HOLO

“I’m a security guard for a festival in 2048. Welcome to the party, honey!” Dressed in character as a bespectacled granny and rocking back and forth in a rocking chair, artist and activist Cassie Thornton reminisced about the long road to true inclusivity. “In the 2020s, parties felt like a time to escape the inescapable. The options were to get together and pretend everything was okay or cower and hide in our homes,” she said in a pretend-crackly voice. It took decades, she argued, to develop a new festival “that doesn’t erase anybody” and nurture a new type of festival-goer “who can survive the end of capitalism and is trained to build a new world.” It’s called the Festival of Zero Compromise and does precisely what its unwavering name suggests: no ethical concessions are allowed, and all are welcome. It’s such a safe and supportive space that even a frail granny can be a ‘security guard.’

“It’s so hard to ask for support because everybody around us is already struggling. But it’s not you; it’s the system. It’s capitalism.” Thornton introduced an exercise called Hologram to help the audience get closer to the Festival of Zero Compromise. It’s a therapeutic exercise she designed based on the Social Solidarity Clinics that sprung up in Greece during the financial and migration crisis it faced in the 2010s. The audience broke into groups of four and got to work. Three people in each group—a triangle of support—tended to the needs of a selected individual. They asked about their physical, emotional, and social needs. “How are you feeling right now, physically? What do you want or need? Where do you need more support right now?” A little hesitant and sheepish at first, the walls of standard social decorum came down, and the audience of arts professionals began asking serious, heartfelt questions of one another to forge bonds of solidarity and care. The Hologram exercise may have only lasted a short while, but the sense of care and gentleness it instilled resonated through the room for the rest of the day.

Takeaway: By speaking to us from 2048, Thornton truly put the Future in Future Festivals. She never spelled out exactly how the Festival of Zero Compromise worked—it’s our job to figure out how to get to utopia—but she did tell us how it felt and how it moved leaps and bounds between the politics of today’s cultural events. We know festivals are subject to the forces of neoliberalism—the market, competition, and social atomization—but by making a little space for empathy and connection, we can forge bonds to help each other survive and flourish.

“Much of our work challenges notions of what Mad or Sick identities are. These DJs and partygoers are already in the room,” said community organizer Renee Dumaresque. Working alongside composer and DJ Stefana Fratila, Dumaresque launched CRIP Rave, a Toronto-based event promoter and accessibility advocacy group who work to make electronic music spaces more accessible for Crip, Deaf, Disabled, Mad, and Sick bodies in 2019. While Dumaresque introduced the duo, Fratila stood behind the decks of an adjacent DJ booth listening intently and occasionally interjecting with some tunes.

“We promote prioritizing accessibility for talent. We push people to ask for more and dream bigger,” said Dumaresque of how CRIP Rave supports Disabled artists—the performers in the spotlight at music venues—as a critical tenant of making nightlife more accessible for all attendees. Their past featured artists include Ciel, Regularfantasy, and Syrus Marcus Ware. American sign language (ASL) interpretation for the Deaf, visuals that respond to music, chill and cooldown spaces, free water, accessibility riders, and workshops on making the DJ booth more inclusive are just a few of CRIP Rave’s interventions into nightlight’s standard operating procedures. “Letting people know what they can expect is often an incredible starting point. It immediately increases accessibility,” said Dumaresque, articulating how transparency and attentive communication with partygoers is a big part of increasing accessibility. Their endgame expands everyone’s agency: “It’s really about choice. So people enter an event that can modify and respond to what they need and feel at any given moment.”

Takeaway: CRIP Rave demonstrates that accessibility should be a first principle in event organizing. This is challenging for cultural producers that have been around for decades and are set in their ways. It’s much harder to ‘tweak’ operations and ‘add on’ accessibility versus designing your operations from the ground up with those values in mind. In the arts, we saw a rush to address equity in the leadership, staffing, governance, programming, and policies in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. It’s time for the arts to adopt a disability justice mandate and initiate similar sweeping changes.

“It’s about creating the space that you need. And stepping outside your comfort zone to fill those voids,” said DJ and multimedia editor San Farafina of Club Sagacité. Two years ago, to address the uphill battle faced by racialized artists, Farafina and her peers in the Moonshine collective rented a raw 200 square metre space in Montréal’s Mile Ex neighbourhood to host events, music production and DJing classes, and exhibitions. Membership is approximately $10 a month (CAD), and artists who join get access to a network of established artists for education and networking. “Generational economic disadvantages and cultural expectations mean that racialized people are statistically less inclined to pursue and succeed in their artistic endeavours. For this reason, we needed to structure the club to minimize those financial barriers.”

Farafina explained how the Moonshine collective and roster of generous artists, label managers, music supervisors, festival programs, and producers have shared know-how with fledgling artists at Club Sagacité. “We try to create tools to open the gate or put a wedge in it to keep it open,” says Farafina of their mandate to circumvent traditional gatekeepers. The club’s educational content is beginner-friendly and helps the curious get started with DJing and production—which can seem technical and intimidating. “People often tell us, ‘I came for the workshop, but I stayed for the friends that I made,’” said Farafina with a beaming smile.

“At Club Sagacité, we’re asked to wear many different hats, and sometimes you have to step outside of your comfort zone to fill voids,” Farafina said in closing. “I’m primarily a DJ, and I greatly prefer that to public speaking—so I will play for you now.” She then walked over to the adjacent DJ booth and, to the surprise and delight of the audience, spun a seamless 15-minute set of bass, garage, and afro-house. Everyone nodded their head to the low-end frequencies, appreciating both the sounds and the change of pace from talks and exercises.

Takeaway: Working in arts and music is an endless hustle and competition for scarce resources. Artists who ‘make it’ are not powerless to reduce the friction for the young artists that follow in their wake. Club Sagacité demonstrates how artist collectives (and their extended networks) can band together and create systems of intergenerational knowledge transfer.