Journey to the East

22/09/23 - 30/09/23

CCA are thrilled to host Journey to the East Festival, a visionary performance festival exploring radical art and culture. We spoke to the festival’s director Jian Yi about what to expect from this year’s festival.

Could you tell us a little about Journey to the East Festival?

Journey to the East is an artist-led performance art and contemporary culture festival. It was first launched in 2021 with a focus on working with PoC, queer artists, and allies, and exploring live art-based contemporary practices inspired by Eastern mysticism. The festival brings local, national and international artists to Glasgow audiences, including multiple Scottish premieres.

The name of the festival is based on Herman Hesse’s novel of the same title, turning a renewed interest around creative practices inspired by Eastern arts and spirituality. It represents a metaphorical (or metaphysical) journey that explores different territories of the human psyche and society.

We are interested in exploring different models of cultural curation that stem from artists’ lived experiences and reflect current experimental practices. As the first in-person festival since the pandemic lockdowns, JTTE 2021 sought to reinvigorate and renew the Glasgow live arts ecology with a focus on amplifying the voices of artists of colour, and as an artist-led grassroots project – create a space for diverse audiences in Scotland to engage in collective experiences of ritual and community.

What kind of work can people expect to see?

While the first edition of JTTE explored the journey to the “other side” of the self thematically, the upcoming edition delves into the journey to the “other side” of one another – in terms of our social relations, breaking down taboos and exploring the complex dynamics of how we relate to one another in society. Positioned between social protest and a meditation on performance art and life, the 2023 festival will explore community in a deeper sense of the word, outside of normative relations and institutionalised hierarchy.

Our priority is programming immersive, experiential and dialogical performance, forward-thinking discourse and artworks that bring new experiences to Glasgow audiences. This year’s works and artist talks will engage with topics of relationality – particularly how we can better come to understand one another and find new territories of social relations. We will explore ways of how to un-bottle ourselves – from talking about grief and the things we don’t communicate, to how we could transform our relations...

Is there anything you’re particularly excited about in this year’s programme?

This year’s JTTE 2023 programme will include masterclass creative practice workshops, live performances, artist talks, panel discussions and film screenings that explore the topics we’re interested in. There will be a renewed focus on participatory engagement with our audiences, including events featuring music and collective dance-floor experiences. We’re really interested this year in the notion of collective dialogue and artist engagement – bringing in a sense of conversation, consideration and opening up to each other. The guest speakers this year address contemporary topics that impact us as artists making work today. We will also be organising a workshop series in July at CCA for local artists and the community. This series aims to build a sense of trajectory for this year’s festival and find new platforms for local artists to explore creative practices together! I’ll be really excited to lead these workshops at CCA, which will directly contribute to the formation of the September festival, alongside collaborating artist-associate Clarinda Tse.