Brooklyn Babylon isn’t an easy show to explain, but it’s an amazing one to experience.
The multimedia production, coming to Penn State’s Eisenhower Auditorium February 28, simultaneously uses live instrumental music, animation, and live painting to communicate a story about the tallest tower in the world being built in a mythic Brooklyn.
Brooklyn Babylon is an urban fable about an Eastern-European immigrant carpenter named Lev Bezdomni, who finds himself torn between personal ambition and allegiance to the community when he’s commissioned to build a carousel to crown the neighborhood-destroying skyscraper.
David Krasnow of public radio’s Studio 360 calls Brooklyn Babylon “a masterpiece … a new work of originality, power, and beauty.”
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, which provides the music, is one of the most admired ensembles in contemporary jazz. The production’s music, written by the Canadian-born Argue, combines and juxtaposes influences from various genres and time periods. The ensemble functions as an equal partner with the projections and live painting in expressing the story.
Brooklyn Babylon was conceived in collaboration with Croatian-born visual artist and graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj, whose narrative inspired Argue’s mash-up of musical styles. Zezelj’s artwork, created live on stage, places the action in a larger-than-life city in which past, present, and future coexist.
Argue’s 18-member ensemble has toured in Europe, Brazil, and North America; been featured twice at the Newport Jazz Festival; and topped the Big Band category in the 2015 DownBeat Critics Poll.
Weaving progressive jazz, early-American popular styles, Balkan folk music, and the sounds of Brooklyn’s diverse contemporary music scene, Argue creates in Brooklyn Babylon an evocative suite that’s at once timeless and unlike anything heard before.
The animation follows the characters through a metropolis in which different eras merge in a labyrinth. The atmosphere resembles that of 1920s silent films, with sharply contrasting light and shadow, expressive gestures and movements, and minimal use of text.
The on-stage painting is created on a large horizontal panel attached to a scaffold above the projection screen. Black and white acrylic paint is applied with brushes and rollers. Each painting gradually evolves from the abstract toward the figurative, and then slowly dissolves into the next image.
“It’s not insignificant that both artists have come to Brooklyn from other countries; neither has gotten over seeing it with fresh eyes and a sense of myth. (That perspective particularly informs this project, about an immigrant whose last name translates from Russian roughly as ‘one without a home.’) But both have a desire to communicate as directly as they can,” writes the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff.
“Mr. Argue is trying to make his work connect to the larger culture he’s known since he arrived here; he started his band in spaces outside the jazz circuit, like CBGB and Bell House in Brooklyn, and has kept a line to his listeners by hammering away at a blog full of opinions about music and politics. And Mr. Zezelj was influenced by experimental and satirical European comic artists from the late 1970s and early ’80s, particularly from Italy and France, and felt a sense of urgency from them; interacting with his own generation, rather than with the studied and imagined past, drove his interest in art.”
Juniper Village at Brookline sponsors the presentation. For information or tickets, visit cpa.psu.edu or phone (814) 863-0255.
