Shows, Tours, Vids

I'm just writing to give you a quick update, share a new music video, and put the word out about some upcoming gigs and tours, including Vancouver, California, and the Eastern USA.

First the update: we exceeded the Crowdfunder target with flying colours back in January, raising £12,588 from 304 funders in 60 days, a fantastic response! The video team in London is now putting these funds to good use on post-production, and we're hoping to have the videos ready for release by April or May, so standby for more!

Speaking of videos, here's a new one that was commissioned by Macmillan Dictionary, a battle between Canadian and British slang, pitting my own verbal skills against the inimitable Professor Elemental. It is an exercise in exalted silliness and was lots of fun to put together, with fine music by Mr Simmonds and visuals by Tommy Nagle who also did the video for Off That. Click here to watch it.

Elemental is an old friend and collaborator of mine and one of the finest MCs I've encountered in the UK. He has an upcoming tour of Eastern Canada and the USA in April and May, so if any of you know of a venue or event he could grace I think he still has dates to fill. Check out his website for more info and to get in touch with him.

Another friend with a great project is David Sloan Wilson, the author of Evolution for Everyone which was a major inspiration for the Rap Guide to Evolution (seriously, if you read it you'll be startled by how many of his ideas I adapted). One of David's best ideas was the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, a real-world application of evolutionary theory that is currently transforming his city for the better, and one of the project's initiatives, the Design Your Own Park Contest, was recently shortlisted for a major urban achievement award, but he needs your vote to win it! To learn more about the project in David's own words just click here, or go directly to the voting page to support him.

As for me, I'm hanging out in Vancouver until the next round of touring kicks off. I'll be performing the Rap Guide to Evolution as a fundraiser for CFI Vancouver on February 20th at the Railway Club, supported by Aaron Nazrul and Boom Booms, my last show in Vancouver before I decamp for New York, so please come if you can! Here's the Facebook event page and the CFI announcement.

Next I'll be performing my new-ish show Rapconteur at the Fresno Rogue Festival March 5-12, so if any of you know of a venue in California I could add to that tour, I could probably make it work in March.

Then in April I'm off to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to perform for the troops alongside Richard Dawkins and others at an event called Rock Beyond Belief, organized by some non-religious soldiers (who call themselves Foxhole Atheists!) as a response to an evangelical christian concert held on the base last year. It's not exactly a "counter-event", more of an attempt to celebrate critical thinking and foster community and solidarity among nonbelievers, especially ones who often feel like they are under siege from religious zealots. It's a pretty interesting backstory if you want to read about it.

After that it's off to New York for the big off-Broadway run, although I might have a few weeks free before rehearsals begin, so if any of you wants to organize a gig in early April just get in touch.

Two Weeks' Notice (Help!)

Happy New Year!

It's the final two weeks of the Rap Guide to Evolution DVD Crowdfunder drive and we're only at 81%, which is much better than I had feared, but Crowdfunder's rules are strict. If we don't meet or exceed the £10,000 target in the 60 day timeframe everyone gets their money back and we're stuck with our original (highly stretched) budget. We can't let this happen! There are 13 days left as of today, so this is a call to arms. Please share the link below on facebook, twitter, blogs, and emails, and if you've been thinking of contributing, now is the time!

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/investment/the-rap-guide-to-evolution-educational-dvd-58

And here's a recent post on BoingBoing.net that has given the pitch a nice boost, literally a 6% increase in the past 48 hours, thanks in part perhaps to the heated debates raging in the comments section, including a spat between myself and a semi-famous transexual blank-slatist over the scientific validity of evolutionary psychology: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/05/the-rap-guide-to-evo.html

Also, I'm accepting bookings through the Crowdfunder drive, and so far two different venues have secured bookings by contributing £1,000. Email me to check about possible dates and availability first, as this is currently the only way I'm booking events for 2011 due to the off-Broadway run that's scheduled to start in New York in March. So if you've been thinking of organizing a performance of the Rap Guide to Evolution or Rap Canterbury Tales this year, let's do it through Crowdfunder and put the money towards the DVD post-production costs!

Speaking of the upcoming off-Broadway run, Sharon Levy of Dovetail Productions is currently organizing the venue, hiring the team, and raising the crucial funds to make this happen, mostly through private investment. She needs to secure $300K (minimum $5-$10K units), standard for New York off-Broadway theatre, and she is open to investors from my network (that's y'all). Be warned that there is risk involved, but also possible financial reward (if you think I'm bankable prospect!) Let me know if you're seriously interested and I'll connect you with Sharon, but first read her Executive Summary with the pitch.

