At once bright and tinged with shadows, the garden of TRANSARCADIA is a place where Arkora and its audiences can acknowledge and share both collective pain and positive visioning of a better world. Looking back across the past decade, the zeitgeists of revolution, rebirth, and turmoil have all been manifest, causing rumination on what lies ahead. As artists, we’ve long been responsible for imagining creative ways forward long before actual means to achieve them exist. With this in mind, can we see a path where confusion begins to give way to shapes of hope and clarity?
Arkora’s TRANSARCADIA blends new pieces, selections from our canon of commissioned work, and reforged traditional songs with immersive sound and visual design inspired by imaginary utopian futures of our aftertimes. Dreamscapes, abstracted botania, kaleidoscopic memories, field-recordings of disappearing ecologies…all fuse together as a backdrop for a program of works from our recent projects (Transfigured Light, Songs from the Rainshadow’s Edge, The Sign of Jonas, Cloud Chamber) and future ones (Eurydice Fragments, Dystopia Lost).
Unfolding as a series of concerts in locations throughout North America over the 2024-25 season, TRANSARCADIA takes a step further in refining Arkora’s distinct polyphonic sound, distilling a larger chamber consort down to eight performers: three dedicated vocalists (soprano, alto, tenor), and a band of electric/steel guitar, violin, piano/keyboards/analogue synthesizers, bass/cello, and percussion, all doubling on secondary vocals. The ensemble and audiovisual design have been devised with straight-forward technical requirements in mind (full spec sheet available on request).