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The Rap Up

By January 1, 2014 No Comments

TEDxSMU

What a year 2013 was! With your help we completed two crowdfunding campaigns, funding the first-ever three show hip-hop theatre cycle off-Broadway and a music video for the Darwin-inspired peace-anthem “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” (look for the video release in 2014). The Rap Guide to Evolution toured the world, including stops in New Zealand, Germany, Spain, Canada, and all over the USA. We were nominated for an OBA Award for “Best Unique Theatrical Experience” in New York, and the NCSE gave me a “Friend of Darwin Award” for some reason.

2013 was also the year I kicked off a new kind of performance, the “Rap Up,” in which I sit in the audience at a live event, whether a lecture, conference, performance, concert, award show, whatever, with my brain partitioned, part listening and part composing verses on the fly. Then at the end of the event I step to the stage and perform a fresh-minted satirical rap summary, unrevised and unrehearsed, which gets a great response since the content is tailored for the crowd, a transient zen rap that lives only for a single performance (unless it ends up on YouTube). Of course, you won’t catch all the in-jokes unless you were there, but here’s a collection of recent rap up performances that were filmed.

And what does 2014 hold in store? More Evolution touring (Norway, Australia, and the American South coming up this Spring), more rap up gigs, more Canterbury Tales (I’m looking into Edinburgh, fingers crossed), and more new music. I’m working on a solo hip-hop record and have a couple of new shows in development, so stay tuned for releases and announcements coming up.

Happy new year!

Baba Brinkman

Author Baba Brinkman

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