"When you work in the performing arts, you're always meeting people," says Brian Quijada of his first encounter with Nygel D. Robinson, his co-creator on "Mexodus," a show that's bound to surprise audiences with both its content and performance style, opening at the Berkeley Rep on September 13.
"Everybody meets everybody," he explained. "And they all say to you, 'Awesome stuff, man! We should collaborate.' And then you never see them again."
Such overtures are by no means inherently disingenuous. But they're almost always impractical. The peripatetic, commission-driven, scrambling-for-the-next-gig lifestyle of mid-level emerging talent makes it next to impossible to pause, join forces, and take an unanticipated deep dive into a new project together.
"Brian and I met at a musicians' conference in New York in 2019," explained Robinson during an interview with the Bay Area Reporter. The two composer/performers were joined by the show's director, David Mendizábal. "We were the only people of color there."
After Robinson, a singer and musician, heard Quijada discussing his own musical specialty, live looping, he engaged him in a conversation.
Mutual admiration
Live looping is the recording and replaying of short segments of sound in real time, aided by software programming. It can turn a single word into a chant, a note into a rhythm. When individual loops are layered on each other, then played simultaneously, complex musical textures can be created. Additional vocals and instrumentals can be performed live atop these moments-old recordings, building a wall of sound.
Among the best-known practitioners of live looping in contemporary culture are Reggie Watts, the music and comedy collagist, and Ed Sheeran, who plays stadium concerts with no human accompaniment, generating an extraordinary variety and blend of sounds through the looping and layering of his vocals, guitar fingering, foot taps, and percussive slaps to his instruments' bodies.
For a singer, Robinson explained, live looping could be valuable in creating audition self-tapes, potentially eliminating the need to find and hire an accompanist.
Quijada was struck by the possibilities that live looping could offer a talented singer like Robinson, who is also a creative multi-instrumentalist (He plays bass, drums, guitar, piano, percussion, and trumpet).
"This guy could be unstoppable," he thought.
During the conference, the pair had an impromptu jam session at Quijada's New York apartment. Before Robinson headed back home to Chicago, the pair exchanged familiar words along the lines of, "Awesome stuff, man! We should collaborate."
Despite their best intentions, the pair might well have never seen each other again. But then a third character joined the "Mexodus" origin story. (Enter LADY RONA, a mysterious interloper.)
Lockdown opportunity
"The conference," said Quijada, "was right before everything shut down. Not long after, I got a phone call from Liz Carlson at New York Stage and Film [a non-profit arts incubator], who I'd worked with before. She said they had some money to help support artists during the pandemic and asked if I had a new project I was working on."
For several years, Quijada had been fiddling with the idea of developing a theater piece around a little-known bit of American history: a southbound route of the Underground Railroad in which southern slaves were ushered to freedom in Mexico.
He reached out to Robinson, and the pair — each essentially confined to their apartments by the pandemic — began their collaboration, at first planning to record a suite of thematically connected songs, one a month.
By June of 2021, the pair had completed what they were then referring to as "a concept album." But Carlson thought they had the makings of musical theater. "Are you ready for a director?" she asked.
The team expands
Ready or not, Carlson introduced the collaborators to David Mendizábal, of New York's Obie-winning Movement Theatre Company.
"David seemed really interested in the themes and story we were working with," said Quijada, "When we first met, I asked him if he knew what live looping was. He was like, 'Not at all.' And Nygel and I thought, 'That's perfect!'"
"If I had known the ins and outs of the technology, it might have limited my creative imagination," said David Mendizábal. "But in not understanding it very well, I felt free to suggest we try things and then we would see if we could make it happen."
"To me, the beauty of looping is that it's all done live," said Quijada. "This project would be infinitely easier if we just recorded parts of it, but we wanted to perform live and we wanted David to challenge us to make everything make sense dramatically. We didn't want it to be a concert of a song cycle."
"There needs to be a dramaturgical reason for everything that happens on stage," said Mendizábal. "The looping can't be a gimmick."
Loops and links
In preparing "Mexodus" for its world premiere last year, in a co-production of Washington D.C.'s Mosaic Theatre and Baltimore's Center Stage, David Mendizábal in the interim had been named Associate Creative Director at Berkeley Repertory. He pushed Quijada and Robinson to tease out the themes of their text and relate it to their creative process.
The collaborators began to consider connections between their working partnership and the story they were telling: how slaves and those who helped liberate them supported each other; how the productive solidarity between brown and black characters in the 1800s reflected both the composers' personal relationship and social justice movements today; and how "Mexodus" would simultaneously introduce audiences to an unfamiliar story and an unfamiliar form of musicianship.
Gradually, with their director's support and suggestions, Quijada and Robinson integrated these layers of meaning into the production, embodying them in their live performances.
"Live looping is a really hard thing to do," said Quijada. "It requires a lot of practice and a steady hand even if your nerves are through the roof. We describe it as a tightrope act, because once you press record, if you don't nail the next four bars of music perfectly, you have to live with that error for the next three minutes at least.
"But that's part of what makes it engaging for the audience: When you go to the circus, you trust that the trapeze artist knows what they're doing, but you're still a little worried for them. There's sense of danger to it."
"Mexodus." Sept. 13-Oct. 20. $31.50-$134. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2015 Addison St. www.berkeleyrep.org
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