Fuck AMERIKA - for Dick Higgins (2025)
Roleplay
Americana and Galleria Mall
Glendale, California
12th of March 2025
Fuck AMERIKA - for Dick Higgins (2025)
Amerikaka I is a performance score from 1962, that Fluxus artist Dick Higgins published in his first book Jefferson’s Birthday (Something Else Press, 1964). There are at least 15 other scores which are based on it in the same book.
Amerikaka I, is a proto LARP. Higgins calls it a method or a procedure. It was designed for a stage, employing lighting and environmental cues. An unspecified number of performers elect a leader (as director), and select randomly from given personae, speeches, actions, cues, and props. They then improvise a play based on their selections. “The duration of the performance is chosen by or accepted by the performers” Higgins writes.
Fuck Amerika takes Higgins’ personae, speeches (as themes for conversations) and actions as material for an open world LARP at the Americana and Galleria Mall in Glendale, California. Ten players met at the food court, chose materials from index cards to improvise with Higgins “social types” and cliché conversations from the 1960s. If public space represents the conditions of democracy, the aging simulacra of the shopping center of downtown Glendale forthes as the somber revelaccino of American democracy today.
Players: Nina Sarnelle, Matthew Doyle, Matt Savitsky, Coleman Collins, Anya Ventura, Cary Cronenwett, Lorrie Waldie,
Ashlyn Mcleod, Christian Anayas, Elbe Trakal
images by Matthew Doyle, Ashlyn Mcleod, Matt Savitsky, Elbe Trakal