ars Nova, The Public Theater, SXSW, by Creative Time, and Off-Broadway on Theatre Row, NYC.
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Dahlak has worked closely with Marc Bamuthi Joseph writing and performing in several of Joseph’s critically acclaimed plays, including Word Becomes Flesh – presented at The Public Theater and Lincoln Center. Spiritrials, the solo play written, performed and scored by Dahlak, is currently on tour. Since the premiere in 2015, Spiritrials has been performed in over 20 cities around the country, including presentations at the Kennedy Center. From 2007 to 2012, Dahlak has released five hip-hop albums, which includes the album Spiritrials that served as a soundtrack to his solo play. Dahlak has been selected as a musician for two U.S. State Department Fellowships: 1Beat (2014) and most recently, NextLevel (2018), where he led hip–hop workshops in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In 2019, Dahlak performed at the Apollo Theatre alongside of T.I. and Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza in the reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me (as now seen on HBO), directed by Kamilah Forbes.
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Dahlak premiered his piece, Try/Step/Trip – a collaboration with legendary director Roberta Uno – in February 2020 at Dance Mission in San Francisco. His musical Long Way Down is an adaptation of Jason Reynold’s acclaimed novel of the same title. The project was commissioned through a collaboration between TheatreWorks and The Apollo. The run of Long Way Down at The Olney Theater Center in Maryland broke box office records. His soon-to-be released film Adapting History is a poetic chronicle American history through music and American music through history. It was commissioned by the ArtPower UCSD, Mondavi Arts Center, and the U.S. State Department. He is currently working on solo play entitled COMMERCIAL in collaboration with Found Sound Nation. The work-in-process presentation of the piece at The Public Theater was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Rockerfeller Foundation.
Development of his work has been supported by CalArts, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Victory Gardens, and Montalvo Arts Center. Dahlak has received awards and support from NEFA, California Arts Council, the Doris Duke Foundation, The Princess Grace Foundation, and MAP Fund. He was a Creative Capital finalist, a United States Artist nominee, and a member of The Public Theater’s 2023 DTWG cohort.
As a teacher, he has been a visiting professor at his alma mater, UC Davis, and is currently part-time faculty at Berklee College of Music. He is a graduate of NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, where he was awarded the Dean’s Full-Tuition Fellowship, and served as the Assistant Director for the national tour of the Tony-winning revival of Oklahoma!
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