Arika Present (Episodes 4 and 5)

Arika Present

Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Tramway 18 - 21 April)
Episode 5: Hidden in Plain Sight (Tramway 23 – 26 May & Stereo club night 24 May)

Arika’s ‘Expanded Festival’ of international film, live art, music and discussion premieres across Glasgow from the creators of INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion.


Episodes 4 & 5 are a continuation of 2012’s series A Film is a Statement, A Special Form of Darkness and Copying Without Copying. These new Episodes also build on Arika’s work at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Arika were the first ever UK contributors to the biennial and presented its first ever survey of sound.


Arika, the organisation behind two of the UK’s most prestigious experimental music and film events, INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion, return in 2013 with a second ‘expanded festival’. Taking place over two weekend-long Episodes spread across nine weeks, Arika will be bringing some of the world’s most renowned jazz musicians, preeminent poets and writers of African-American literary culture and interrogative performance artists into a creatively laidback dialogue with audiences, artists, activists, jazz lovers and the just plain curious.


“Arika are at the forefront of experientially rich, aesthetically demanding, and philosophically provoking curatorial practice. They appear to be an equal collaborator, challenging both their audiences and participating artists to bring their most potent work into view. They are doing the finest and most original curatorial work around...” Jay Sanders Co-Curator, 2012 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC



EPISODE 5: Hidden in Plain Sight


Like Episode 4, Episode 5 will be an exploration of some of the aesthetic practices that have been produced in fugitive spaces of freedom. Where Episode 4 explored the performance of freedom and blackness, this episode investigates the languages, gestures or habits by which different performances of gender or sexuality are socially enacted and performed. Whether that’s: voguing and the House|Ballroom scene, (trans-temporal) drag, lip syncing, public feelings, queer film, trauma, feeling bad, deep / queer house music and clubbing, low theory...


With: Vjuan Allure, Antonia Baehr, Cecilia Bengolea, Boychild, Pauline Boudry, François Chaignaud, Ann Cvetkovich, DJ Sprinkles, Marlene Freitas, Jack Halberstam, Trajal Harrell, Emma Hedditch, Renate Lorenz, Fred Moten, Jimmy Robert, Terre Thaemlitz, Vogue’ology.




About Arika


Arika were formed in 2001 and have brought audiences in Scotland and the UK festivals of experimental and underground music, sound, film, art and ideas including the INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion festivals as well as tours like Resonant Spaces and Shadowed Spaces.


“New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” Amiri Baraka.




The work of two of the most important and exciting African American poets and writers, Amiri Baraka and Fred Moten, frames the festival. Amiri was the founder of the Black Arts Movement; he is America’s great radicalised poet, transcribing the tragic as political despair - radicalism set to work. To close the first half of our extended festival, on Sunday, Amiri will enter into a . Grimes was central in defining the bass sound of free jazz on monumental recordings and performances with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylo.


Other highlights across the weekend include:


Wadada Leo Smith: Trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser and educator, Wadada is one of the great figures in jazz, and the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) a musician-led institution that seeks the creative and representational control of its music and education. His music, grounded in a historical poetics, suggests what can be done as racism, poverty and justice intersect; bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience, collective action, a thousand acts: “None of these pieces are meant simply to be listened to.”



John Tilbury: Tilbury is the great avant-garde pianist of our time. We continue to be deeply affected by his thinking on music, politics and ideology: “There is no such thing as an artistic conscience which is not governed by world outlook…the content of a piece of music is not something mysterious, unattainable or elusive. On the contrary, creative listening, that is, listening to music that involves the mind as well as the ears and heart, can attain a measure of understanding of what a composer is saying about the world.”


Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio presents Ni ‘mamita’ Ni ‘mulatita’. A performed film lecture; maybe a little melodramatic, maybe danced, maybe not, but either way exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves (e.g.: the prevalance of brown/ blackface, the mammy and the mulata stereotype) through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.


Daniel Carter & William Parker: Is the music of exceptional jazz saxophonist Daniel Carter an improvisation of his, free associationist, non-impositional anarchism? When William Parker, the great jazz bassist of our time, says: "it is the role of the artist to incite political, social, and spiritual revolution, to awaken us from our sleep and never let us forget our obligations as human beings…" what’s he getting at? And: what might their collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?


M. NourbeSe Philip presents Zong! "A brash, unsettling book, Zong! wants to chant or shout history down, shut history up… Fretful, possessed, obsessed, upset, curse and homeopathy, both, it visits a breathtaking run of glossolalic scat upon historical trauma." Nathaniel Mackay. Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience? And how do we read NourbeSe’s anti-narrative poetic lament in Glasgow today, given the city’s role in the history of slavery?


Both Episodes are designed to be informed but informal. Whilst each has a distinct, yet related, set of concerns at its core, the artists and events involved constantly query not only the intersections of, and the tensions between, music, poetry, performance and theory but also those between gender, sexuality and race. Our Episodes are intended as a kind of convivial, exploratory cross between a salon, festival and live magazine; maybe a kind of concentrated space in which ideas about art and its social use can be investigated through intense performances and thought-provoking discussions with leading international artists and thinkers, and hopefully with the people in Glasgow who might have the most to say in return.

Mimosa, Parising is Paris at the Judson Church

Since both post-modern dance and the voguing ball scene are marked by considerable self-indulgence, it is unsurprising that (Mi)imosa – Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church, which takes its cues from these movements, frequently gets lost in rambling interludes. These passages threaten to undermine the conceptual brilliance of Tarjai Harrell’s fusion of high art and queer subversion, only to be rescued by the virtuosity of the four strong cast.

