Tramway, Glasgow, Sept 26th-28th
When the Arika organisation took a side-step from curating experimental
music festivals in a now booming scene they laid the groundwork for
with their Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion events, the more
holistically inclined series of themed Episodes they embarked on seemed
to chime with a renewed hunger for ideas and seditious thought. While
Episodes still featured performances and screenings, they were
consciously not made the centrepiece of events that involved
discussions and debates which questioned the relationship between
artist and audience, and indeed the structures of such events
themselves.
In Episodes 4 and 5, Arika concentrated on the musical and political
liberation expressed by the black community through jazz, and a similar
state of transcendence found for the Queer and Trans community through
the House Ballroom scene. Episode 6 in part fuses both experiences in
Make A Way Out of No Way, which over three days looks beyond the
nuclear family conformity of a prime time mainstream to the deliberate
political and artistic choices required to do something more
rebelliously wayward.
Artists taking part in Make A way Out of No Way include radical black
poet, Fred Moten, queen of black working class dance form, Krump, Miss
Prissy, and operatic diva M Lamar's performance of queer black requiem,
Speculum Orun: Shackled to the Dead.
“Race is an invention and a fiction,” says Barry Esson, who, alongside
Bryony McIntyre, have run Arika since the organisation's inception
thirteen years ago. “Sex is an invention and a fiction. All sorts of
these definitions are used to normalise us and control us. This Episode
is looking at that, and how different communities come out of that and
learn to express themselves within that landscape."
The List, September 2014
ends
When the Arika organisation took a side-step from curating experimental
music festivals in a now booming scene they laid the groundwork for
with their Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion events, the more
holistically inclined series of themed Episodes they embarked on seemed
to chime with a renewed hunger for ideas and seditious thought. While
Episodes still featured performances and screenings, they were
consciously not made the centrepiece of events that involved
discussions and debates which questioned the relationship between
artist and audience, and indeed the structures of such events
themselves.
In Episodes 4 and 5, Arika concentrated on the musical and political
liberation expressed by the black community through jazz, and a similar
state of transcendence found for the Queer and Trans community through
the House Ballroom scene. Episode 6 in part fuses both experiences in
Make A Way Out of No Way, which over three days looks beyond the
nuclear family conformity of a prime time mainstream to the deliberate
political and artistic choices required to do something more
rebelliously wayward.
Artists taking part in Make A way Out of No Way include radical black
poet, Fred Moten, queen of black working class dance form, Krump, Miss
Prissy, and operatic diva M Lamar's performance of queer black requiem,
Speculum Orun: Shackled to the Dead.
“Race is an invention and a fiction,” says Barry Esson, who, alongside
Bryony McIntyre, have run Arika since the organisation's inception
thirteen years ago. “Sex is an invention and a fiction. All sorts of
these definitions are used to normalise us and control us. This Episode
is looking at that, and how different communities come out of that and
learn to express themselves within that landscape."
The List, September 2014
ends
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