Arika 13: Freedom Is A Constant Struggle

From 18-21 Apr, Arika return to Tramway with a weekend of events exploring radical black art forms. What are they, we hear you ask? Allow director Barry Esson to explain...

Feature by Bram E. Gieben | 10 Apr 2013

Barry Esson is one of Arika's directors, along with Bryony McIntyre. They devised the much-admired INSTAL events in the early 00s, and the ground-breaking audiovisual festival at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Kill Your Timid Notion. Their new programme combines radical performance art with extended discussions, salons and lectures from key figures in a myriad of performance traditions. “We have a really developed position now as to what we think is useful, or interesting, or could be pursued around, not just music in its aesthetic sense – just reducing it to sound – but also in the way it activates us socially, or erotically. How it affects us as a community,” says Esson. Moving away from the festival format towards an episodic structure with adequate space for engagement, Esson describes Arika events as “a cross between a music or a film festival with something that is more like a live magazine.”

Their next event is a meditation on freedom and the role of improvisation within radical black art forms, specifically poetry and free jazz. With daytime sessions dedicated to discussions with leading thinkers from the radical black arts movement, and evenings featuring unique performances and artistic collaborations, Esson and his colleagues hope to open up discussion in Glasgow about the rich tradition of improvisation in black culture. Two eminent thinkers and writers joining them to explore this territory are experimental poet and theorist Fred Moten, a long-term friend of Arika, and one of the intellectual heavyweights about whom he has written extensively – poet, playwright, publisher and activist Amiri Baraka.

“Baraka was involved with the Beat Generation, he was a Marxist theorist, and was one of the key figures who established the Black Arts Movement, which was founded on the idea of black nationalism,” Esson explains. “He identified as gay in the 1950s, there were rumours he went out with Frank O'Hara, but then moved to be quite homophobic in the 60s. One of the areas where his position is quite controversial is on sexuality. It's had a massive effect on his own life. He is now a prominent AIDS activist, and is very involved in queer and lesbian politics in New York. He is incredibly influential, but not unproblematic.”

Moten meanwhile “tries to use queer theory to read through a number of important figures; to try and queer the black radical tradition, in terms of the way that queer theory understands gender and sexuality as a performance, to get to an understanding of ‘blackness’ as a performance, and race as constructed. As a white, Scottish guy, I'd be quite nervous thinking about what position I have to question the link between politics and aesthetics in the black radical tradition, but Fred is the great chronicler of that tradition. One of the things we are going to talk about is what it means to discuss that tradition from a position outside of it.”

Joining the likes of Moten and Baraka are musicians Henry Grimes, a noted double-bassist, and woodwind player Daniel Carter. Both leading figures in the ‘free jazz’ movement, they will be involved in performances and discussions that explore the types of spaces created by improvisation-based art forms in black culture. “Free jazz, free verse: all of these things make specific claims on freedom,” says Esson. “We want to question whether they still live up to them, and how we can engage with these ideas.”

Freedom through artistic expression with a focus on improvisation has been vital to radical black culture. “How, as an oppressed people, would you understand the idea of freedom, if you've never really experienced it?” asks Esson, paraphrasing Moten. “There are all kinds of social spaces which are produced which give people the ability to enact ideas of freedom – free jazz clubs, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, the Black Arts Movement.”

Key figures from these movements, such as AACM co-founder Wadada Leo Smith, and John Tilbury, a European avant garde composer associated with the AACM, will also be in attendance. “People started to embody these ideas of freedom aesthetically, via these art forms. Fred describes it as the testing out or the enacting of an idea of freedom, when you can't actually be free. We want to ask whether, through experiencing this performance, you can engage with the ideas of freedom they are embodying.”

Day pass £6 / Festival Pass £14. Book tickets via www.arika.org.uk http://www.arika.org.uk