Arts Centre Wednesday 22

“I can’t tell if this show is theatrical evolution or a blatant offense.” Baba Brinkman opens his performance by quoting a theatre critic’s critique.

Appropriating hip hop classics (that happen to be strangely appropriate), Brinkman rewrote them to make them completely pertinent to Darwin’s theory – though fact: Mobb Deep really does have a song called Survival of the Fittest.

Admittedly the education bits of his raps are a bit predictable, as most of us did sit through high school biology, but the brilliance of his show isn’t actually in the content – not completely anyway – it’s the context in which Brinkman delivers the information, and then twists the audience into situational evaluations about race and culture.

At one unforgettable point, Brinkman – a rapping white man, though that’s no controversy nowadays – justifies his primarily white audience members into chanting along to Dead Prez’s I’m a African. Mitochondrion geekiness aside, it was all at once hilarious, true if you believe in evolution, reflective of the insularity of our race-based contemporary music culture, and demonstrative in momentarily breaking down race identification.

Brinkman’s energy is relentless, and the fact remains that his flow is actually pretty good. If he was black, he might have a record deal instead of a fringe theatre show. Regardless, the juxtaposition of hip-hop with Darwin is striking. By boldly making use of hip-hop in a most unusual but still provocative way, Brinkman harmoniously fuses art with evolution.