Sun Ra’s multimedia East Village show flopped and he left for Philadelphia in 1968

Evidence

The show’s printed program announces a call to adventure: “the space music of sun ra: a free form excursion into the far reaches of sound and sight—.” The unlit stage was illuminated by projected slides of celestial bodies and two films: The Magic Sun, an abstract portrait of the Arkestra by composer Phil Niblock and Maxine Haleff’s The Forbidden Playground (a dance film, juxtaposing a New York playground, with documentary sequences of NASA astronauts). Dressed in colorful robes, the members of Arkestra were accompanied on stage by the Edith Stephen Dance Theater. John S. Wilson was disappointed, writing in the New York Times that “the Arkestra was reduced to performing as a live soundtrack to a mixed-media display … and gave relatively little evidence of the stimulating musicianship of which it is capable.” Sun Ra blamed sparce attendance on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. eight days before. In Fall 1968, the Arkestra left the East Village and relocated to Philadelphia. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1953

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s argument that avant-gardes are produced by material conditions — this is a case where the conditions (post-King-assassination, mixed-media overreach) did NOT produce success.