The pandemic has toppled the life of many people but none are in a more hapless condition than those stuck on ships. Today we are showcasing the story of one such showbiz couple stranded at sea whose idea was to thrill the world with a multimedia tour from a sailng ship but the pandemic played spoiled the show.
Gregory Scruggs of The Pitch chronicles their story in an article published on the website.
A Climate Change Act on A Ship
On June 20, as the sun set over the endless Pacific horizon on the longest day of the year, a motley crew of seven musicians-cum-sailors assembled on the foredeck of an antique sailing ship and downed a shot of rum.
They were nine months into a journey from the Netherlands to Indonesia via the Panama Canal.
Their mission: to stage a multimedia tour from a sailing ship, and to reinvent live music for a world facing the existential threat of climate change.
- Dressed in whatever they could scrounge up, from a green suit to a reflective firefighter jacket to a cape made from a tattered flag, they hailed the crew of a nearby Chinese fishing vessel.
- While the fishermen looked on curiously, the crew shouted and waved in excitement.
- Grey Filastine, the mastermind behind the project, pulled out a pair of Chinese opera cymbals and smashed them together with abandon.
- It was their first human contact in nearly two months.
A Touring Ship Cum Concert Venue
Christened “Arka Kinari” from the Latin for “vessel” and the Sanskrit word for a half-human, half-bird musician, the ship is the most ambitious endeavor yet by Filastine, a U.S.-born percussionist and producer, and Indonesian vocalist and environmental activist Nova Ruth. As a self-contained unit, the Arka Kinari is both touring van and concert venue. The deck transforms into a stage, and the sails become projection screens for Filastine & Nova’s potent live performances.
How did they do it?
For the avant-garde duo, whose music obliquely addresses ecological collapse, Arka Kinari is the culmination of a 10-year vision to wean off fossil fuel-based travel while maintaining a viable artistic career.
Instead of flying around the world from festival to festival as they did for years, they would sail from port to port to perform for audiences far from tastemaker hubs, propelled by little more than the wind and a modest motor for maneuvering in harbors.
creating a musical ship world
“I like touring small-ish venues and connecting with audiences in flesh and blood, but indie gigs have lost out to macro-festivals,” Filastine told me via satellite email last month from somewhere in the Pacific. “There isn’t really a place for my work in the modern musical landscape, so better to create the world we want than to continue slogging through the world we’ve inherited.”
Separated by the pandemic
In September 2019, Filastine & Nova shoved off from Rotterdam, where they bought the ship and assembled a crew, and began their journey. They expected to start their first full tour in Indonesia this summer following dress rehearsals en route in the Canary Islands, Panama, and Mexico. By early March, the project’s two leads were separated by the Pacific Ocean: Nova had flown ahead to Indonesia to make preparations for their tour, while Filastine lingered in Mexico to provide shore support, like picking up needed parts, with plans to fly to the Marshall Islands to rendez-vous with the ship for its final leg.
Then the pandemic hit.
Borders started closing left and right. The Marshall Islands enacted a strict quarantine, prohibiting all incoming boat and air traffic.
With the wind at Arka Kinari’s back, it was too late to reverse course and return to Mexico. At this point, the rest of the crew was sailing westward, blissfully unaware of the unfolding global crisis.
- Filastine booked a flight for Hawaii. On March 18, he warned the crew in a series of 140-character text messages sent via satellite about the stock market crash, panic buying, and border closures.
- He then advised them to plot a new heading for Hilo, Hawaii, where he would do his best to negotiate a safe harbor amid the archipelago’s new restrictions.
Keeping the Ship Safe
Dreams of their inaugural tour in Indonesia rapidly ground to a halt as keeping Arka Kinari safe and supplied became the paramount objective.
Filastine frantically negotiated with Hawaiian immigration officials and secured permission for the international crew to receive emergency visas.
Expiring Visas, Hurricane & Pandemic
Arka Kinari arrived in April, and the crew quarantined for 14 days.
But the clock was ticking on the non-citizen crew members’ expiring visas—and an impending Pacific hurricane season was breathing down their necks, even as borders remained shuttered across the Pacific.
- One American member of the crew, uncomfortable with the uncertainty, left the ship, and Filastine took his place.
- They loaded up with months’ worth of provisions and raised anchor once again, not knowing if they would find a welcoming port when they next made landfall. But Filastine resolved to stay the course—with Arka Kinari, he and Nova were committed for the long haul.
In April 2018, I squeezed into Seattle’s Clock-Out Lounge for Filastine & Nova’s final North American gig before they dedicated themselves full-time to Arka Kinari. By that point, the duo had perfected the immersive stage performance for Drapetomania, an album that subverted and skewered the carbon-intensive lifestyle they eventually hoped to eschew.
The Show
As a screen behind the stage displayed a mock airport flight monitor listing eye-raising destinations like Leningrad and Aleppo, the pair snaked through the crowd toting rollerboard suitcases, with Filastine dressed in a captain’s uniform and Nova as a flight attendant. Then Filastine addressed the audience over an intercom as though delivering a pre-flight briefing. Nova pantomimed along, donning a gas mask in lieu of an overhead oxygen mask, and a metal chain with handcuffs in lieu of a seatbelt.