Harell’s genius is to imagine a past in which the Judson Church, home to various, dynamic choreographers in the 1960s, was invaded by the downtown ballroom scene, where queer culture flourished and social dance was a vigorous means of cultural expression. Alongside the highly formalised “task based” movements of the post-modern choreographers from Judson, there is lip-synching and catwalk posing, drag and kitsch operatic numbers. The collision of styles is bracing, postulating a choreography that links the showing out of the nightclub and the high art of contemporary dance. And beneath the performance, the urgent questioning of queer culture, its deconstruction of masculine and feminine stereotypes and the gap between the real and the fake.

Arika, who programmed (M)imosa as part of Episode 5, their look at queer identity, have moved away from their roots in music to curate weekends that challenge notions of freedom. In Episode 5, sexual identity gets called, and queer culture (including gay, bisexual, trans and drag) is presented as an alternative to the monolithic sexualities and gender identities that artistic director Barry Esson suggests are inculturated by the dominant hegemony (also known as late capitalism, social normativity, the state and patriarchy).

(M)imosa undeniably strikes at easy delineates of gender and sexuality: the four performers flicker between male, female, gay and straight appeal. But in stark contrast to Esson’s radical distrust of stable ideas of fake and real, the performers restate authenticity through their mockery of stereotypes and intriguing gender recombinations. Towards the end, Harell himself tells an anecdote to reveal the five occasions when the fake must be put aside (interestingly, three of them are sacraments, the fourth is for matters of health and the final one is shopping). (M)imosa might take delight in confusion and faking it, but the possibility of parody depends on the verifiable existence of the object to parody.

Given the cabaret format of the performance, and the many moments of brilliance (including an excerpt from a ballet, the final Prince impersonation, a funky introduction that is the most obvious integration of vogue and contemporary choreography and the sudden shift into a terrifying dark light disco session), much of the show is pure entertainment, sweetening the implied message of freedom to adapt gender to desire by revealing how much fun it can be.

The various caricatures of masculinity and femininity that drag deconstructs – the macho, the romantic artist, the camp gay male – are themselves melting in the mainstream thanks to the fire of feminism and gay liberation: the moments of predictability (a version of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights routine, as seen in Peter McMaster’s entry to the Behaviour festival and in Boris and Sergei’s Vaudevillian Adventure this year and the on-stage temper tantrums that are a polite reflection of Ann Liv Young’s predictable melt-downs) are reminders that queer culture isn’t so alien: the similarities between (M)imosa and Victoria’s White Star Hotel, which came to Tramway over eight years ago suggest that the contested issues aren’t entirely marginalised. And there’s the recycling of recent pop culture into new meanings, a process that Simon Reynolds describes in Retromania and is pretty much the main strategy of pop, mainstream, alternative and underground.

Far from establishing a distinctive space where identity can be up for grabs, this version of the queer is recognisable as a manifestation of the same cultural practice that has Beyonce referencing vogue in her Sasha Fierce persona, or the questioning of authenticity as seen on Channel 4’s Faking It series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and it is part of that dominant hegemony’s talent to integrate the underground into its own agenda.

As Esson said in his introductory speech, the queer space is an alternative to discursive analysis – instead of arguing about gender identity, it dances around the subject, valuing fun and physicality over cerebral blather like this review. Harell and his co-creators (Cecilia Bengoles, Francois Chaignaud and Marlene Monteiro Freitas) groove and educate, even if they could have done with a good dramaturge to cut out the longeurs between the routines. They might not quite offer a genuine freedom, or abolish the tyranny of normative sexuality but they do promise a good time for the mind and the emotions.

Thaemlitz Ain't Got No Soul

For reasons I cannot yet divulge – although it may be the allure of anti-theology sparkling at the centre of the ideas being slowly unpeeled – Terre Thaemlitz’s Soulnessless is the most intriguing of Arika’s offerings in Episode 5 (Hidden in Plain Sight). I am not sure whether its promised slot will add much more to its description in the pamphlet, but the challenges it presents to the conceit of identity certainly pleases my cheeky deconstructionist soul.

Did I say soul? What I ought to say is something less spiritual. Thaemlitz is having a good look at the language used to describe transexuality, and seems worried that it buys into the sort of gloopy, new age humanism that is the closest thing late capitalism has to an original religion. When there is talk about a person “becoming” a gender, it applies a positive process, a bit like the process whereby someone becomes fit by going to the gym, or maybe becomes more fully themselves by doing fifteen minutes meditation a day and going to therapy for fifteen years.

Thaemlitz goes in the other direction: isn’t transexuality an act of unbecoming, as it says in the pamphlet, “stemming from an inability to live with your birth body.” While Thaemlitz is using this description to challenge the idea of an essential self, which a person can evolve into, I have a feeling that this way of putting it is likely to be controversial.

The assumption might be that the very concept of an essential self is a trick, a fiction used by religion (and later, capitalism through its advocacy of individualism). Rejecting this can make the transgender expression as process of liberation from those nasty ideas about souls and selves.

Unfortunately, unbecoming doesn’t really have such a good set of associations: while becoming can imply a transition from one state to another, to unbecome sounds a bit like disappearing. It’s a negative process. This might escape the religious implications of the self – although I am not sure that religion is really that big a bother these days – but it also ties nicely into those opinions that see transexuality as destructive.

But hey – game on.