A Hybrid Future is a Brilliant Future: The AfriClassical Futures Series at Elastic Arts: a response by Laaura Goldstein

Image captured by Julian Otis

AFRIClassical Futures Series: YAW, EVA SUPREME

Curators: Julian Otis + olula negre

Featured Performers: Yaw Agyeman + Eva Supreme

Special Guests: Ben LaMar Gay (horns & electronics) + Sharon Udoh (piano)

Collaborators: Anya Brumfield + Khelsey Zarraga (violins)

January 14, 2024

Elastic Arts

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To boldly and emphatically attach the word "futures" to the title of a performance series amidst what could be the wreckage of our old world casts a strong spell for the ensured existence and triumphant thriving of the innovative and deeply held artistic practices of Black people. Black artists strive for consistent production and support of their work within institutions whose roots in white supremacy create constantly disappointing deterrents. At the very beginning of 2020, the director of Elastic Arts Adam Zanolini directly addressed these patterns when he approached composer Julian Otis with an idea to create space for Black musicians that have worked in the area generally known as classical music. Zanolini writes about the origination of the series in Volume 25 of the “Graphics Notes” series published by Elastic Arts and archived on their website. The creation of the series’ name provides a hybrid space within itself, a split and a fusion, the term AfriClassical. After the initial idea, Julian, in turn, brought on musician olula negre to join as curator as well. The ability of this series to make performances in public was halted by the lockdown, but yielded fruitful and beautiful performances and discussions on Zoom preserved on Elastic’s website. Over the last four years, the series found its way to audiences at the Elastic Arts space as a quarterly occurrence. I attended their performance at the tip of the year on Sunday, January 14th for an embodied definition of the term as I stepped into their vision. Here, I encountered emergent forms of music defined by the light and sound of an early winter sunset, a feeling that surrounded all the people that arrived in the space to play and witness vocalized stories as song, a deep emotional experience that manifested in a true collective. 

It was already the coldest day of the year and a sizeable crowd hustled in out of the zero degree weather, drawn into the oasis. Yaw Agyeman, who would perform in the second half of the event, reflects a few months later that, “[i]t was a pleasure to play at Elastic, on that particular occasion/night. It was cold outside, and so warm inside. It is a thing that I think about often. The idea of warmth, as an island, in a sea of cold. How do we find moments to love and hold each other- sometimes abandon the self, in the foreground of hate, despair, and indifference? How do we care and take care of?” Julian Otis opened the show with words that were met with a chorus of amens that continued to circle the room for the duration of the show, which consisted of two lengthy and substantial performances. As we settled in for it, Soprano vocalist Eva Supreme came out under a white canopy that surrounded her in a veil between the day and the night and spun strong vocals from beneath. Her performance undulated between a mastery of beauty and down through an insistent resonance of her range. She repeated, “I am already great,” behind long clear notes that she produced as her own foundation with a looping pedal making herself her own choir. We all felt part of a prayer, surrounded, on a Sunday, at sunset. 

It keeps reflecting back to me how we were all a part of the performance somewhere in between a call and response set in motion from the beginning. The second half saw the band set up across the stage: Sharon Udoh at piano, also serving as bandleader, Anya Brumfield and Khelsey Zarraga on violin, Ben LaMar Gay on trumpet and electronics, and Yaw at the microphone who set himself at an angle towards the audience, half of his body facing the audience and half towards the band, like an arrow pointing both forward and back. He would sometimes say, “No need for looking back,” in a continuous prayer that stretched into sermon, storytelling, and service. It’s a way I’ve recognized that poetry and hope are put together in a way that naturally becomes song. I wrote down the thought that, “we’ve been doing this since we knew we could,” but it is only performances like these that really remind us. 

As the blue light deepened into the rich sky of the future, my notes on the page blended and blurred. Here, I’d like to note that great art makes us want to make art as it invites us to participate. Yaw notes: “I think about how some of us, we continue on with the same goal, the same mission, in spite of our own hate for our self; in spite of the world’s insistence on our second class-ness; in spite of the world’s desire to shut us or kill us, because of our mission, because our mission might bring light to us all. Because our mission is greater than us, because our mission is greater than humanity itself.” And there was surely a sense that the most radical and irrational revolution would work against the worst of the rational world if it could expand in a solid sphere outside of the space where we, the audience, rounded out the music as listener and witness. That it seemed possible to bring it there, a little bubble of the future that is still expanding.

Imagine the layers of a music infused in pure story that brings you into the present tense of yourself like nothing else can, the inevitable, real realm of the future and here you might recognize the AfriClassical Futures.

The next event in the series takes place on May 5th at 4pm at Elastic Arts featuring King Sophia.

Image captured by Julian Otis

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Laaura Goldstein's first collection of poetry, loaded arc, was released by Trembling Pillow Press in 2013 and their second collection, awesome camera, was published by Make Now Press in 2014. They have also published several chapbooks with vibrant small presses across the country. They began performing their work as well as teaching in Philadelphia for the Center for Literacy and helped facilitate workshops for Poetry for the People as well as worked at Temple University as a Dean's Appointment. They are now are a Senior Lecturer in Core Literature and Writing at Loyola University Chicago.