GBRS presents... A Q&A with Zorras

Grey Borders Reading Series presents...a Q&A with Zorras.
Interview conducted by Phil Miletic over email (25 August 2011).

Zorras will be performing with Camille Martin, Aisha Sasha John, and Shannon Maguire on Friday 23 September 2011 at the NAC. Click here for more details.

Zorras Multimedia Troupe:
Scottish-Canadian poet Sandra Alland and Belgian-Venezuelan musician Y. Josephine formed the multimedia performance troupe, Zorras, in Edinburgh in 2007. They quickly became known for their unique bilingual mixture of text, sound poetry, percussion, singing, electric bass, guitar, megaphones and projected images. Zorras inject passion and humour into both personal experiences and cutting observations of our troubling times. The result is strangely alluring musical stories.

Q: For those who don’t know: what does Zorras mean? What does it mean to you? (Why did you choose it?), and how would you like the name Zorras mean to the audience?

“Zorras” is a Spanish word that has several meanings. The literal or primary meaning is “female fox” (or “vixen”). “Zorra” is also commonly used to mean “slut” – if you Google Zorras you’ll find a tonne of porn (though now you’ll also find poetry, music and film).

So you have, on the one hand, the male fox or “Zorro”, who is a superhero – and on the other hand, the dirty, sexually promiscuous female. We decided to call ourselves Zorras because we wanted to be our own superheroes, and to reclaim yet another word with a negative context. And also because on the night of our first rehearsal in Edinburgh we saw a beautiful fox just chilling in a park. Urban foxes lead high-risk and short lives in the UK – people hunt them down or run them over. But they are resilient. Zorras is made up of people who identify as queers, genderqueers, crips, women, migrants, poor and/or people of colour. So we feel a certain kinship.


Q: Sandra and Y: it says in the Zorras wikipedia bio that upon hearing each other at the Who’s Your Dandy event, you immediately took to each other and formed Zorras. What of each other’s performances drew you to form Zorras and what were you hoping to create out of each other’s respective creative talent?

Y: I’m a bit on the moon sometimes, so I didn’t know Sandra was a poet until she performed that night. The way she played with her breathing, and the shapes and textures of her poems was very rhythmic. As she was reading, I kept hearing percussion noises in my head, which hadn’t happened before while watching someone who wasn’t a musician. It made me think we should work together.

Sandra: I had a poetry band in the 90s in Canada (Stumblin’ Tongues, with Andra Simons and the Kien Brothers). It was a brilliant ensemble that only broke up because of immigration issues. I haven’t wanted to work with a musician since then, as I find poetry with music can be too random, the music just a way to fill in space. I don’t know, it’s like the French expression for falling in love: “un coup de foudre”. Lightning strikes. When I heard Y sing and play cajón, I was blown away by her skill. But also there was something about the way she interacted with the other musician that led me to believe she had a different kind of ear. I imagined true collaboration. And that’s what I got.


Q: Zorras initially began as a music duo. What motivation was there behind adding Ariadna to the roster transforming a “music duo” to a “multimedia group”?

Zorras were a duo but we were never really a music duo; we were always multimedia. Sandra performed or read text, and also created slides and video for live shows. Y made music and sang. The motivation for adding Ariadna’s visual work to Sandra’s in some of our shows was twofold: Ari’s art is superb, and we were overwhelmed with work (creative, technical and administrative). When possible, Ariadna operates our shows like a stage manager.

What Ariadna has also brought to the group, though, is fresh ideas and different ways of thinking. She’s more technical than us, has more of that kind of knowledge. And she’s really good at getting brilliance out of a shite piece of equipment. Also, with the extra person and therefore extra room to breathe, we were able to focus more on truly integrating the various aspects of Zorras.


Q: What artists have you collaborated with? Are there any artists you would like to collaborate with? Any specific Canadian?

Sandra and Y collaborate all over the place, but not that often as Zorras. Our collaborations besides Ariadna are with writer and oboist Nathan Gale for a live performance about (dis)ability in Edinburgh and Birmingham this autumn, with Glasgow’s thiscollection to adapt a poem by Edinburgh’s Brian McCabe, with Edinburgh’s Screen Bandita/Filmhouse for a super-8 stock-footage performance night, and with guitarist Holly Hayes for our recent short film shot in London, El Villano (“vi-ja-no”) / The Villain. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw93-1SpyWM&feature=channel_video_title
Two of these were commissions, and two were accidental.

Wish list? Hmmmmm. Me'shell Ndegeocello. Camille, the French singer. She and her band make their music mainly with mouth-sounds. Miranda July. Bootsie Collins. Chavela Vargas. Maybe Tracey Emin, though she’s leaning nastily towards the right lately. Can we name dead people? Frida Kahlo. Lhasa De Sela. Tracy Wright. Janis Joplin. bp nichol.

