New York Live Arts’ 2020 annual Live Ideas humanities festival of arts and ideas titled Live Ideas 2020––Altered-Worlds: Black Utopia and the Age of Acceleration This year’s hybrid festival will offer five days of activity designed to explore second wave Afrofuturism as the groundwork for a future unfettered from the ideals of white Enlightenment universalism.
Contemporary Afrofuturism may be defined as an emerging social philosophy of the African diaspora and Africa. Today, partly because of a crisis in globalization, social media and other technological advances, second wave Afrofuturism is emerging as the High Culture of the African diaspora and is the cultural vibranium of a rising virtual African civilization. The 2021 edition of Live Ideas, Altered-Worlds: Black Utopia and The Age of Acceleration, will explore this second wave of Afrofuturism as an alternative to the social anomie, reactionary impulses and neo-fascism of late capitalism.
The five-day inter-disciplinary hybrid festival will unfold across multiple dimensions and brings together an illustrious group of artists, writers, thinkers, activists including:
Tiffany E. Barber, Adrienne Maree Brown, D. Sabela Grimes, Ayana Jamieson, John Jennings, Ari Melenciano, Jasmine Murrell, Qudus Onikeku, Rasheedah Phillips, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tobias c. Van Veen, Saul Williams, André M. Zachery, and many more.
The five-day hybrid festival will unfold across multiple dimensions at the intersection of arts, techno-culture, sci-fi, social sciences, philosophy and the imagination. Highlights of the festival include the world premiere of The Motherboard Suite featuring Saul Williams and six choreographers and directed by Bill T. Jones, an interactive installation by Jasmine Murrell, a symposium delving into second wave Afrofuturism, an immersive Afrofuturist Cabaret, an exploration of Afrobeats and entrepreneurship through the work of Nigerian choreographer Qudus Onikeku.
Live Ideas 2021 is co-curated by Reynaldo Anderson and New York Live Arts in partnership with the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM).
