What Is The Architecture of A Party?
A Methodology for Creation (In-Process)
Photo: Rakia SeabornI recently spent seven intense months in the studio with another artist, engaged in what felt like anti-technique technique or a decolonising of my body. The body that exists on the other side of those seven months is forever changed. I am thinking deeply about easeful effort, indirect focus, improvisation, rhythm and vernacular accents. I am obsessing over how it feels, the vibration in the chest, when I put on a song I love and just improvise to it with no focus on what it looks like. This is all in an effort to suss out how my new body operates within the established aesthetics of RAKIA!.
While in another artist’s process, it was nearly impossible to find the headspace to rehearse my own work. However, I am constantly compelled to be creating. As I’ve done in the past, I started writing. I texted Composer Austin Guerrazzi one afternoon “I think I wrote the lyrics to a pop song. What do we do?!” He responded “Send them to me! Let’s make some pop songs!” Thus began an entirely new way of working and creating where words and music become the impetus for everything else that follows.
When I began to synthesize pop songs, the feeling of a heart like a subwoofer in my chest and the super-specific physicality I observed in my videoed improvisations, I landed on this notion that what I’m doing is the most essentialized form of social dance. How do I take these songs, this feeling, that physicality and use it as a method to create work? I landed on the idea of a party as Rosetta Stone. Thus, what is “The Architecture of a Party”?
Sequin Skirt Study from Rakia Seaborn on Vimeo.
Gold
December is the color of wet cement.
Shivers between dreams feel permanent.
Run down sun down forever blue.
I am dying to be consumed by you.
Electric tide of lava on the north face
Ready steady go sneakers laced
Tie me up, melt me down, fiery grace.
Am I even in the running for first place?
Taste like cumulus and old cigarettes,
Grayscale sky, arctic roulette,
White lies crystallize into truth.
I am dying to be consumed by you.
Electric tide of lava on the north face
Ready steady go sneakers laced
Tie me up, melt me down, fiery grace.
Am I even in the running for first place?
The intimacy of dirty laundry
Undressed in a sonnet
Unrequited quandaries
The cold in the bones is unbinding.
Eyes like Kilauea in the spring.
Gaze ablaze gaze ablaze fiery grace.
Am I even in the running for first place?
RAKIA!®2017