In other news, we have now finished all of the live filming for the music videos and the footage we have is amazing! We filmed a Galapagos beach party for "Worst Comes to Worst", a grimy snarling fire-in-a-barrel rudeboy video for "Survival of the Fittest", and a breakdance battle between Darwin, Sarah Palin, Michel Foucault, and *God* for "Survival of the Fittest". Check out the photos on the bottom of the Crowdfunder pitch page.

Next, crowdfunder willing, is the editing and post-production phase, and finally the release party, hopefully in early April to coincide with the off-Broadway run. One final push to make it happen!

Thanks for your support and continued efforts,

Baba

Epic Battle

On Friday we filmed an epic breakdance battle with Darwin facing down his detractors, Michel Foucault (representing social constructivism), Sarah Palin (representing the christian right), and God (representing Himself, of course). It was a satirical reconstruction of the evolutionary culture wars on the dancefloor and Darwin reigned supreme! Check out the new photos posted to the pitch page, or view them on facebook here.

The videos are shaping up amazingly well and we have our final two days of shooting Monday and Tuesday this week, wrapping up Hynotize, Sexual Selection, and Worst Comes to Worst. Then we move into the post-production phase, which will rely hugely on crowdfunding support. We're now 1/3 of the way into our alloted time and we've almost hit 2/3 of our target, so the end is in sight, but this is no time to let it slip! If you have already contributed, please tell a friend, and if not, now is the time! Click here to help fund the project.

Also just announced: I will be performing my two new rap/comedy/storytelling shows, The Rap Guide to Human Nature and Rapconteur one last time in London on December 20th. Both of these shows were written in 2010 and both of them premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe to great acclaim, so we are filming a live DVD of both shows next Monday starting at 6:30pm at the Alley Cat in Soho, two 50 minute halves with a 15 minute intermission. Last chance to see these shows in England for some time! Click here to check out the facebook event page.

Gangbusters!

The crowdfunding drive I started just over two weeks ago to increase the production value of our Rap Guide to Evolution DVD project is going gangbusters, with 143 individual funders so far, and the vast majority of them have chosen the vanity package: £30 for a pre-order copy of the DVD and the use of your picture somewhere in the animation. We're at 61% of our £10,000 target after just fifteen days!

It's awesome progress, but we're still a ways from the mark, so if you've been thinking about buying in but haven't gotten around to it, now is the time! Click here to check out the progress so far, or to buy your little slice of immortality.

By the way, if you're one of the 143 beautiful people who have already signed on, thank you! And if you're one of the extreme keeners who've written to ask me where to send the photo, or who just went ahead and emailed me your photo already, take it easy! I won't collect the images until we actually hit the target, because if we don't hit it within the 60 day time limit everyone gets their money back and no one's photo will be used, so please don't send me any more pics. It's not that you're not attractive, it's just that we'll do it all together with an upload page once we've reached the target : )

One of the most amazing things about the past two weeks is the degree to which blogs and social networking sites have taken up the cause. It's not yet a full-blown viral outbreak, but there are some promising early warning signs. The project was mentioned in David Sloan Wilson's Evolution for Everyone blog, as well as by New Humanist Magazine, by Andrew Potter writing for McLeans, on the Friendly Atheist blog, and in posts by Words of Science and Crowdsource Capital, so there is a fairly wide-range of interest. If you have connections to blogs or if you write one, please consider posting about this.

More news: here's an interview I did on the radio show and podcast Skeptically Speaking last weekend, which talks about the Crowdfunder drive and my new album The Rap Guide to Human Nature.

And if you want to see how I use rap to popularize science and science to help people understand rap in my live shows, check out the TEDx talk I did back in October.

As for me, I've just finished a series of college and high school performances in NJ, NY, and RI, and tomorrow I'm checking out Manhattan theatres and meeting with the team organizing the upcoming off-Broadway run, currently slated for March 2011. Then next week I'm back in the UK for more Wellcome Trust music video filming, plus Robin Ince's legendary Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People comedy showcase, followed by Christmas with the family in Vancouver and some well-deserved rest.

Thanks again everyone, and keep the crowdfunding momentum rolling!

Crowdfunding Evolution

Friends,

As many of you know, the Wellcome Trust awarded me a grant earlier this year to make a series of music videos for the Rap Guide to Evolution, a project that is intended to "promote the public understanding of science" using a new medium. Well, over the past few weeks I've been working with a professional film crew in London to shoot these videos and the results have been really exciting. We are now on target to finish the live filming by the middle of December, with the editing to be completed by February, give or take. Click here to watch our trailer video with some preview clips.

