Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle
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?
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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?
How do we gesture to the invisible, the trans or the obscure? A performative conversation between boychild and Fernando, a sharing of gestures, and a bodily back and forth between mathematician and dance artist.
Perhaps the paradigm of America’s covert musical subculture, Sun City Girls operate just over the border of raucous delirium.
What to do about a telethon other than fuck it up? Poet, tarotist, artist, and librarian Cyrée Jarelle Johnson returns to IWBWYE to read the 1980s and ’90s for what those decades were: practice for now.
A discussion about what is at stake in the performance of realness and the practice of passing, and how they are both acts of survival and resistance.
A series of events organised by the Vogue’ology collective from the House Ballroom community in New York grounded in the scenes history of autonomous, self-organised struggle and a shared investment in collective art practices and how those intersect with the multiple and often divergent struggles for freedom.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
A historical narrative of the black and Latino/a transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay House and Ballroom Scene in relation to race, gender, sexuality and class oppressions.
A trance inducing, flickering investigation of structural and minimalist droning from one of the key thinkers in sound and image over the last 50 years
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
An extravagant debauch of plush toys and ritual. Palestine performed a version of Strumming Music, a trance inducing investigation into overtone systems achievable on a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.