Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins: The Hip Hopera of 5P1N0K10

Art Is Science: The Hip Hopera of 5P1N0K10

An Essay by Paulette Richards

A version of this review was published in Puppetry Journal with the permission of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival.

Like Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins’s The Hip Hopera of 5P1N0K10 (Spinokio) is an allegory. Rather than warning children to obey their parents and study diligently, Pipkins’s story explores the age-old question of what it means to be human by drawing parallels between humanity’s increasing reliance on robots and AI and African-Americans’ experience as commodified labor. In the world of the play, sentient AI deployed by NALK Industries has destroyed every major city on earth by infecting humans and machines with nano-viruses. One man can see alternative realities. His name is Jeghetto. Pipkins raps “art is science” as he manipulates this Jeghetto puppet laboring to build a robot. Suddenly Jeghetto is abducted from his lab and held captive on a NALK spaceship for several years. The acronym NALK is “KLAN” spelled backwards, so Jeghetto’s confinement in the belly of the NALK beast remixes Geppetto’s sojourn in the belly of the whale and engenders physical and spiritual rebellion against white supremacy.

5P1N0K10 started as the story of a robot on a quest to become “a real b-boy.” The Black and Puerto Rican street dancers of the early 1970s who helped shape hip-hop in the Bronx referred to themselves as b-boys and b-girls. One of the signature moves they perfected was spinning on their heads while balanced in a headstand. Pipkins constructed a robot marionette that could perform this feat and named him 5P1N0K10. His plot and aesthetic are a mashup of comic books, video games, science fiction films and television shows, concept cars and spaceships, battle bots, dinosaurs, and hip-hop. 5P1N0K10’s story evolves continually through the “intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation” that Ytasha L. Womack defines as Afrofuturism (2013: 9). The materiality of Pipkins’s puppets and performance practice is therefore integral to his storytelling.

Materials

Pipkins routinely describes his work as “making something from nothing.” He has always constructed his puppets from scraps and other upcycled materials—primarily wood, cardboard, and PVC pipe. He strips the figures down to abstract forms composed of rectangles, squares, and cylinders. The style effectively evokes the Afrofuturistic world of the show. 

Mechanisms

Pipkins achieves beautiful articulation in his marionettes by slicing their bodies into geometric planes strung on a central cord. He continually reworks his puppets, seeking to get the most movement with the fewest controls. The NALK AI have chosen to embody themselves in the form of arachnids. Pipkins’s design for the spider marionettes who portray them in the show has evolved over time. At first, he tried to manipulate each of the eight legs with a separate string. This design proved unwieldy. Then he saw some Czech marionettes and was inspired to use rods instead of strings. He suspended the spider from two rods, one at the front and one at the back with four legs connected to each one. The current iteration of the spider marionette uses a single rod with a controller that tilts from side to side, enabling the spider characters to scuttle along by alternately lifting every other leg. Pipkins’s ingenious mechanisms give the chief AI puppet (a white mannequin head supported by spider legs) a suitably sinister presence.

Manipulation

The most impressive combination of mechanism and manipulation occurs in a virtuosic sequence where Pipkins precisely endows a cello-playing puppet with realistic movement. Pipkins’s techniques for jointing and stringing his marionettes are unique. He also eschews working them from a bridge. Instead, he and his sons, Devine and Tarrin, perform with them cabaret-style, in full view of the audience. Though the three puppeteers don’t use hoods or gloves to efface their presence, their black coveralls give them the appearance of technicians servicing the robots, spaceships, and other machines. The family team manipulates the tabletop rod puppets with smooth coordination. They try different positions in hours of rehearsal, blending Devine’s strength at holding puppets for extended periods of time with Tarrin’s skill at manipulating feet to make puppets walk and run. The hours of rehearsal pay off in the final battle when the robot hero defeats the NALK forces with masterful karate moves.

The sets for the show are minimal—several tables covered with black cloth. Projections shot and edited by Alex U. Griffin immerse the characters and the audience in outer space, futuristic cityscapes, or prehistoric rainforests. These projections blend footage of puppet characters with the three-dimensional action on stage, enhancing the time-traveling story arc. A projected robot face made of blocks serves as the omniscient narrator, announcing “I am the archive.” References to log entries underscore the show’s preoccupation with historical documentation. 

Once Jeghetto has completed his new prototype robot, it sets off on a journey through the rainforest where Tiamat/Ishtar/Isis/Athena appears in the guise of a female robot. This apparition is the analog of the Blue Fairy in Collodi’s original story, but instead of warning against foolhardy actions, she asks, “May I guide you and give you access to the Akashic records?” Nineteenth-century Theosophists conceived of the Akashic records as a comprehensive archive of events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intentions vibrationally encoded into the fabric of the universe. Thus, for Pipkins, defining what makes us human is an epistemological question—how do we create and pass down knowledge? Constraints on New World Africans’ power to tell their own stories and share accumulated wisdom were a key strategy in classifying them as commodity objects rather than as human beings. Thus, Womack observes that:

Call it the power of the subconscious or the predominance of soul culture gone cyberpop, but this dance through time travel that Afrofuturists live for is as much about soul retrieval as it is about jettisoning into the far-off future, the uncharted Milky Way, or the depth of the subconscious and imagination (2013: 2).

Pipkins’s Afrofuturistic hip hopera is therefore an act of soul retrieval.

As Pipkins re-creates African diasporan material performance, he grapples with many gaps in the record—gaps in knowledge about the Middle Passage and slavery, as well as gaps in knowledge about the technologies Africans created for constructing and activating material characters. But when he encounters such gaps, he says, “I just summon the ancestors, and they give me information and I use it.” As he described his story-building process during the talk-back after the show, a spider descended from the rigging above the stage and dropped down to the floor to the right of his feet. The NALK AI spiders attack and destroy libraries because they are repositories of the stories that make us human. Yet stories about the spider trickster, Anansi, are one of the bodies of knowledge that African captives were able to pass down in the Americas. Perhaps Anansi appeared to cosign Pipkins’s assertion that the art of storytelling is the ultimate science.