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

Tonight, Tuesday, October 20, Contemporaneous opens its 2026–27 season at Roulette Intermedium, 509 Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The evening, titled "Seeing in the Dark," is co-presented with the percussion groups Mantra Percussion and Recap Percussion. It runs from 8pm to 10pm.

The official page describes it as an evening of new music about different ways to light a path through darkness. Three works are on the program, and two of them are world premieres.

First comes "To crave and to have" by Lila Meretzky, who was Contemporaneous's Imagination Composer in 2024. The page says it illuminates "the gulf between what is and what ought to be."

Next is "Only in the Dark," a cello concerto by Brendon Randall-Myers and Annie Blythe. This is the world premiere of an arrangement for Contemporaneous's chamber orchestral forces, with Blythe as soloist. The piece draws on the two creators' neurodivergent experiences and on the range of sensory experience across human consciousness. Its four movements are "Within an invisible light," "On fire, quietly," "The way they wept" and "Aurora."

The closing piece is the world premiere of "America: Book Two," the next installment of Paul Pinto's years-in-the-making meta-opera Estebanico, played by Mantra Percussion and Recap Percussion. It follows a Moorish conquistador as a single character across a long stretch of time, pulling apart the threads of the past to offer a new view of the history of the Americas.

In its own announcement, Roulette Intermedium also shared a clip of Recap Percussion playing Angélica Negrón's "Count to Five" on found objects. Tickets are sold through Eventbrite and roulette.org.