Sonica 000: What is Sonica?

Sonica is a new festival, curated by Cryptic. It has the slogan "sonic art for the visually minded." A logical expansion of Cryptic's recent theatre productions, Orlando and The Little Match Girl Passion, which integrated live music and performance, Sonica emphasises the connection between visual artists and music. 

There are few cities where this connection is more explicit than in Glasgow: Cryptic Nights has encouraged musicians to take risks in presenting their work, to escape the generic gig and think about the context (recent highlights included a drum solo out in nature, and a dub-step inflected fashion show), and allowed visual artists to explore their sound obsessions - Raydale Dower got concrete, Robbie Thomson had a three way mechanical mash up with Jack Wrigley and Sarah Milne - and SWG3 and The Glue Factory host bands and clubs as often as exhibitions and installations. The exhaustive study of Glasgow's art community, Social Sculpture not only catalogued the connections, but became a manifesto for future graduates from the Art School. 

Equally, there is unlikely to be many people more suited to developing the festival than Cryptic's artistic director Cathie Boyd. A tireless campaigner for imaginative, original performance - a director herself for many years, she is now encouraging a young generation of artists to follow in her footsteps, by refusing boundaries and looking for new combinations - Boyd was one of the artists who emerged in Glasgow in the years following its time as  European City of Culture in 1990. Her enthusiasm for international performance and the challenging was nurtured by Tramway's adventurous programming in the 1990s, and it is appropriate that, through Sonica, she is bringing exciting events into Tramway's programme.

Because Sonica's remit is so specific - the slogan is more than mere marketing, it does make sense of the various shows - a festival is essential to build a critical response to the work. There's no easy way of describing the genre of this work - Musical Theatre? Sound Installation? Audio-Visual Presentations? - the number of performances works to give the overall programme a context.