The eleventh Tonight featured Stefanie Seibold and Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio who presented the jungle is a skyscraper, a performance revolving around the costume politics of the legendary jazz formation Sun Ra Arkestra.

the jungle is a skyscraper takes as a starting point the costume politics of jazz musician Sun-Ra and the Arkestra in their musical performances throughout the world. The combination of music, politics and science-fiction elements resulting in emancipatory narratives such as afro-futurism and other alien-myth-sciences, are in a fascinating way specific to the stage performances of the Sun-Ra Arkestra – oscillating between the sacred and the glitzy – in conjunction with a wider politics of form. The Shape of Jazz to Come – an early album-title by free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman for example, alluded to the ongoing discussions around concepts like form and anti-form in music, and in other artistic practices of the 1960s.

In the performance the jungle is a skyscraper, concepts like consonance and dissonance, shape and shapelessness or the known and the unknown, are to be consequently renegotiated within the specific objects and unfoldings of the performance, to be newly combined, presenting sounds, surfaces, textures and materials as the locus of the political.

The performance by Stefanie Seibold and Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio is coproduced with MuHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. In MuHKA the performance will take place on December 10, 2010 at 20.00 hrs.

Overview of If I Can’t Dance Tonight events