Two artists find their own stories in another's life

To be exalted is to be superior and eminent beyond all others. For Carl Hancock Rux, the spoken-word poet, playwright, and recording artist, exaltation has come in recounting the life and times of German Jewish art historian Carl Einstein. The vehicle: a theater piece called The Exalted, a collaboration with composer/musician Theo Bleckmann running at the Kimmel Center's SEI Innovation Studio through Saturday.

Einstein (1885-1940) was an influential European critic, one of the first to show appreciation for African art with his 1915 book Negerplastik ("Negro sculpture"). From that point forward, he was stalked by Germany's right wing, left his homeland for France in 1928, then moved on to fight in the Spanish Civil War as an anti-Franco anarchist.

"He literally puts down the pen and puts down his vocation to begin to join the world, to fight for the right to rage," says Rux, 40, whose The Exalted looks toward his own lineage (he is African American, his great-grandfather was German). With that, Rux and Bleckmann, 49, (who was born in Germany) connect their shared heritage to issues of atrocity, genocide, and Einstein's journey.

"His is a journey of discovery, empathy, and diving into the unknown," Bleckmann says of Einstein's immersion in African art and Rux's immersion in Einstein. "Einstein's plea for acceptance was singular and a path untraveled." He paid a price; chased through southern France by the Nazis, he killed himself by jumping from a bridge in 1940.

"In the end," Bleckmann says, "Einstein sacrificed himself, and there is a strange poetic beauty to his death, almost like trying to offset the hundreds of thousands of fatalities during the German colonization of South-West Africa. He, too, was hunted for his race and beliefs."

The Exalted's writing and performing duo bring Einstein and his longing for acceptance - for his political views, for African art in the West - into the present with a smart, sparsely percussive (mostly kalimba, inspired by Namibian field recordings) theater piece that, like much of Rux's work, looks backward to move forward.

Hearing his overall aesthetic described as a cross between Gil Scott-Heron and William S. Burroughs, Rux chuckles softly and cops to the former's take on social order and political consciousness with a blues feel and the latter's stream-of-conscious recollection and renegade spirituality.

"I think I've always looked back . . . sideways . . . peripherally," he said, pointing toward everything in his extensive catalog of mixed-media works: from his 1998 volume of poetry and fiction, Pagan Operetta, to 1999's fusion-funk album Rux Revue to his 2003 novel, Asphalt, to plays like Steel Hammer (which, like The Exalted, is directed by Anne Bogart).

In "trying to find out who owns history, who owns art," Rux says, The Exalted looks at Einstein's sense of the crucial. "He needed to write essay-length books about African art for a world that had not come face to face with it. "In doing so, he is a man without a country."

For Rux, The Exalted is a way to look at history – "the historical present, my own historical present" - and connect Einstein's praise of African art and the empowerment of a people with everything from the Occupy Movement to #BlackLivesMatter.

How these two iconoclasts collaborated comes down to Bleckmann's quote from composer Milton Babbitt: "If two people agree, one of them is unnecessary."

Bleckmann has his own lengthy, critically adored catalog, an avant-cabaret collection that includes wonky versions of Charles Ives, Kate Bush, and Tin Pan Alley songs as well as his own torrid tunes on 2006's Las Vegas Rhapsody.

Like Rux, he says collaboration is always about learning from the other person and having something completely unexpected happen. "Rux gave me a history lesson about Einstein and the German colonization of Africa, after which I realized this is a subject that connects to me very deeply, having grown up in Germany and having had parents who lived through WWII as kids," says Bleckmann.

Connecting meaningful stories and making them relevant to everyone - himself, in particular - is Rux's bag, especially in the case of The Exalted, with its haunting score and copious verbiage. "As I grew up, I thought - as others did, I'm sure - of the Holocaust as only a Jewish and a German story. I didn't think that it belonged to me. I didn't understand my place in it."

It is in reading and breathing in Einstein and his love of African everything - all of which comes through intelligently and passionately in the play - that Rux comes to a stark and sparkling conclusion: "We are more alike than we are not alike."

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The Exalted

Through Saturday at the Kimmel Center's SEI Innovation Studio, Broad and Spruce Streets

Tickets: $25

Information:

215-893-1999 or

www.kimmelcenter.orgEndText