Crisscrossing across the theater, jumping over seats, changing up the tempo, moving his arms to the rhythm of the story, slam poet, dancer and playwright Marc Bamuthi Joseph combined poetry and motion on Jan. 22 during a lunch presentation organized by the PHS club Voice Cooperative (VoCo) to students in the Alan Harvey Theater.
Joseph has performed on Broadway and is now Chief of Program and Pedagogy at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, located in San Francisco.
“I’m the surrogate for Russell Westbrook and 50 Cent,” Joseph said in the beginning of his presentation.
He told a story about being a black American in Africa, brought attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and occasionally rapped — all while reciting poetry and dancing. 
President of PHS club Together We Slam Tom Jara gave an introduction to slam poetry to start off the event.
“The truth is mute and we need to speak for her,” Jara said in a poem he performed to the audience.
Freshman Laila Adarkar and junior Yuka Matsuno both decided to go to the event because they had been fascinated with slam poetry.
“I thought he was really good,” Adarkar said. “He was talking about a lot of important stuff and it was interesting to hear his take on it.”
The reference to the Black Lives Matter movement and the black community resonated with her the most, Matsuno said.
“A lot of poems I often hear in slam poetry are about love and life, but he talked about race and what it was like to grow up as a black American,” Matsuno said.
In addition, Joseph’s casual manner while presenting and conversational tone made his poetry fun and unique, Matsuno and Adarkar said.
“He was almost preaching, like he was the professor and we were his students,” Jara said. “It was pretty cool.”
In his last poem of the presentation, Joseph told of his experiences coaching kids’ soccer and how soccer can be used as a metaphor to relate to how the world works together.
“The only way to win is if everyone touches the ball,” Joseph said, once again using poetry to address a world problem
