If you believe that young people are all ill-informed and incapable of expressing themselves beyond 140 characters, then flip over to HBO's Brave New Voices. Every year, high school performers from across the country come together to perform at the Brave New Voices Grand Slam Finals poetry slam competition, and in the final round, it comes down to four teams. In 2010, the teams were from Denver, Albuquerque, San Francisco Bay area, and New York City. Brave New Voices gives viewers a glimpse into the world of competitive high school poetry slams and the raw emotion that these teenagers put into their art.
The 2010 Brave New Voices was hosted by actress Rosario Dawson and rapper/actor/Fox News “cop killer sympathizer” Common, and judges included Beau Sia, Mayda Del Valle, Talib Kweli, Sanaa Lathan, and Penn Jillette from Penn and Teller (bonus!). For the finals, each team picks a line-up of four poems, and they alternate through so that the first team does one poem, the second team does one, the third team does one poem, and it goes back to the first team after the fourth team does their first poem. This way, the judges don't score an entire team too low just because they happened to be first. Each performance is scored on a scale of 1 to 10 (though it is mentioned that judges in the finals never give ratings below 8.0), and Rosario Dawson reads off the judge's scores in order of lowest to highest so they don't know which judge gave which score. The highest and lowest scores are also automatically thrown out.
Since HBO's Brave New Voices is coming in at the end of a long competition and only filming the finals, I wondered how much I would care about these kids and the different teams beyond their performances. I think HBO managed to sneak in enough interviews with the team coaches without pulling away from the competition for too long and losing the audience's attention. The great thing about these interviews was that they gave the audience added insight into why the kids chose to write about immigration, war, weight issues, or education reform because for many of them, these topics hit close to home.
In the interviews section, the judges mention that one of the difficulties of judging a poetry/performing arts competition is weighing a fantastic performance about a lighter topic versus a lesser performance about a heavy topic. For example, there was a great poem about childhood nostalgia that included references to 1980s TV shows and Nintendo video games. In a behind-the-scenes interview, Penn said emphatically that he was not easily impressed by a performance just because they picked a more serious topic, and he would probably vote harsher than the other judges since he judged based solely on the creativity of the performance, not the topic itself. I agreed with Penn, and that's why one of my favorite performances was about the African-American community's relationship with food. I loved it because it felt honest and personal as opposed to a topic that they chose because they thought it would appeal to the judges.
While there are many outstanding performances on Brave New Voices, the final performance of the night completely blows the audience and the judges themselves out of the water. The Denver team's final poem was about the contest's inflated points system where judges are mandated to give at least an 8.0 in the finals. They angrily slammed the mandate for encouraging mediocrity and underestimating the kids in the competition. “I am 18 years old,” they cry out, “of legal age to drive, to vote, to smoke my lungs black, to cradle an automatic weapon, deadly, with bullets flying from my fingers, but I can't handle a mediocre score in a poetry slam?” They dare the judges to “give this poem a 7,” and ironically, if the judges connected with the poem's message, it would cost the Denver team any chances of winning. Still, it was a great moment of triumph for the Denver team seeing that their poem made a real impact on the audience and judges. Furthermore, they were mature enough to know that seeing their own written words make a real impact is far more valuable than winning first place, a valuable lesson the judges, teams, and audience alike can take away from Brave New Voices.
DVD Bonus Features
Special features on the DVD include “sacrificial poems” (outstanding poems by teams that did not make the finals) and extended interviews with the judges and team coaches.
"Brave New Voices 2010" is on sale July 19, 2011 and is not rated. Documentary, Television. Starring Common, Rosario Dawson.
