cHURCH OF MONIKA: Music for the Doomed

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February 11, 2018
11:00am

Join us at the cHURCH OF MONIKA for a staged reading of David Brensilver’s Music for the Doomed. This is a free event. Bagels and coffee will be served.

In the not-too-distant future, a poet-composer — an artivist — is sentenced to prison under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and the Cultural Sedition Act of 2025 for writing and disseminating a protest song that contravened the principles of free-market capitalism and adversely affected an industry’s bottom line. A journalist on the Injustice Beat, determined to paint a word-picture of Bravery in the Time of the Cultural Clampdown, discovers the uncomfortable reach of complicity.

Music for the Doomed is a multidisciplinary performance piece by David Brensilver that incorporates his script and music, as well as poetry by Abioseh Joseph Cole. In this staged reading, David plays the role of the journalist and Abioseh plays the role of the artivist. Each of the various elements of Music for the Doomed can also be performed as a stand-alone work. Music for the Doomed is itself a part of a larger project — a novel that’s in the planning stage. In a sense, Music for the Doomed exists both as a fictional work of art and as a real one, with discrete elements. The project could and might ultimately incorporate elements of other disciplines.

A talk/Q&A will follow the reading.

David Brensilver studied percussion at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and The Juilliard School and has performed over the years with ensembles of various sizes and styles. He’s also become an accomplished writer and has worked as a daily newspaper journalist and as the editor of a monthly arts publication. He’s the author of the satirical novel ExecTV (ENC Press, 2005) and the often-irreverent animal-rights blog The Daily Maul. David’s most recent work, Music for the Doomed, is a multidisciplinary performance piece about complicity and its costs. He’s a vegan.

Abioseh Joseph Cole is a vegan poet, blacktivist, financial coach, teacher, and hip-hop artist, producer, and recording engineer. He started writing in 1989, at the age of 9, and has since found poetry to be his truest form of expression, be it in rap form or in prose. While most of his career has been spent honing his talents in hip-hop, the last year has been focused on spoken-word poetry. He has performed at the Vegan World Summit at the University of California, Berkeley, Connecticut College, Yale University, The Green Earth Poets Cafe in Brooklyn, New York, and other venues, and has won poetry slams at Poets Realm in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lizard Lounge in Boston, Massachusetts, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, and The Love Jones Experience at the Russell in Hartford, Connecticut. He is a member of the 2017 Connecticut Slam Team, Verbal Slap. He has also taught poetry workshops to students ranging from middle school age to adulthood, including a residency at Yale University.