Secret Agent 23 Skidoo’s Imaginarium carries rhymes from the page to the stage

Rhyming is a passion — as well as bread and butter — for Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, Asheville’s eternally exuberant, purple top hat-wearing children’s hip-hop artist. 

This month, the Grammy Award-winning musician — also known as Cactus — channels his celebrated songwriting skills into a new community educational offering, the Imaginarium: Flip the Script!, a rhyme-writing workshop and performance series for local youths.

The project, generally designed for ages 7-17, launches at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 19, at AyurPrana Listening Room in West Asheville. The choose-your-own-adventure, eight-week program consists of weekly classes combined with performances culminating in a capstone community hip-hop show with the whole Secret Agent 23 Skidoo crew. 

The concept merges rhyme-writing techniques and 23 Skidoo’s unique brand of uplifting playfulness and creativity with elements of a classic rites-of-passage journey. An underlying objective is to offer local kids tools for healing and growth in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene. 

Rooted in Paradise

Cactus — who spoke with Xpress in late December shortly before departing on a three-week 23 Skidoo tour of Australia — is well-versed in teaching others to rhyme: He’s offered classes for all ages on the craft for close to 15 years across the United States and around the globe. 

But the seed that grew into the unique concept of the Imaginarium was planted in his imagination several years ago in Paradise, the California town that was famously destroyed by wildfires in 2018. After the fires, California State University – Chico enlisted Secret Agent 23 Skidoo in a grant-funded project designed to teach rhyme-writing to children as a response to trauma. 

“Up until that point, I’d done a lot of rhyme-writing workshops and very much believed in its ability to change people, its ability to bring things out of people and heal people,” Cactus says. 

After the initial workshops, 23 Skidoo was invited back to teach week-long rhyme-writing residencies at every school in the district. Through that experience, Cactus developed techniques for teaching rap through the lens of a rite-of-passage journey.

“In a classic rite of passage — and, of course, every culture has a different take on this — some of the basic steps are to be separated from the community, to take on a quest on your own, to face your fears,” he says. “You’re usually given a new name, then you come back a changed person and share your new power, your new strength, with the community.”

In the Imaginarium: Flip the Script! workshops, the separation and quest occur when participants are asked to look deeply within themselves to find something of value they want to share, refine the idea, then get on stage and release it to the community. 

“That’s overcoming one of the biggest fears in modern society — public speaking,” says Cactus. “I mean, most adults are crippled by that, so being able to overcome it is really huge.”

Kids are also asked to come up with their own new hip-hop name before they perform. 

In the Paradise community, Cactus had the opportunity to see the benefits of the process firsthand and through reports from teachers. Some students became more comfortable talking to other people, he says. Some came out of their shell onstage and went on to join theater groups.

And a few did keep writing raps. He recalls one child whose home burned down in the fires and had to live with his family in a car for a time. “Similar to Asheville, when a lot of houses are destroyed in a disaster, it’s really hard to find a new place to move into. He did continue to write rhymes,” Cactus says. “That really helped him channel a lot of the emotion that he was dealing with from that situation, and also have something to focus on.”

‘OK to fail’

Cactus had plans to introduce the Imaginarium to Asheville even before Tropical Storm Helene devastated Western North Carolina. “But after the disaster, I really stepped up,” he says. “I was like, OK, now we have to do this, because I know how well doing this exact thing as a response to something like Helene works.”

He points out, though, that the Flip the Script! program doesn’t lean too heavily into its trauma-healing superpower. Anyone can participate and have a great time, whether or not they identify as having experienced trauma. 

“The truth is, a lot of times trauma is healed through fun and excitement and laughter and being silly and being creative and playing, and that’s what we’re going to be doing,” Cactus explains.

He kicks off each session by asking each participant to write a word they like on a piece of paper and hold it up for everyone to see. He then puts on a beat and freestyles all the words into a song — sometimes 40 or 50 of them, depending on the group size.

The icebreaker demonstrates how easy it can be to put words together, he says. But it also has another purpose.“There are times I will slip, and that’s OK. That’s a big part of what this is — that it’s OK to fail. I think there’s a lot of pressure on kids right now, but being able to fail in a supportive place where we’re all there to create and have fun together means that it’s not so scary.”

From there, Cactus shares some history about the cultural origins of hip-hop, then asks participants to brainstorm a few other words. They then review techniques for creating rhymes for each of them and weave those into phrases.

“Then we talk about how to deliver that with the right emphasis, the right rhythm, the right mic control and stage presence,” he says. “Each of those steps, when you break it down into bite-sized pieces, is really achievable.”

Life tools

All components of the series happen at 2:30 p.m. on Sundays, Jan. 19-March 23 — all at AyurPrana Listening Room except the Feb. 9 showcase, which takes place at The Grey Eagle. The four two-and-a-half hour workshops (Jan. 19, Feb. 2, Feb. 16 and March 16) are staggered with two unique shows (Jan. 26 and March 2) featuring performances by participants from the previous classes, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo and featured guest performers. 

Two showcases will invite students from all preceding workshops to strut their stuff onstage for the whole community with Secret Agent 23 Skidoo and other acts. The first showcase is Feb. 9 at The Grey Eagle. The grand finale and “ultimate boogie-woogie get-down showcase” happens at AyurPrana on March 23 — the rapper’s birthday. 

Participation in each of the four workshop sessions costs $50 and includes performing in the following week’s show. Nonworkshop participants can attend the shows for $20 per person, ages 3 and younger are free. 

Thanks to a sponsorship from Fred Anderson Prestige Subaru and additional funding from local nonprofit My Daddy Taught Me That, Imaginarium: Flip the Script! will have up to 100 scholarships — or Golden Tickets — available. (A link to the Golden Ticket request form is on the ticket webpage.)

Kids can choose to take just one workshop or do the whole series. “The more times you do it, the better you’re going to get,” Cactus says. “All the steps that this rites of passage approach teaches are just really great tools to have in life, period. So the more times you do it, the better it’s going to be.”

Cactus says Flip the Script! Is just the beginning of the Imaginarium project. Though he says the specific details must remain a mystery for now, it could evolve to have an adult component and in other ways as well. 

“What I hope to do here is to continue to build and for it to snowball into a community of people who are looking forward to all of these events and making something really fun and exciting happen during the darkest time of one of the darkest years that Asheville is going through.”

For more information and tickets, visit avl.mx/efc.