Then the duo launched into a propulsive performance. Nova, who grew up singing Pentecostal spirituals, Koranic recitations, and Javanese gamelan music, handled most of the vocal duties in her native Javanese and Bahasa Indonesian. Filastine, whose percussion chops date back to the radical marching band Infernal Noise Brigade that soundtracked the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, cycled between beating a wearable drum kit, a goblet drum, and a shopping cart. As the set reached a climax, the visuals shifted to a first-person view of a plane crash. The performers descended from the stage into the middle of the crowd and deployed a parachute, with the audience clutching onto the edges.
“That performance was meant to be understood as abandoning a civilization of speed,” Filastine said.
“What audiences couldn’t know at the time is that we were literally bailing out of our participation and complicity with the formal structure of the entertainment industry, and even the format of a stage.”
The Power of the Sea
With their Arka Kinari vision in mind during an Asian tour in the latter half of 2018, they inquired with Indonesian shipwrights about putting together a Pinisi ship—the traditional sailing vessel of the Bugis people, which is Nova’s ethnic background—from scratch. That tack ultimately proved fruitless and in 2019, after more than a year of research and inspecting 20 different vessels, they settled for the rustbucket in Rotterdam.
Buoyed by a crowdfunding campaign, Filastine and his co-conspirators spent last summer refurbishing the schooner into a working vessel with four sails aligned as projection screens, space for two live performers on separate stages on deck, and mounts for two speakers and a subwoofer.
While researching Arka Kinari, Filastine poured over the history of Chinese circus groups that toured by junk boats and dove into the etymology of “showboat,” which comes from the decorated theater boats that plied U.S. rivers from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. “Music, languages and religions all spread by ship before the late 20th century,” Filastine said.
“The sea was the original internet, something understood implicitly by the pioneers of the world wide web, back when we ‘navigated’ the web. But it has since ossified into corporate territories: Google, Facebook, Apple.”
Support from Ports
On a warm night last October in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, some 150 people clustered dockside to watch Filastine & Nova’s inaugural performance on the Arka Kinari. Crew members lit signal flares as Nova began singing Javanese poetry about the end of the world to the tune of an ancient Catalan song while silhouetted against the moon projected on a sail. Filastine manned the audio with sequins draped over his face as he pounded away on an electric drum pad. A dancer resembling a sea anemone in a purple costume with tendrils floated gently through the scene.
“If you can believe it, the port police asked us to turn up the PA because they wanted it to hear it louder,” Filastine said of that first show.
The gig, set up by a local promoter in partnership with the experimental Keroxen festival, had an audience familiar with avant-garde performance art. But for a duo who once played a French refugee camp, those kinds of crowds, ultimately, are not Arka Kinari’s target audience. From there, the crew set out to reach everyday people whose lives and livelihoods are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Screening for the Indigenous Communities
In January, they rigged up a performance for the indigenous community of Kuna Yala, an autonomous zone of low-lying islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama already threatened by rising seas. “It was a very tricky gig not only because the local population have no experience with anything formally classified as live performance, but also because of the dangers of getting close enough to the populated island without the strong winds crashing us onto the rocks or a house built on a pier,” Filastine recalled. “That was the hardest conditions we’ll ever likely face, and we did manage to pull it off.”
The blessedly slow pace at sea, away from the noise of daily life, opened Filastine’s ears. “The format of pop songs simply doesn’t fit the infinite horizon,” he said. “I’m now only listening to longer-form music, European and Indian classical music, qawwali, noise, ambient and contemporary composers like Riley, Reich, Glass.” Such moments of musical bliss come between the backbreaking work of maintaining a sailboat—scraping the hull, fixing the motor, managing provisions.
Last Show Before the Pandemic
In February, they performed for the last time before the pandemic, in Puerto Ángel, Mexico. “It was the best gig so far, the kind of unusual mix of people we want to bring together—fishermen, locals, Mexican modernos from nearby towns, some expats,” Filastine said.
Stranded at sea
In the weeks before stumbling across the Chinese fishing vessel amid the vastness of the Pacific, they radioed Johnston Atoll, a small U.S. island known for incinerating biological and chemical weapons, for permission to land. No response. For several days, they lingered on another uninhabited island and scavenged a wrecked Chinese cargo ship to bolster their dwindling food supplies. They were eventually chased off by the local navy.
Finally, on June 30, Arka Kinari received permission to land on Guam. The crew has secured a month of provisions, and diesel mechanics are working to repair their motor.
A Visionary Activity
The prospect of arriving in Indonesia, much less playing live gigs there, remains murky, and the project continues to survive financially on crowdfunding support. But with the Atlantic and most of the Pacific behind them, as well as three gigs in obscure ports of call, they have proven both Arka Kinari’s seaworthiness and its stage readiness. With touring at a standstill and venues closed in most countries, suddenly this daringly risky alternative to the traditional music industry looks downright prescient.
“We had touring culture before airplanes, and we’ll have touring culture after the end of fossil capitalism,” Filastine said.
“The transition can be intentional, or it can be apocalyptic.”
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Source: Pitchfork
