Sometime around 2 p.m. Sunday, my sensory receptors reached critical mass.I was only an hour into a rather peculiar assignment: Traverse the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Arts' Performance Festival and cull the best and worst moments into a single article. But sitting in the Rose Art Museum's basement, I starred at my reporter's notebook with horror. A French horn and xylophone tried to caress my ears but yielded pure cacophony; rapid-fire stanzas-both poignant and iconoclastic-left me cold. I had hit sensory overload.

This reaction was inevitable, of course; the afternoon-which featured over 100 performers and dozens of media in three venues-offered more stimuli than a bacchanal laced with "Substance D," the narcotic du jour in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. But even as my brain burned on both ends, I couldn't help taking in the afternoon's breadth.

Assistant Dean of Student Life Jamele Adams' half-hour set of slam poetry was a particular highlight. Performing to a small crowd in the Rose's Mildred S. Lee Gallery, his commanding figure was draped in a camping vest and camouflage baseball cap: hunter chic by way of boho cool. He opened with a manifesto, invoking Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes before proclaiming, with a presence resonating through the entire museum, "I am new poetry." He addressed racism, sexism and the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, but his most penetrating message was his simplest: that for young people, few things are more essential than poetry. As he boomed, "I want you to write thunder," the audience couldn't help but nod in agreement.

In the same venue, the Juilliard School's Duo Maintenant performed "Magnetic Double Resonance," a short experimental composition for French horn and xylophone written by Juilliard Ph.D. candidate John Aylward. Here, disparate-even mismatched-melodies and timbres interwove. The resulting ambience, magnified by the tight gallery space, sounded like science fiction the way Arthur C. Clarke imagined it in 2001: A Space Odyssey: stranded in a void but warm as a womb, always gazing inward.

Other musical acts had less luck. Performing in the Slosberg Recital Hall, the Brandeis Wind Ensemble stumbled first with Daniel Lutz's "Dichotomy. Impressions of Kerouac," which evoked the beat author in title only. But their take on Alfred Reed's "Fifth Suite," a tribute to international dance, perked up the sleepy audience, particularly with its final movement, a traditional hora.

The Boston Secession, a choral group that performed in the Rose, provided one the most unexpected acts of the day. With "regard-disregard," they combined a small installation pictures taken by and featuring homeless Bostonians with spoken word and song. But the presentation, which began with some sharp back-and-forth whispers: "regard, disregard," intoned like some violent, street-born mantra. Several soloists began to muse on homelessness and their backing colleagues waxed apocalyptic. The effect should have quieting; in the cozy gallery, it seemed laughably muffled.

After a lengthy break to recover my senses and sanity, I ended my afternoon in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium, with Hold Thy Peace's performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe," the play-in-miniature within A Midsummer's Night's Dream. The troupe was perhaps uniquely suited for the adaptation; The Bard had penned it as satire bordering on tomfoolery. But for me, anyway, it was a light-hearted end to the afternoon's overabundance of arts.