Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Here we’re grouping documentation of the many performances of improvised music that have taken place at our festivals over the years but also work that tests out a hypothesis in real time. Current highlights from this collection include William Parker and Daniel Carter’s freewheeling duo exploration, John Tilbury and Wadada Leo Smith’s meeting across traditions and Howard Slater’s talk about individual and collective practices in free jazz.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?
A performance bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience and collective action from the great multi-instrumentalist and member of the AACM.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
What does it mean to listen with the mind as well as the ears? A solo performance from the great avant-garde pianist.
A performative survey of listening, as we managed to find it being used as a tool in different practices, disciplines and communities in North America (music, poetry, film, philosophy, activism…).
TEST is a collective creative improvising quartet based out of the NYC Underground (figuratively and literally). Their street-hardened, spatial Jazz is riotous and intense: is also makes us think about collective organization, and different ideas of responsibility and liberty.
Percussion used to explore the social construction of space
Inspired by the supernatural horror of H. P. Lovecraft, black metal and a sense of worry as to what constitutes an object, or a world.
Slapstick comedy, monologue, and a kind of live sculpture transformed through video, props, musical instruments and make-up.