Nas performs on Friday and Saturday with the NSO Pops Orchestra as part of One Mic, the Kennedy Center’s two week celebration of hip-hop.

The Kennedy Center stages a major festival every spring, and for the past several years, these events have focused on various regions around the world. For this year’s festival, the arts institution will look at the dominant American cultural development of the past 30 years: hip-hop. One Mic: Hip-Hop Culture Worldwide, which begins today, examines the way in which hip-hop has spread from an urban art form into an international wellspring for artistic expression.

“We’re looking at hip-hop as a culture, not just as commercial music,” said Garth Ross, the Kennedy Center’s Vice President of Community Engagement and one of the driving forces behind One Mic. “Hip-hop is one of our only indigenous American folk art forms. The hope is that the audience walks away with greater appreciation of how it fits within an evolving cultural landscape.”

The Kennedy Center used both new and existing connections to seek out talent for the festival. The chief collaborator in this effort is Hi-ARTS, which mounts the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. Conceptually, the starting point came from the four basic elements of hip-hop: MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti. The curators included additional elements — knowledge and understanding — in conceiving this festival. In programming the performances, the organizers aimed to bridge the divide between an art form that arose from the street with the ivory tower image that comes with an internationally recognized performing arts venue.

“Hip-hop is as your local as your country, city, community or block,” said Kamilah Forbes, the Producing Artistic Director at Hi-ARTS, who also played a key role in assembling the roster of artists for One Mic.

Ross highlighted two key words, “balance” and “contrast,” to describe the festival. One Mic balances grass roots and more commercial performers, men and women, as well as domestic and international approaches to hip-hop. At the same time, the program takes advantage of the apparent contrast between hip-hop as a community based art form with the Kennedy Center’s mandated role as a national cultural center. Nothing illustrates this more than the festival’s marquis event, taking place on Friday and Saturday, in which rapper Nas celebrates the 20th anniversary of his landmark recording, Illmatic, with accompaniment by the NSO Pops orchestra. Other performances will look at the ways in which hip-hop culture varies from region to region. For example, Da Originalz, a street dance crew from D.C. will share the stage with the “Queen of Krump,” Miss Prissy. Breaking Form features urban street dancers from South Korea, France and Brazil.

The festival includes many shows worth highlighting. red, black, and GREEN: a blues is a hybrid performance that draws from theater, dance and music. Hip-hop icons MC Lyte and Ms. Lauryn Hill will team up with other notable female artists for Rock Like a Girl, which showcases the great contribution women have made to the genre. Mogul Russell Simmons hosts Faith, Hip-Hop, and the Common Good, an interreligious lineup with headliner Talib Kweli. The schedule also includes a “graffiti jam,” featuring the work of up to 70 graffiti artists on a 990-foot wall. Finally, the organizers also hope to facilitate conversation through panel discussions with topics ranging from feminism, to sexuality and identity, to the effects outside forces like jazz, music videos and gentrification have on hip-hop’s evolution.

The key to this festival’s success is whether the Kennedy Center, a most “Washington” of institutions, can successfully showcase hip-hop in a way that doesn’t make it seem like a novelty in spaces that usually present “high art.” The curatorial approach seems to have done that as it doesn’t merely split the difference between the two, but rather seeks to take advantage of this dichotomy in unexpected ways.

“The idea of the festival is that it will be both a cultural and intellectual experience,” Ross said. “Experiencing these studies in contrast close up, the sameness or unity is going to become as apparent as the differences.”

One Mic: Hip-Hop Culture Worldwide begins today and runs through April 13 at the Kennedy Center. Visit the festival website for full schedule and ticket information.