17:40 (18:40)
2 – 28 August
(Not 15)
Fringe First winner and "peer-reviewed rapper" Baba Brinkman (Rap Guide to Evolution, Rap Guide to Religion) explores the scientific study of consciousness in his latest hip-hop comedy. Baba's brain consists of roughly 90 billion neurons with trillions of connections, and none of them has any clue that he exists.
And yet those cells come together to produce a steady stream of ill rhymes, laughs, and mind-blowing scientific findings. Come and find out how.
What
was the inspiration for this performance?
In
2014 I was hired to perform at a consciousness conference. I had
never written any material about consciousness, but the conference
organizers challenged me to attend the scientific lectures and write
raps each day summarizing their content, which I performed each day
to camera for a video blog of the conference, and also performed
at the conclusion for
everyone attending, including world experts in neuroscience.
I got
utterly fascinated by the subject and decided to write a whole show
about it. Also, my wife is a neuroscientist, although I can’t
honestly tell whether I wrote this show because I married a
neuroscientist, or whether I married a neuroscientist because I
wanted to write this show.
Is
performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?
I
would say performance is a good space to catalyze
the
public discussion of ideas, since it provides a common space for
thought provocation and a shared experience that audiences can draw
on to start a conversation.
How
did you become interested in making performance?
I
was a fan of poetry and rap in the nineties and I got the idea into
my head that rap music and lyrics and culture would be a great
platform to bring the traditions of verse theatre into a modern
setting.
My thesis at school was about Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales and
freestyle battling and how similar the two forms were, and in 2004 I
brought my first rap theatre show to the Fringe. This year will be my
ninth Fringe and my ninth rap theatre show, so I guess the concept is
connecting.
Is
there any particular approach to the making of the show?
It
starts with about six months of reading up on the science I’m
exploring in the show, listening to audiobooks and researching
online, taking notes and getting to the point where I can have a
moderately informed conversation on the subject with a true expert
and actually ask pointed questions that don’t betray complete
ignorance.
Then once I’ve got the ideas in hand, I search for
characters and social dynamics that will help to bring those ideas to
life. In this show I do one rap from the perspective of someone in a
vegetative state, one rap about my infant son and why he may or may
not have any consciousness at all, and one where I’m talking to an
octopus while tripping on mushrooms.
Those characters were not in the
original plan, but they seemed like good focal points for important
ideas about what consciousness is and how it works.
Does
the show fit with your usual productions?
This
is the fifth “Rap Guide” to a scientific subject I’ve brought
to the Fringe, with previous shows covering Evolution, Human Nature,
Religion, and Climate Change, so yeah, I definitely have a format I
work with at this point.
What
do you hope that the audience will experience?
I
hope audiences will experience a profound sense of horror and vertigo
as their accustomed confidence in the accuracy of their perceptions
and beliefs is dismantled point by point, followed by a cathartic
belly laugh as they realize that temporarily losing your grip on
reality isn’t such a bad thing, and even if we accept ourselves as
biological machines without immaterial souls, everything we value
survives the transition except for our superstitious baggage.
What
strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
Dope
rhymes and irreverent jokes, that’s about it.
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