A Ballet Through Mud

Many a ballet before RZA’s was born from a piece of writing. Adolphe Adam’s Giselle is based on the work of 19th-century poets Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo. Ludwig Minkus’ Don Quixote takes its name from the classic Miguel de Cervantes book. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker is based on a children’s story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, adapted by Alexandre Dumas. You’d be hard-pressed, however, to find a production outside of this one with origins in the noble art of MCing. “I found my old lyric books during the pandemic that cover my life from the age of about 14 to 19,” RZA says of A Ballet Through Mud’s humble beginnings. “And I started reading through those stories, the ideas, the youthful exploration—all of that made me want to find a way to put music to those lyrics. Then, eventually, the lyrics went away and the music just did all the talking for me.” The man also known as The Abbot has done plenty of talking himself over the years, initially as an MC and founding member of iconic hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, then as published author, actor and film score composer. Yet, it was another medium altogether that pushed him to diversify his creative bonds once again. “I saw the [dancer, director, choreographer and activist] Alvin Ailey documentary during that period of time, and I caught the understanding of ‘Let the body language talk, let the music talk’,” he says. “A picture could paint a thousand words, type of thing.” The song titles within A Ballet Through Mud—“Clear Sky After Storm”, “Soft Footsteps” and “The Night Dances When You Least Expect It”, to name a few—set scenes in and of themselves, but RZA has crafted an altogether empowering listening experience, one he’s had verified by someone who couldn’t be closer to his practice: his wife. “If you play it, it’s going to make your mind move,” RZA says. “You’re going to start thinking about shit. You’re going to start seeing shit. One day, we was headed out to Vegas, and my wife was rolling with me. It was playing and she was just looking out the window. By the time we got to the third song, she had a whole movie in her head. She pitched me a movie, yo.” Musically, A Ballet Through Mud is the result of collaboration with Australian conductor Christopher Dragon and the Colorado Symphony. Notably, RZA worked with Dragon on A Wu-Tang Experience: Live at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a one-off concert experience featuring orchestra arrangements of Wu-Tang Clan classics. He has, of course, also had experience directing eight of the most impossibly talented MCs in hip-hop history, but his time behind the boards for all-timers such as Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah and Ol’ Dirty Bastard is likely the least relevant of his experience here. “I change from the normal way that I would produce a hip-hop album or produce a song because now I’m not dealing with just my own creativity or just my own equipment,” he says. “I need 60 musicians to understand what we are doing. It was a lot, but I was blessed with years of scoring movies and working in that field. So my knowledge of songwriting, my knowledge of emotional expression, my knowledge of composing films, all of that just came at this moment in time to say, ‘RZA, do something that you haven’t done before.’ And bong, bong.”