By Bo Emerson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When Marc Bamuthi Joseph is cartwheeling through the air — and spitting out poetry at the same time — he’s glad he used to play soccer.

Because speaking (or singing) and dancing at the same time isn’t easy. Just ask Fred Astaire.

“Or Beyoncé!” said a laughing Joseph. “I think that particular skill comes out of sports. ... It’s the training as a soccer player that has kind of focused me.”

Joseph will be kicking it this weekend as the headliner in a two-day event at the Rialto Center for the Arts featuring two hybrids of the dance, jazz, slam poetry, theater and hip-hop worlds. With Universes, a quartet of musician/poets from New York, the event stretches the concept of hip-hop into new territories.

Co-commissioned by the Atlanta-based National Black Arts Festival, Joseph’s work “the break/s” will be the centerpiece of a Friday and Saturday show at the Rialto titled “Can’t, Don’t, Won’t Stop — Taking Spoken Word to the Next Level.”

Of “the break/s,” Joseph said, “I call it a travel diary across planet hip-hop, inspired initially by reading a book by Jeff Chang called ‘Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.’ ”

The piece also documents travel in the real sense, as Joseph’s free-form verse recounts his journeys through Bosnia, Cuba, Japan, Senegal, Atlanta, Madison, Wis., and Paris.

A Morehouse graduate, Joseph, 33, started out as an English teacher, then became a dancer and singer in traditional theater, including the Tony-winning Broadway show “The Tap Dance Kid.”

He also made a name for himself in the slam poetry world, winning a national championship and appearing on HBO’s “Def Poetry” over the past two seasons.

Writing his own material, he began to bend the world of theatrical hip-hop, combining dance and poetry to create a synergy that exceeds the bounds of both. The combination, said the Oakland, Calif., resident, “lets me speak literally and have my body be the metaphor, so I have literal speech and figurative movement and hopefully there’s a harmony there.”

That harmony can be wicked. In one of his bits, he describes the law that forbade slaves, on pain of death, from owning any “noise-making device,” while his feet begin a surreptitious soft-shoe. “However, they had enough business sense not to devalue their own property by chopping off our feet,” he adds, as his own feet accelerate into a tap-dance rhythm.

In other words, strip us of every possession and right, we can still turn our feet into music.

Hip-hop and poetry lean even further into music in “Live from the Edge” from opening act Universes, a quartet that has performed together for 13 years, mashing jazz, poetry and popular song into a new creature.

The group was born in poetry cafés.

“We were in every open mic you can find,” sometimes three or four in one night, co-founder Steven Sapp said. “We’d drive to Brooklyn, do a show, get back in the car, drive to Queens, do a show, get back in the car, drive to Manhattan, do a show.”

Sapp’s group has performed at jazz venues, using four-part harmony to incorporate Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Cole Porter and Sly Stone into their poetic flow.

They are another example of the breadth of the hip-hop umbrella, an umbrella that Sapp, 43, would prefer not to name.

“There’s a term, ‘hip-hop theater,’ and we’ve fought that for years,” Sapp said.

What is hip-hop? Joseph’s monologue explores that question. He knows that the A3C Festival going on at the same time across town, bringing almost 200 rap artists to East Atlanta and Little Five Points, will attract hundreds of young fans who would line up to see Killer Mike and Rakim but would deny that “the break/s” is part of the same mix.

A3C organizer Brian Knott doesn’t see a divide, except in the demographic and in the setting. In his clubs, the amps are cranked, and no one sits down.

“Either way, you can walk out of it and say, ‘Wow, my mind was blown,’ ” Knott said. “It’s just two totally different kinds of experiences.”

Though many rap fans would deny it, “Hip-hop is not limited to commodities of youth culture,” Joseph said. “The point, I think, of this piece is to help us eliminate some of those strict ideas of what hip-hop is, because that rigid perspective on what’s real and what’s not has all sorts of consequences.”

“Some of which,” he added, referring to the beefs that took the lives of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, “are fatal.”

Hip-hop events

“Can’t, Don’t, Won’t Stop — Taking Spoken Word to the Next Level,” 8 p.m., Oct. 2-3, $32-$59, Rialto Center for the Arts, 80 Forsyth St.; 404-413-984; www.rialtocenter.org/

A3C Festival, Oct. 1-3, $33 three-day pass; eight stages in Little Five Points and East Atlanta; www.a3cfestival .com