Notes From the Underground
Cultural Drifts is a Los Angeles-based collective dedicated to producing performance, visual work, and publishing projects at the intersection of art, theater, and protest. Our work is grounded in the belief that performance remains one of the most immediate and unflinching forms of cultural inquiry in the age of mind-numbing streaming that lulls, disembodies, and splinters attention.
We are currently preparing our second performance festival, Notes From the Underground—a curated evening of live, interdisciplinary actions that confront exile, eroticism, resistance, and nostalgia against the Disneyfied decay of all certainties.
As an independent collective operating without institutional backing, we rely on direct support from individuals and communities committed to sustaining uncompromising, socially engaged art that is poetic and not illustrative, that triggers the algorithmic selves, and that creates communities of solidarity. Your contribution will allow us to fairly compensate performers, secure necessary technical equipment, and present this work with the care and precision it demands.
We intend to establish a bi-monthly program of performances in Los Angeles, building a sustained platform for artists working across disciplines and outside conventional frameworks.
Your support enables the continuation of a practice that does not dilute its message or compromise its complexity.
Thank you for standing with us.
Cultural Drifts presents: Notes from the Underground
April 26, 7:00 PM sharp
Location: Downtown Los Angeles (address with RSVP)
Notes from the Underground is an evening of five performance works situated at the intersection of psychic rupture, political displacement, and embodied critique. Presented by Cultural Drifts, this second iteration of our performance festival draws together artists whose practices move between intimacy and estrangement, memory and resistance, structure and collapse.
Program:
7:00-7:45
Voices Collected for an Unfinished Symphony
An ambulatory sound piece composed through public interaction.
The performer moves through space gathering fragments—voice, breath, unscripted sound—constructing a live archive of the unsayable.
Voices Collected for an Unfinished SymphonyAn ambulatory sound piece composed through public interaction.
The performer moves through space gathering fragments—voice, breath, unscripted sound—constructing a live archive of the unsayable.
What Are You Willing to Give Up?
A participatory score.
Audience members must self-label, then relinquish and renegotiate those labels in relation to others. A study in essentialism, exchange, and the labor of unmaking identity.
8:00-8:45 PM
Proxy Touch: A Conversation from the Warzone
A real-time dialogue between a performer and an emotional surrogate in Ukraine.
This is an act of mediated intimacy, shaped by latency, distance, and the persistence of human presence amidst geopolitical disintegration.
Fantasy Market
A performance structured around the transactional logics of desire.
A cam performer offers not her body, but her capacity to mirror—selling not sex, but the architectures of longing.