Teaching the Drama: Cardi B, Hip-Hop, and Applied Theatre Practice in a New Interdisciplinary Class with Prof. Pat Parks

By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Marketing and Communications, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts

The Department of Theatre Arts is proud to announce a bold new course that brings theatre arts training to the forefront of contemporary culture:

Cardi B: Am I the Drama? The Art, Production, Marketing, and Cultural Impact of Hip-Hop (Cardi B’s acclaimed 2025 album Am I the Drama? debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and marks a major moment in her career).

Co-taught by Prof. Pat Parks (Theatre Arts Administration), Dr. Msia Clark (Hip-Hop Studies), and Director Jasmine Young, MBA (Warner Music/Blavatnik Center for Music Business), the seminar explores the artistry, strategy, and production behind Grammy-winning superstar Cardi B’s meteoric rise.

“Cardi B’s career allows us to critically engage respectability politics, misogynoir, and the policing of Black womanhood, while also recognizing the forms of agency, strategy, and resistance embedded in the success,” said Dr. Clark. “By situating Cardi B within broader histories of Black feminism and hip hop culture, this course challenges students to rethink what empowerment, authenticity, and visibility look like in contemporary popular culture.”

For fine arts students, the course highlights how foundational skills — storytelling, stagecraft, lighting, sound, makeup, choreography, and costuming — translate into real-world music, live performance, and entertainment contexts, while also foregrounding the often invisible labor that undergirds these disciplines, positioning students to understand the full ecosystem of performance, production, and strategy.

Prof. Parks’ Performance & Production Section: Bringing the Drama to Life

The course has three major sections. Prof. Parks' section guides students through staging a show as well as demonstrating how an artist’s cultural, aesthetic, and activist platform is realized through performance. The course is grounded in a producer’s lens — an interdisciplinary methodology that trains students to synthesize artistic vision, technical production, and administrative strategy into a unified performance ecosystem.

This section starts with the dramaturgical arc. We ask: How is the artist’s story being told — not just musically, but visually, culturally, and politically? How does that extend from the stage to media and public engagement?

A native of Memphis — a city whose musical legacy includes blues, gospel, R&B, and hip-hop — Parks brings a lifelong connection to music and performance into the classroom.

Hip-hop has always been part of my cultural soundtrack. So while hip-hop has always been a thread in my story, so has performance and theatre.

Parks’ first true theatre performance was in The Colored Museum in college. Years later, Parks’ first significant hip-hop musical theatre experience came when attending In the Heights during a trip to New York City with family.

I thought I could get away with it because it was my family's first time in New York City, and the show told a culturally resonant story with hip-hop as the engine. They absolutely loved it.

 

Created by Lin-Manuel Miranda and produced by Jeffrey Seller, In the Heights fused hip-hop, storytelling, and stagecraft in ways that helped redefine contemporary musical theatre and expand the possibilities of the form, establishing a throughline for hip-hop theatre that continues in Parks’ pedagogy and professional practice.

 

Parks’ professional path later intersected with both theatre luminaries. As a success coach for the Miranda Fellowship at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Parks supported emerging artistic leaders in new works across producing, marketing, and stage management. Parks also invited Jeffrey Seller to lead a masterclass on identifying and championing generational talent — like Lin-Manuel Miranda — whose voices might otherwise be overlooked. This experience reinforced the throughline of hip-hop theatre and broader theatrical production, connecting Parks’ pedagogical work directly to some of the most influential creators in contemporary theatre.

What Lin-Manuel Miranda did for theatre, Cardi is doing in the recording industry in many ways — marrying her love of hip-hop and theatre & drama to push boundaries, bring new audiences to the space, and break records all the same.

Reframing Cardi B as Theatre Practitioner

The course positions Cardi B as a case study in applied theatre practice.

Her eye for staging, spectacle, choreography, and narrative is deeply theatrical. It’s reminiscent of a theatre kid — and that’s not by accident.

Cardi B’s foundation in performance extends back to Renaissance High School for Musical Theater & Technology, grounding her in disciplines that mirror the training CABCoFA students receive. Students analyze how she has leveraged her platform to disrupt traditional hierarchies by centering creatives often relegated to the margins — particularly across hair, makeup, styling, and production.

Rather than treating these collaborators as invisible labor, Cardi B positions them as visible architects of the spectacle, sharing the spotlight in ways that affirm creative authority and actively propel brands and careers forward. From that foundation — understanding the platform and the people powering it — students then move into the full work of production, building performances that are both aesthetically rigorous and culturally intentional.

Cardi B’s theatre connections include a ballet-focused segment with Debbie Allen and an appearance alongside Chadwick Boseman on Saturday Night Live, establishing cultural ties to both formal performance traditions and the College’s namesake legacy.

 

 

The lineage comes full circle as Parks serves as co-producer with Debbie Allen on Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, reinforcing a continuum between theatre, training, and contemporary performance practice.

Production as Collaboration and System

Students translate an artist’s platform and musical catalog into a fully staged work, developing all production elements — costuming, hair, makeup, lighting, props, choreography, and media events — while ensuring alignment with the artist’s cultural, aesthetic, and activist identity.

Central to this process is the collaboration between theatre arts administration and theatre technology, where producing, design, and execution operate as interdependent systems rather than discrete functions — making visible the labor structures that traditionally operate behind the scenes.

Expanding the Work: Industry Engagement & Applied Practice

Parks was part of the team that developed Ulta Beauty’s inaugural MUSE Accelerator, supporting diverse beauty brand founders as they prepared to launch, scale, and thrive in retail environments. Drawing on that experience, Parks helps students understand how behind-the-scenes expertise — in production, branding, and operations — can scale creative labor into market-facing enterprises, often elevating collaborators to visibility and influence comparable to the talent they support.

“Though I am also an artist, I too come from a tradition of working behind the scenes, doing the labor that makes the spectacle possible without being named in it,” Parks explains. “What we’re seeing now, and what this course interrogates, is a disruption of that model. Artists like Cardi B are collapsing the distance between visibility and labor, making it clear that the people building the moment are the moment — and that has real implications for power, ownership, wealth, and legacy.”

This principle is reflected in Cardi B’s career as well. Many of her collaborators — from makeup artists to hair stylists — have translated on-stage and backstage expertise into their own branded ventures, mirroring the strategies Parks shares in the classroom and illustrating the integrated ecosystem between talent, production, and commerce.

Bridging Culture, Commerce, and Scholarship

The course models an emergent field of study at the intersection of theatre, hip-hop, and the creative economy, equipping students to translate artistic vision into work that is culturally resonant, strategically positioned, and economically viable.

At its core, the module equips students — both within and beyond the College of Fine Arts — with a shared professional language, enabling them to collaborate across disciplines and more efficiently realize complex creative visions from concept to stage.

As both a cultural figure and a case study, Cardi B offers a lens to examine how contemporary performance is produced, distributed, and monetized across interconnected artistic and commercial platforms.