Brooklyn's Boerum Hill, NYC: Contemporaneous Opens Its Season With "Seeing in the Dark" at Roulette Intermedium

Contemporaneous opened its 2026–27 season on Tuesday, October 20, with Seeing in the Dark at Roulette Intermedium, 509 Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The concert began at 8 PM and was scheduled to run until 10 PM. It was co-presented by Mantra Percussion and Recap Percussion, and the organizers described it as an evening of new music offering different ways to light a path through the darkness of our minds and our nights.

Three works made up the program. It opened with Lila Meretzky's To crave and to have, a piece that illuminates "the gulf between what is and what ought to be." Meretzky came back to the ensemble after serving as its 2024 Contemporaneous Imagination Composer.

Next was Only in the Dark, a cello concerto by Brendon Randall-Myers and Annie Blythe, presented in its world premiere arrangement for Contemporaneous's chamber orchestral forces, with Blythe as the soloist. The work draws on the two artists' neurodivergent experiences and on the different sensory experiences possible across the spectrum of human consciousness. It moves through four movements: Within an invisible light, On fire, quietly, The way they wept, and Aurora.

The night closed with the world premiere of America: Book Two, the next installment of Paul Pinto's years-in-the-making meta-opera Estebanico, performed by Mantra Percussion and Recap Percussion. The opera follows a Moorish conquistador as a single character traced over a sprawling span of time, pulling apart the threads of past stories to build a new vision of the history of the Americas.

Tickets were sold through Eventbrite. Contemporaneous's next listed event is its Virtual Community Salon on November 20.