INTERVIEW: Andrew Bancroft on the art of ‘Freestyle Love Supreme’
Photo: From left, Andrew Bancroft, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Arthur Lewis, Christopher Jackson, Ian Weinberger (on keyboard) and Chris Sullivan star in Freestyle Love Supreme at the Booth Theatre. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by press rep with permission.
Freestyle Love Supreme, the much-celebrated improv group founded by Thomas Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Veneziale, is having quite the autumn season. The hip hop extravaganza will return to Broadway’s Booth Theatre Oct. 7 for a three-month run. The show also recently won a special Tony Award at the much-delayed 2020 ceremony, and the art of freestyle continues to be taught to many interested students through the Freestyle Love Supreme Academy.
The academy will offer courses over seven weekends from Oct. 23 to Dec. 12, and those looking to freshen up on their improv skills don’t have to be located in New York City. The classes are virtual, and students can expect to learn many important skills and have fun on their musical, poetical journey. For newcomers, the art form at the center of Freestyle Love Supreme is a mixture of hip hop and improv, and for company member Andrew Bancroft, it’s a skill that can definitely be taught and enjoyed by anyone.
“Some folks are already really into hip hop or really into improv or performing or comedy, and just want time to build their skills and get better at these things or learn how to beat box on top of storytelling,” Bancroft said in a recent phone interview. “We’ve got talent galore on our team. We’ve got some of the Broadway cast and other folks who have been trained with us and already had a lot of skills to begin with. We’ve got a really great team for building skills, but there’s also a group of people who are more just curious about trying something new and are like, oh, I don’t do any of those things, and those things terrify me. And I think our community, our academy is just as good if not better for those folks because if you never make a rhyme in a class with us, it doesn’t matter at all. The most important thing is that you’re trying something new, and you’re trying something vulnerable. And you’re helping to create a space that you feel safe in, and you lift other people up.”
Bancroft often comes back to this idea of community when describing the magic of Freestyle Love Supreme. He and the other instructors welcome individuals from anywhere and everywhere, and he helps them find their performative voice. He has taught dentists, rabbis, students, neuroscientists and Supreme Court lawyers.
“What everyone has gotten from it is community, being in a space where we’re all encouraged to be heard and celebrated for it,” he said. “Anyone can do it. That’s the other thing. People see the Broadway show sometimes, and it is kind of magic. There’s a magic to it, but it’s also a muscle and a skill. … Not everyone is going to end up on Broadway, but you can do this art form and share your voice and your story, and get something out of it from day one.”
For Bancroft, freestyle is a mixture of art and magic, and he is continually amazed how a group of people can make something from nothing. That magic is on display at the FLS Academy and will soon be on display for Broadway patrons at the Booth Theatre. There’s a core group of performers who appear nightly at the Booth Theatre — and Bancroft is one of them — and sometimes a guest star will stop by for a special one-night-only engagement. This latter category includes Miranda, the man behind FLS, Hamilton and In the Heights.
“That’s kind of the beauty of improv, it’s being in a room and listening and creating,” Bancroft said. “There are a lot of folks who will even take a class with us, and their entry point was not hip hop or freestyle, it was theater. Shows like Hamilton have opened a whole new audience to hip hop, and I think people are starting to see, oh wow, and start to learn about it en masse, globally, which is a really beautiful thing.”
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the FLS Academy needed to adapt. They successfully transitioned their in-person classes in New York City to virtual offerings on Zoom, and Bancroft is happy to report that nothing was lost during the transition.
“We scratched our heads for just a moment at the beginning of the pandemic,” he said. “We all realized, oh, this isn’t a month-long thing. This is going on. We were like, we probably need this community now more than ever, and I was pretty impressed with how quickly it transferred. We took our seven-week in-person class and started turning every week of that into a weekend workshop, and it just did transfer over. There’s nothing like being in a room with somebody, and when you’re improving, listening to each other and reacting, but it really transferred to Zoom pretty quickly. I think people were even more hungry for connection and telling each other stories and having someone else besides whoever was in their house, if anyone, to talk to. The silver lining for us was we moved New York in-person classes to international digital classes and got to meet people in Australia and the UK and Saudi Arabia and Colombia and Peru who could log in and rap with us in New York via Zoom. So that has been a really, really sweet part of it. Even when we’re ready to fully go back to in-person classes, our digital community may remain the most robust, and we’re not going to let go of that at all.”
Bancroft grew up in rural Maine, and his local town didn’t really expose him to hip hop or its potentiality. He stumbled upon the art from by being passed some cassette tapes, including Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’ (the musical artist is perhaps best known for the song “Bust a Move”). Bancroft was hooked immediately.
“I’ve been hooked on all kinds of music since being a kid, and lyrics have always been my thing,” he said. “I mean we all get exposed to rhymes really early, from nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss. It’s one of the first lyrical art forms that we’re exposed to or practice is rhyme, but yeah I got pretty obsessed with hip hop groups. I went to college at Wesleyan in Connecticut with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tommy Kail and Bill Sherman, Anthony Veneziale. We’re all part of Freestyle Love Supreme as well. I got introduced to freestyle in my first week in college by my friend Jeff. He’s like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this instrumental cassette tape’ — I know I’m dating myself with cassettes. He put it on, and we just rhymed about stuff in his room. And then I was instantly hooked. I’d been writing lyrics for rock bands, and I would write raps occasionally. But to do it in the moment and just be with somebody communing in that way and opening your head up to something beyond you, the words kind of come from elsewhere. The goal of freestyle for me is opening that channel up and widening the door to be cool with what comes through.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Freestyle Love Supreme returns to Broadway Oct. 7, and the FLS Academy begins virtual weekend classes Oct. 23. Click here for more information and tickets.