Other Canadians (alive): Tagaq, LAL, Bluemouth Inc., Gein Wong, Naila Keleta Mae, Sook Yin Lee.

It’s hard to answer, as for us the best collaborations are things that spring up accidentally, with people we really trust. So even if someone is an amazing artist, it could turn out that we’re better off admiring them from afar ;-)


Q: With cultural backgrounds from around the world, what drew you to Edinburgh?

Ha! Well, Sandra is half-Glaswegian and wanted to go to Glasgow for a year – but ended up getting a job in Edinburgh. Y was running away from her then-girlfriend’s husband in England. In both cases it was supposed to be very temporary, but then a lot of rubbish happened (including Y ceasing to exist according to both her countries – but that’s a tale for another day). And here we are, more than four years later…

As for Ariadna, she is notoriously secretive, so she won’t say why she’s here.


Q: Kevin Williamson had said that you “have been like a breath of fresh air in Edinburgh’s poetry scene.” Call this a two part Q: Can you, for those like me who aren’t familiar with the Edinburgh poetry scene, describe the state of the Edinburgh poetry scene and why you might be considered a breath of fresh air?

Sandra: Edinburgh is a small place, despite being a UNESCO “City of Literature”. It also has a constantly fluctuating population – it’s a university city, and it hosts the Festival (which doubles the population every August); this means things get started, but then people leave.

There wasn’t much I could find when I first arrived, but now there’s poetry everywhere. One thing that you can view as good or bad, depending on your tastes, is that the UK in general is a bit obsessed with spoken word right now. I think people over here have been trapped by literary history, maybe more so than people on Turtle Island… by that, I mean it’s still really normal (and often expected) to compose your poetry in rhyme. Spoken word is seen as a nice break from that – it’s also viewed politically as a Screw You to the establishment.

But there are actually quite a few poets who are working in more (for lack of a better word) experimental forms on the page and stage. I can name about 20 poets in this vein who inspire and amaze me. I’m not sure what Kevin means exactly, but I think it’s mainly about the fact that there are simply very few of us here. So when someone new comes in – it’s not a statement on quality. It’s definitely not, “Thank Gawd you came here because everyone sucks”. It’s more like, “We’re thrilled you came here because we were just getting a wee bit bored with each other.” Artists need people to play with.

I think Kevin’s statement also maybe has to do with intermedia work, which is historically a bigger part of the landscape in Toronto than in Edinburgh. I grew up at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, Rhubarb! Festival, and SummerWorks Festival. It was a very unique education. Ariadna is a student of the recently-invented Intermedia Studies, and Y is one of those people who seems to have been born able to master all art forms. We come from different parts of the world and different cultures, so mash it all up and the art we make is bound to be a bit wacky.


Q: Any main inspirations that influence your work (film, music, poetry, fiction, photography, etc.) individually, and may there be a specific few for Zorras as a whole?

See answer to collaborative wishes. Add Samuel Beckett. Andra Simons. Karen Miranda Augustine. Rachel Zolf. d’bi.young. Virginia Woolf. Buster Keaton. Yoko Ono. bill bissett. Stuart Ross. Claude Cahun. Monique Mojica. Anna Camilleri.


Q: Tell me about Cachín Cachán Cachunga! What brought about the CCC?

Ah, the gay scene. Well, it’s just that. In Edinburgh, there are gay bars. There is very little culture associated with these bars, just uhn chicky uhn chicky music and karaoke, and money. Queer and trans people, people of colour, migrants, working class and people with disabilities don’t always feel welcome in a lot of these spaces. And then there’s the fact that Scotland is still a very religious place, where fundamentalist Christians protest outside plays written by trans people, where public art galleries censor queer work. Even in cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow.

So basically we wanted to create a space where people from our various communities felt welcome and safe. And to create a really great multimedia event that showcased the people we were meeting who had incredible talent – but were mostly being ignored because of their various differences.


Q: Could we see Cachín Cachán Cachunga! in Canada or something like it hosted by Zorras?

Sandra: Yes, most definitely. If someone pays us ;-) But to be honest, I’m not sure how much somewhere like Toronto, for example, needs a Cachín. Then again, when I think of the calibre of the work we’re presenting, maybe the original impetus for forming Cachín is less relevant in that context.


Q: What keeps Zorras going, what keeps Zorras together?

Love, art and whiskey.


Q: Are there any other projects planned for the future for Zorras or any one of you individually that the Niagara region should be keep their ears perked for?

Not yet, but we’re working on it.


Q: Why avocados?

Avocados are probably the most delicious food on earth. In places like the UK, avocados are among the most expensive foods. Even when you splurge to buy them, they are usually rotten or so unripe that they go rotten anyway. So we don’t get a lot of avocado action around here.