(Supra)National is a performance that presents the ancient Georgian cultural ritual of the supra, a gathering that itself drew on supranational cultural traditions of celebration and worldbuilding shared across the Transcaucasus. Our collaborative team includes Uta Bekaia, a Georgian multimedia and performance artist whose work centers on the speculative recreation of ancestral rituals reimagined through a Queer utopian lens, and Leah Feldman, a professor and researcher based at the University of Chicago studying the history of internationalism and anticolonial thought in the Soviet Union from the vantage of gender and sexuality and ethnicity. Bekaia and Feldman will bring together multiple disciplines from history, theory and philosophy to performance, sculpture, costume, and video to explore the supra not only as a historical rite, but an occasion for queer worldbuilding, reimagining forms of internationalism that are increasingly necessary amid authoritarian returns in Europe and the US.

The supra unites poetry, song, expressions of hospitality, and communal storytelling. Like other spaces of carnivalistic play, it was a tradition at once structured by gendered and classed hierarchies as it was a wild space of overturning order and reimagining social relations intoxicated and inspired by wine and poetry. (Supra)National also draws on the artistic tradition of the Surrealist dinner and Dadaist theater traditions as forms of antifascist political and aesthetic resistance. It plays on the relationship between the internal order of the supra ritual organized by the tamada, or toastmaster, and the idea of the supranational, that is, forms of socio-cultural belonging that transcend the limits of the nation-state. While the supra is known as a Georgian national tradition, we probe its supranational origins and political and aesthetic possibilities to upend the rigid patriarchal orders that have come to govern nationalist imaginaries of the traditional, reinventing tradition through queer and spiritual ritual.

Performance at Almaty Museum Of Arts. photos by Sabina Amangeldina