Photo: Miana Jun
BROOKLYN REZOUND, created by The Commons Choir in collaboration with composer Darius Jones, is an investigative musical and dance performance that delves into the history of diversity and displacement in Brooklyn and creates a multilayered, embodied sonic map of that story. The official motto of the Brooklyn is “Eendraght Maeckt Maght” (“Unity Makes Strength”). Over 40% the borough’s population speaks a primary language other than English and over 138 languages are spoken in Kings County. In this variety of lexicons, from their range of cultural backgrounds, how do people express their aspirations for life here? What do they give up in order to move toward their goals? Uncovering often obscured histories and rarely visible identities, the epic work is about the need to come up with pidgins, pathways, parallels, positions, and wish-fulfilling invocations for living together while we’re living together.
Performers featured in this residency include: Martita Abril, Sylvestre Akakpo, Ilona Bito, Yoon Sun Choi, Lydia Chrisman, Bob Holman, Shantelle C. Jackson, Judah Levenson, Anaïs Maviel, Shelley Nicole, Jean Carla Rodea, Eli Tamondong, David Thomson, Julia Uleha, and Saul Ulerio.
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COMPANY BIO
Led by choreographer Daria Faïn and poet-architect Robert Kocik, The Commons Choir collectively sets humanity’s troubles and highest aspirations to song, movement, and spoken word. The Choir is built upon The Prosodic Body, a methodology developed by Fain and Kocik to explore language and the fundamental building blocks of sound as a medium to create art that delves into the rich cultural diversity and social interaction of communities. Their medium is prosody, encompassing the physical and musical aspect of language—vibration, tone, rhythm, pause, emphasis, gesture, connotation, intent, attitude—without which we could not communicate. A performance by The Commons Choir takes on the scale of an epic, town hall musical. Their vocalization emits a primal full-bodied force, sending a vibration throughout the audience, who ultimately feel the core sound of the language—the subtleties of how it enforces who we are, how we move, how we exist and relate to one another—as distinct from its meaning. The Commons Choir has a core and variable cast of roughly 30 singers, actors, dancers, poets, musicians, composers and people and in addition to performance their work manifests in architecture, health, education and socioeconomic justice.
Darius Jones is an extraordinarily gifted alto saxophonist and composer. He joined the New York music community in 2005, after living and studying in Richmond, VA. During his time in New York he has amazed and inspired musicians and audiences from widely divergent backgrounds with his meticulously honed musical gifts. Soul-power is at his foundation; forward-looking expression always at the core. Darius was signed to AUM Fidelity records in February of 2009 and released his highly acclaimed debut album as a leader, Man'ish Boy (A Raw and Beautiful Thing), in October of that year. He has since released numerous other albums which have garnered overwhelming praise from the New York Times, NPR, Jazz Times, All About Jazz, Time Out New York, the Boston Globe, Pop Dose, Signal to Noise, The Wire, Paris Transatlantic, The Village Voice, and others. Darius was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship by Roulette in 2008, which he used to launch his chamber ensemble, Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, a project dedicated to new works for voice. Darius was a two-time nominee for Up and Coming Artist in 2010 and 2011, and nominated for Alto Saxophonist of the Year in 2013 by the Jazz Journalists Association. Darius was one of Jazz Times' Debut Artists of the Year for 2009. Of note, Jones was featured in the Wall Street Journal and BBC's Jazz on 3 in 2011.
BRIClab is a commissioning and residency program that offers local artists time and space to explore and expand the possibilities of their work in music, dance, theater and multi-disciplinary performance. Work-in-progress showings, presented with moderated artist-audience dialogues, open artists’ process and creativity to BRIC’s diverse public. This fall, BRIClab features artists and projects mining ideas of migration, immigration and home.
Venue Information:
The intimate, flexible studio space within BRIC House is dedicated to emerging and mid-career artists, with an audience capacity of 50-75 for rehearsals and performances in a workshop setting.
Beginning Nov. 1, 2022, attendees of any BRIC House programming will no longer have to show proof of vaccination or a negative test to enter the building. Masks are encouraged but not required in all BRIC operated spaces. If you have questions regarding this protocol, please email Safety@bricartsmedia.org