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Creators of “Real Enemies,” composer Darcy James Argue, writer and director Isaac Butler, and film designer Peter Nigrini, discuss the American fascination with conspiracy theories that fuels their immersive, multimedia work, a suite packed with plots and paranoia, performed by an 18-piece big band accompanied by large screen video and text.

Presented by Cal Performances.

“For a wholly original take on big band’s past, present and future, look to Darcy James Argue” — so says Newsweek’s Seth Colter Walls. Darcy James Argue, the Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based composer and bandleader, has toured nationally and internationally with his 18-piece ensemble, Secret Society, garnering countless awards and nominations and reimagining what a 21st-century big band can sound like. “It’s maximalist music of impressive complexity and immense entertainment value, in your face and then in your head” writes Richard Gehr in the Village Voice.

Argue made his mark with his critically acclaimed 2009 debut Infernal Machines. 2013 saw the release of Brooklyn Babylon, which, like Infernal Machines before it, earned the group nominations for both GRAMMY and JUNO Awards. His most recent recording, Real Enemies, released in the fall of 2016, earned a third consecutive GRAMMY nomination and has been praised as “wildly discursive, twitchily allusive, a work of furious ambition… deeply in tune with our present moment” by The New York Times’ Nate Chinen.

Isaac Butler is a writer and theater director, most recently of The Trump Card, a meditation on the peculiar rise of Donald Trump with the solo performer Mike Daisey. Butler also wrote and directed Real Enemies, a collaboration with the composer Darcy James Argue and the video artist Peter Nigrini, which was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and named one of the top ten live events of 2015 by the New York Times. He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota, and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, Slate, American Theatre, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

Peter Nigrini has designed on Broadway for The Best Man, Fela!, 9 to 5 and Say Goodnight Gracie. Other designs include Here Lies Love (The Public Theater); Fetch Clay, Make Man (New York Theater Workshop); The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (Second Stage); Notes from Underground (Yale Rep); Grace Jones – Hurricane Tour; Rent (New World Stages); Elsewhere (bam); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (New York City Opera); Blind Date (Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance); The Orphan of Zhao (Lincoln Center Festival); No Dice (Nature Theater of Oklahoma); Romeo and Juliet (Salzburger Festspiele); and Life and Times (Burgtheater, Vienna), among others. 

Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason is the University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer, University of California, Berkeley, and a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Department of Economics. Formerly he was the dean of the School of Information, University of Michigan. At Michigan, he was also the Arthur W. Burks Professor of Information and Computer Science, and a professor of economics and public policy. He was the founding director of STIET (a research program for Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions). He is passionate about public universities, where he has spent his entire career.

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