DBR at BAM

Call us old-fashioned (we did leave a restaurant before 7 on a Saturday night, after all), but there’s just something really cool about taking a violin, plugging it in, and playing it like the world’s tiniest guitar. Subversive, even. And there’s something even cooler about using music, text, and computer-generated images to imagine a meeting between two influential figures, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) has done both, among other things, as part of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). His “Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln” blends languages, words, video, and sounds to comment on Lincoln, Darwin, Haiti, the United States past and present, Obama, musical composition, poetry, etc., etc. It was academic lecture as rock concert, opera as music video, private musings as public spectacle, superabundance as commentary, a really intense 90 minutes.

Photo: thanks