The challenge we face now is finding additional funding to support this project. The Wellcome Trust grant is enough (barely) to film and edit the videos, but we want to take them to the next level by weaving in original animation, digital effects, and high-quality nature footage licensed from sources like the BBC. Imagine a four-minute short film, part Eminem-style rap music video, part David Attenborough-style nature documentary, illustrating themes such as the common descent of all human beings from African ancestors and the processes of natural and sexual selection that shaped our bodies and minds and the rest of nature. We are making twelve such videos, one for each song on the CD. My hope is that these videos will be used by Biology teachers the world over to make evolution accessible to their students, as well as offering an entertaining entry point into Darwin's theories for non-Scientists in general.

The solution? A new concept called "crowdfunding", which allows you to pre-buy the DVD we are making before we are finished making it, contributing to the production value and ultimately the potential impact of the finished product. Together with SPL Productions, I have partnered with a website called "Crowdfunder" to run a campaign to raise an additional £10,000 to increase the production value of these videos. If we can hit our target in 60 days, the end result will be something amazing. If we fail to hit the target, the money is all returned to the funders and we fall back on the Wellcome Trust grant, which will still be enough to complete a good finished product, just one with a lot less mojo.

To give you a sense of what this all means, we've created a lovely Crowdfunder pitch page that lays it all out. Click here to see it.

If you like the project and want to support it, there are various rewards attached to different levels of funding. £10 gets you a download of the finished videos, £20 gets you a DVD, and £30 buys you immortality: we will put your photo in one of the videos, representing a branch on the human family tree. You can also book me for a performance if you contribute enough (click the above link to find out my going rate, slightly discounted).

And if you haven't heard the songs yet, you can click here to download the Rap Guide to Evolution CD.

I hope you will help me take this project all the way, and if you know any science teachers or friends of evolution, please forward them the link.

Fringe Science

Friends New and Old,

Well, the Edinburgh Fringe 2010 is concluded and I'm back in London, back on my grind, back on tour, reading and writing and gigging and muddling about. Sorry, that last bit was a post-partum pang.

How did it go? Exceptionally well! I performed over fifty shows in three and a half weeks and didn't die of exhaustion, or even lose my voice. My cavalier decision to list myself as part of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival (as opposed to "theatre") for the first time ever was vindicated by a five-star review in Chortle on the second-to-last day of the Fringe, an awesome (though scientifically very confused) write-up that helped me sell zero tickets but at least left me with a jolly after-glow. Click here to read it.

Even my little pet project, Rapconteur, got some love at the Fringe. The best review I got for it was a five-star praise-fest from Three Weeks, which you can view by clicking here.

Rapconteur was also my first foray into the Free Fringe, where the audience pays nothing and at the end of the show I stand by the door with a donation jar making puppy-dog eyes as they shuffle past, some paying and some avoiding my panhandling gaze. It was a bit of an experiment, and if you're curious to know how it went (financially and otherwise), I wrote up the results in one of my blogs for Whatsonstage.com.

I'm not just being ironic calling the Free Fringe an experiment either. After the show one day I was approached by some behavioral economists who are keen to experiment more formally with audience altruism and publish the quantified results, a prospect that makes me childishly excited, but more of that anon.

Speaking of experiments, in The Rap Guide to Human Nature I phoned my sister Dawn from the stage every single day for twenty six consecutive days, waking her up most mornings in the midst of her summer holiday (my Edinburgh show started at 7:45am Vancouver time). The point? I kept track of which days she answered the phone and which days I got voicemail and used the data at the end of the month to predict her ovulation cycle. If this makes no sense to you (hint: it's about evolutionary incest avoidance instincts), check out this article by Michael Shermer on the science behind the experiment:

And the results? Well, here's the calendar (used with Dawn's kind permission):


A very straightforward prediction follows from the Michael Shermer article. So how does that prediction square with her actual fertility cycle? I edited the results into a youtube video (the future of science outreach), which you can watch at the link below. Warning: this video contains information about my sister's fertility cycle. For educational use only! Click here to watch.



Hmm, how can I round out this highly eclectic newsletter? I know, with a link to a music video I made with some tree planter friends back in May, an ode to Canada's highly sheltered position (and policies) in regards to catastrophic climate change. It's like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" crossed with the party at the end of Return of the Jedi. Get ready to travel down a path that may soon be very popular, the Road Northwest. Click to watch on Youtube.




Hasta la vista,

Baba

My Fringe Nightmare (Part Two)

Back in London post-Fringe, feeling dizzy with the shock of not performing multiple times every day. So quiet, so calm. Cabin fever now contends with relief and exhaustion. The nuts and bolts are simple and satisfying: I performed 53 full-length one-hour shows over the course of 3.5 weeks, without losing my voice or getting ill, and once again the reviews and audience response were strong. But this fringe was more than just an adventure – for me it was also an experiment in risk-taking and genre-switching, and the word that haunted me throughout is: “comedy”.

