Wadada Leo Smith
Wadada Leo Smith
A performance bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience and collective action from the great multi-instrumentalist and member of the AACM.
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.
A performance bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience and collective action from the great multi-instrumentalist and member of the AACM.
5 days of film, music, discussion and study of our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the colonial ordering of how we come to know the world—practicing how we might exist otherwise, right here and now. Can we start to know and practice the world to come?
Glasgow. Power electronic klutz behaviour by Kovorox sound head-honcho. Bruised bodies and broken microphones.
Work for cello, percussion, contra bassoon and cherbulum commissioned for Instal in collaboration with Paragon
The Cube is a 6 hour performed installation in which sound and image are treated as independent but equal, where musicians and filmmakers sit alongside each other, improvise to and feed off both projected image and amplified and acoustic sound.
A freestyle performed conversation for bodies and voices – with the Queen of Krump, the master of Vogue Femme Dramatics and the rising star of Vogue Women’s Performance.
Stripping back the domesticated ‘meaning’ of (everyday, mundane, kitchen) tools to reveal “a lexicon of rage and frustration.” Plus an allegorical use of mundane, everyday things as an examination of how meaning is constructed in film.
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
A collaborative duo performance, Anoyonodekigoto sets up a sort of negotiation between a musician, a dancer, the audience and the space we’re all sharing.
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
Could they be one of the most ferocious live noise acts around, or a necessary and ludicrous parody of ferocious noise acts? Could they be both?
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.