“The Hybrid Project,” an interactive venture created at the Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco in 1999, carries on a legend of “an interactive performance project” that allows performers to discover new ways to connect different art forms.

On Sept. 30, Intersection hosted the season’s first Hybrid Project show “Re-mixing Classics” which featured a fresh look at classics performed by actors, musicians, songwriters and filmmakers. They mixed dance, poetry, theater, music and other artistic forms to explore new and different ways for performers to use performances to communicate.

The first performer was Lorrie-Jeane Marinas - new to the stage at Hybrid, and a graduate of SF State’s theatre program in 2005 - who performed a re-mixed version of William Blake’s classic poem, “A Poison Tree.”

"My three fellow friends/performers, who will be performing in this Hybrid as well, helped me create a funky contemporary story that was inspired by Blake’s simple and vivid poem,” said Marinas.

Marinas, 24, said her poetry reading started out like any other, but in mid-act she began rapping the poem with her own lyrics and beats. Dance moves were thrown in by Intersection’s summer Alternative Arts Institute students Yadira De La Riva, Victoria Mejia and Karen Marek.

“It was a fun collaboration,” said Marinas, who has been with Intersection since the summer of 2004.

When Marinas performs pieces for The Hybrid Project, she said she feels free to do whatever her imagination dreams up.

“Being that I wanted to create a piece based on something relatively old, there were no set rules saying it has to sound and look like this-and-that,” explained Marinas.

The Hybrid Project’s coordinator, Dan Wolf, also performed at the evening’s event.

Wolf, 30, spent a semester at SF State in the spring of 1999 and has worked at Intersection ever since.

He got his start at Intersection as an artist reading for a play that became the first ever Hybrid Project performance, “Hip Hop Hybrid.”

The first component of the musical piece performed by Felonious, a hip-hop collective with writing partner and bandmate Tommy Shepherd, was named after James Brown’s classic song, “The Big Payback.”

Along with Shepherd and Felonious, Wolf presented a piece that re-mixed Brown’s song, but included original music and lyrics by Felonious.

It also included “all the lyrics and song titles that have been created when artists have sampled the song to create a story of two MC’s who jack each others music and lyrics and the action ends up fatal for one of the MC’s,” Wolf said of the idea to re-mix the classic song.

“Cause of course it’s called ‘The BIG Payback’ (since) someone’s got to get paid back. Revenge!”

Other performers included De La Riva’s re-mix of Lina’s song, “God Loves Me,” which she rapped and added her own lyrics; Marek’s presentation of a poem mixed with beatboxing and dancing; and Mejia’s performance of “Infotrated” - a piece she created as she worked on her recent production, “The Bird People” - which talked about the American dream and a false reality.

William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” was also left untouched.

Ryan Nicole, Ricky Marshall and Shepherd performed the re-mix of “Hamlet” (circa 1989) in Oakland, Calif., during the hype of the drug wars. They added free-styling flows and beats to a dialogue that links to the present with death, murder, murder within the family and finding closure.

Classic stories and comic in the project called “Lyrics and Lines” were also re-mixed with beats, raps and lyrics.

Manuel Martinez, 2003 SF State art history graduate with an illustration minor, collaborated with Elizabeth Chavez and Carlos Aguirre to create a film, slides, stories and comics for “younger people to get interested in stories they would not usually want to read.”

It was Martinez’s first project for Hybrid.

The idea for “Lyrics and Lines” came about through Martinez’s experience as a teacher’s assistant at Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s Migrant Education Program.

Because many of the students’ native language is Spanish, Martinez was able to revisit the problems with bilingual education and literacy.

“I didn’t understand many stories as a child so I wanted to make illustrations to help others understand what the stories were about,” he said.

Told with rapping by Aguirre and with the help of Shepherd doing beats were “The Prodiyal Son,” “Misled by Need,” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

First-time visitors to Intersection, James Yeargain and Suzannah Murray, said they enjoyed the night’s show.

“I really liked the way the performers took different art forms and combined them to make a piece,” said Murray, 24.

“The performers here gave little samples of what is to come as they showcased their work, so I’m going to come back to see the final project,” said Yeargain, 25.

At the end of the evening, Wolf said he wanted the audience to think about the freedom and possibilities of such kinds of art and performances.

“The Hybrid Project is a place where the artists and the audiences tell each other what the cutting edge is, where the generation of artists are going and how (through) performance and community we can actually get there.”