In the months leading up to the Fringe, from the time I registered my (as yet unwritten) Rap Guide to Human Nature show pretty much up until the first Edinburgh performance, I was plagued by recurring dreams of disaster, dreams of arriving at my first show completely unprepared and utterly failing to entertain (see my previous blog). I was bemused (and motivated) by these dreams, since I have been doing the Fringe since 2004 and it’s never happened before, but then, I’ve never listed as comedy before, always theatre. The “Theatre” genre is a big tent, big enough for comedy and tragedy and everything in between, but it’s unspecialized. You can be a cook without knowing how to make certain dishes, just like you can be a performer without making people laugh. There are two ways to become specialized: training and trial by fire (I went for the second option). The problem is, I still don’t know how to make people laugh. I can do it, but I can’t explain the process or teach anyone else how to do it, (which seems like the basic criteria required to really “know” anything). This was probably the source of my anxiety.

But not all of the dreams were bad. I specifically remember a bizarre one from early April that turned my nightmare scenario on its head. It was very similar to the others in the beginning: I’m in Edinburgh on the first day of the Fringe, and the crowd is already forming outside my venue, mere minutes before the first show. Panicking, I realize that I have absolutely nothing to say, nothing prepared, no material, how did this happen? Then I run into Justin (he was my venue tech at the Adelaide Fringe) who says enthusiastically: “Hey Baba, I really love the new show! When you were here yesterday doing your tech rehearsal, I was laughing so hard! People are going to lap it up!” A moment of confusion is followed by a spark of realization as I grab Justin by the arm and drag him aside: “What, you’ve seen the new show?!?” He looks perplexed: “Of course, we did the tech run yesterday, it was great…” I’m nearly hysterical now, pulling out my note pad: “Tell me what’s in it!” Justin looks even more perplexed: “But, you wrote it, and you just performed it…” I’m trying to remain calm, shifting into crisis management mode: “Listen Justin, I must be suffering from acute amnesia because I can’t remember a single thing from the show; in fact as far as I can remember I haven’t written it yet, so you have to tell me what you saw yesterday.” Justin plays along, obviously suspecting a prank, but also sensing my desperation: “Well, you started off with this monologue about… and then you did this rap with a chorus that went… and then there was this character you played…” And as he rattled off the material from the show I kept scribbling away at my notebook, like: “Brilliant, that’s a great idea! Where do I come up with this stuff?!?” Then I brought my notebook on stage with me for reference, set it on the floor, and proceeded to kill it, getting huge laughs and thunderous applause, just as Justin predicted I would.

When I woke up I tried to write down everything I had said that was getting such big laughs in the dream, and trust me it’s all crap. Not a single joke or character ended up in the actual show, but the feeling I woke up with was golden: this is going to work out. I knew it because I had experienced it, even if I didn’t know yet how to pull it off. That’s pretty much how I feel right now. I can remember funny things I said and I know they were funny because I got some big laughs, but I’m still not sure why they were funny, or how I would do it again, except to just go on instinct. Jamie (aka Mr. Simmonds) got some big laughs too for that matter; he turned into a right performer over the past month, a comedy DJ. I proposed to him on stage twenty-four times and he turned me down every day except the last, when he unexpectedly accepted. What’s funny about that? I guess you had to be there.

On the second to last day of the Fringe Jamie and I got a parting gift in the form of a golden review: 5 stars in Chortle. For the uninitiated, Chortle is the UK’s top comedy-reviewing website. It isn’t widely known outside of the comedy circuit, but comics and fans of stand-up comics follow it avidly. The review was untimely in so far as it didn’t help us to sell any tickets, arriving so late, and it’s riddled with scientific errors (for instance, the reviewer refers to all of “ovulating” material in the show as “menstruating” material, a pretty significant oversight), but it’s the most tangible evidence I now have that the Fringe this year was not a dream. I really did three shows, we really did sell lots of tickets, and we really were funny.

Sorry to write such a solipsistic final blog. I also saw lots of great shows, and some disappointing ones, but like I said before, I’m not a reviewer. For me this year’s Fringe was a challenge, an experiment, and an adventure, and on all three counts I feel great. Next on the agenda: in two days we commence Rebel Cell rehearsals here in London for our big fall tour of the UK, which begins in Cornwall on September 17th. First thing’s first though: twelve hours’ sleep, hopefully with some instructive dreams. Carpe Noctem.