Wise words Gearing up for Funda Fest 6 BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

The sixth year of Funda Fest, Rhode Island’s very own African-American storytelling festival, with presentations in Providence, Woonsocket, and Newport, will introduce a new element into the mix at Friday’s "Spoken-Word Performance" at the South Providence Recreation Department (Prairie Avenue, Providence; doors open at 7:30 p.m., with a screening of Funda Fest 4 preceding the tales at 8:30).

Saturday’s concert at the RISD Auditorium (8 p.m.) is also a must, with local performers joining forces with nationally known storytellers Kala Jojo (from Philadelphia) and Diane Ferlatte (from California). Ferlatte returns to Providence after her performances in November at the National Black Storytelling Festival, where she wowed everyone with the rootedness of her stage presence, the layers in her voice, and the nuance in her gestures — an absolutely unforgettable storytelling/theatrical experience.

Mitch Capel, aka Gran’daddy Junebug, from Pinebluff, North Carolina, was another memorable storyteller at the November festival. Capel will be featured, along with Boston-based poet Askia M. Touré, at Funda’s evening of spoken word performances.

Capel got his start in storytelling because of a Paul Lawrence Dunbar story he told at a banquet, where some teachers heard him and invited him to their schools. He’d first heard Dunbar’s words, in poems and stories, at his grandmother’s knee. Years later, he heard his father telling some of those same stories and his father handed him his grandmother’s well-worn book, The Life and Work of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

"The more I read about him, the more I appreciated his work and his genius and his courage," Capel noted in a phone conversation from his home in North Carolina. "My goal was to memorize all of his works, and I’ve done about 75 percent. Then I started researching contemporaries of Dunbar’s and then writing my own stories."

He developed his Gran’daddy Junebug alter ego as a way to pay respect to his grandparents and other elders — "I want young people to understand that they’re a wealth of knowledge." He was influenced by a neighborhood character from his childhood and by Richard Pryor’s Mudbone. In the school programs, he had taken to calling little boys Junebug and little girls Jellybean, so it seemed natural that when one young boy said, "Well, you must be the Gran’daddy Junebug," the moniker would stick.

But Capel’s performances are not just geared to children. The Dunbar piece he performed at RISD in November was called "Goin’ Back," in which a very, very old man thinks back on what he’s seen in his life. Capel explained that he used to put on makeup and/or put licorice root in his jaw for such roles but now he finds himself hunching over and beginning to tremble with the first words from the old man.

"I won’t put a story in my spirit — I won’t crawl into the skin of a story unless it moves me," Capel stressed. "Every phrase has to be powerful."

It’s not only Dunbar’s themes that impressed Capel, but his knack for rhyme and rhythm. Onstage Capel speaks only in rhyme and tells his tales in his own brand of "sto’etry." He once told Dunbar’s "The Rivals" with a teenager volunteer doing the human beatbox and the audience "rocking in their seats.

"His lyrics were banging then and they’re banging now," Capel said, with a laugh. "He was like an original rapper."

But in between Dunbar and rap is almost a century’s worth of rhythm and rhyme, prose and poetry, and music and dance from African-American artists. Askia M. Touré was one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement in the late ’60s, an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, one of the earliest proponents of teaching African Studies and a leader in recognizing the Nile Valley as the source of Western civilization. He received the 1989 American Book Award for Literature for From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance, and his most recent book, Dawnsong (2000), is the first volume of an epic trilogy about the ancient gods, goddesses, pharaohs, and queens in Kemet (Egypt) and Nubia.

"My particular quest has been to resurrect the key aspects of African civilization," commented Touré, in a phone conversation from Boston. "To show the achievements of African people throughout history and how they’ve contributed to the advancement of humanity."

Influenced by poets as diverse as Pablo Neruda and William Butler Yeats, with a social consciousness based on the vision of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Touré is emphatic that "we should not just protest inhuman conditions but also be concerned with images of beauty and the ideal."

He has thus championed the beauty of African-American people — and the need for more diverse images in the media — and the beauty of the earth: "I have a sense of the preciousness and the vulnerability of all life and the need to preserve it and help it to grow. One the things I’ve been very concerned about is humanity’s effect upon Planet Earth, the devastation that modernity has had upon the planet.

"Our task as poets and artists," he added, "is to provide a more ideal vision for humanity. To somehow drag America, kicking and screaming, into a more diverse and humane society."

And if the content of Touré’s poetry has been based on the turbulent history of Africans and African-Americans, its form has been infused with the lyricism of their music, with a special connection to blues and jazz.

Touré sees a direct lineage from the bebop of the ’40s to the doo-wop of the ’50s to the hip-hop of the ’80s, with its own catchy rhythms and characteristic rhymes. He tries to convey to young people something of what he has learned of African history and African-American heritage and, in turn, he appreciates the way hip-hop has laid out truths about life in urban America, how it has evolved, and how it is affecting contemporary American music as a whole.

Poet Touré thinks it’s natural to be part of a storytelling festival since he’s always viewed many poets — Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Sonia Sanchez among them — as great storytellers. He and Capel would agree that poetry is just one more way to educate and illuminate their listeners.

"If you come in there with an attitude, I hope that when you walk away, that would have been removed from your spirit," Capel stated. "Sometimes I like to make people laugh, because when they do, they open up to you. And then you can hit ’em upside of the head, hit ’em with some deep stuff, and they walk away with that."

Funda Fest 6 takes place Friday, January 23 through Sunday, January 25. Call (401) 273-4013 (www.ribsfest.com).