Talks & Entertainment

This event will take place in our Downstairs venue with mostly standing room. For those who require seating, please call 202.408.3100 in advance.

The British songwriter with Italian and Jewish roots performs songs from his latest album, I Dreamed an Island, which he was inspired to compose after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. His performances are a sensitive celebration of cultural diversity and pluralism.

I Dreamed an Island is a voyage toward an imagined haven inspired by a unique moment when Sicily was a beacon of light in the early medieval gloom and a haven of tolerance and coexistence between Christians, of Roman and Byzantine traditions, as well as Jews and Muslims. He sings mostly in English, but also in French, Italian, and Arabic.

The album is a modern reimagining of creative cohabitation between peoples and faiths. It blends languages, narratives, instrumental arrangements, and a multitude of unique sounds.

“Oiseau,” written the day after the Paris attacks when Faccini was on tour in Tunisia, describes a sleeping man caught in a nightmare of terrorist violence. From the depths of his dream he cries out to a bird on his window-sill, asking it to wake him with the sound of its song. “The Many Were More” is a rallying call for tolerance and includes a poem written in Arabic by the 12th Century Sicilian poet Ibn Hamdis and sung by the Algerian Malik Ziad.

After ten songs, a sense of nostalgia lingers for Faccini’s dreamed-up utopia, an island that today seems more remote and more necessary than ever before.