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Artist Profile: Rod Gailes OBC Director Rod Gailes talks about his current musical "COLORS: Dream of the MASTA." by Katie Carey Ann Arbor, MI In this installment of our occasional Artist Profile series, we're going to hear from Rod Gailes OBC. He's a Detroit playwright, and he wrote and directed a musical called "COLORS: Dream of the MASTA." It's made up of pop, gospel and spoken word songs. On the surface, the musical is about the African American experience. But if you look closer, Gailes OBC says the story is more universal than that:

Ultimately, what the show is really about is the idea that we were created and that we all come from the same source spiritually. And that we are creations and we've been given life and we have been given choice and that there is a "masta" so to speak. But that, at times in our development we have decided that we are the "masta," that we can name and pick and decide what's gonna happen to other people.

We're not necessarily trying to recreate historical events as much as we are trying to remember periods in our spiritual and emotional development as a human family. There have been periods where we've oppressed each other and had really bad fights with each other, but that doesn't erase the fact that we are still family, that as human beings we are all family, and that is really what the show celebrates in its structure.

What we are really trying to create when we are in the room with it is not so much having you suspend your disbelief - like we are taking you somewhere or we are pretending to be in someone's living room - as much as when you walk in that theater, you are having an actual, in the moment, celebration of the human family reunion.

The big takeaway, I think is, we have the ability to choose, and boy oh boy, wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if we chose to be good to each other and good to the planet. And won't that make our lives so much more wonderful we can fly, is the ending number. We can fly, if we want to.

For more information about the musical click here.