Ariel Zetina brings an inspiring queer community to Pitchfork

The live debut of her album Cyclorama features an ensemble of queer dancers and singers of color, supported by queer designers, choreographers, and managers.

By JOAN ROACH

In just over a week, Ariel Zetina debuts a live performance of her brazen 2022 album, Cyclorama, at the Pitchfork Music Festival. When it dropped, Zetina described the album as “an imagined theatrical production,” and this week that production takes its next step: onto the Green Stage in Union Park early next Sunday afternoon.

Building on what she calls the “ensemble nature” of the album, Zetina has chosen to premiere a live collaboration instead of simply delivering a DJ set. She’s enlisted Mia Arevalo (half of electro-pop duo Magin) and multi- faceted nightlife star Cae Monāe as vocalists, as well as dancers Angelíca Grace, Liviana, and Thee David Davis—all of them queer people of color. The entire cohort of choreographers, designers, and managers who’ve helped with this project behind the scenes is also queer and local.

Pitchfork launched its Chicago festival in 2006, two years before Zetina moved to the city to study theater and creative writing at Northwestern University. The DJ, producer, and performer has been on Pitchfork’s radar for a long time, and Cyclorama and its singles received rave reviews. Last summer Pitchfork published an essay about trans women DJs taking over the club, whose subjects include Zetina and heavy-hitting Chicago-born house producer Honey Dijon. At the 2022 Chicago festival, Zetina played the DJ-focused stage in Zelle’s “Purple Parlor” VIP area.

Zetina’s name is synonymous with queer nightlife in Chicago, and she’s earned a prominent place in the city’s dance-music community—it’s surprising that Pitchfork has taken so long to invite her onto the main lineup. She was Smart Bar’s resident for Diamond Forma- tion, and she still helps organize the collaborative monthlies Club Wives and Ariel’s Party.

Zetina’s original music and DJ sets weave together 2000s electroclash, Chicago acid house, and hip-house—think Green Velvet/Cajmere’s transformative 90s tracks, especially “Brighter Days” with Chicago vocalist Dajae— with influences such as Belizean punta and maximalist techno. Given their elevated bpm (beats per minute), her tracks are often classified as techno, a faster and more industrialsounding sibling of house.

Zetina is interested in house—especially its legacy of combining influences to create danceable tracks. “I think of Chicago house and my music as being very percussion heavy,” she says. What she finds most inspiring “is house music’s history of creating spaces where you could go where people didn’t look like you.” House and techno have Black roots, of course, and it’s still important for marginalized people to be able to maintain exclusive spaces, but Zetina speaks to another vital function of dance music—it brings people together.

As a performer, Zetina draws on the electroclash DJs and drag performers of the 2000s, but more important, she feels beholden to her early art experiences in Chicago. She recalls her time within a majority Latina arts community that flourished in Pilsen nearly a decade ago, pointing to the work of queer performance artists Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Paula Nacif, Kiam Marcelo Junio, and Glamhag.

Zetina remembers this period as one of intentional exchange between Pilsen natives and non-natives, which encouraged community in the Chicago art world. She says the sense of “collaboration during that time was palpable”—something she often misses as she moves among dance-music, performance, and art spaces. She feels that these scenes can be too separate.

Collaboration is at the core of Zetina’s art practice, and many of the people participating in her Pitchfork performance are longtime associates who’ve worked with her as part of the drag show Rumors or the DJ monthly Club Crush. The sentiment driving her Cyclorama set is intended to demonstrate the benefits of interdependence among thriving artistic and

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In theater, a cyclorama is a backdrop, a layer that mimics the depth of reality, a border that separates upstage from behind the scenes. Zetina’s world-building album situates the audience at the theater, and each song and performer is part of a larger mise-en-scène. “I imagine all the tracks on this as the lights and action projected onto the cyclorama,” Zetina says. Not only does the album turn “club music into a wide-ranging interrogation of queerness,” as Gio Santiago describes it in their review for Pitchfork, but it also creates a boundless theatrical arena where Zetina and the girls can go to play.

On July 5, I headed behind the curtain to the performance ensemble’s first costume fitting at Rocky Vintage’s Pilsen apartment and studio. When I arrived, Zetina, Arevalo, Liviana, and Angelíca Grace were already there. The dolls sat on the couch, shelves of multicolored yarn above their heads, passing around an Elf Bar during introductions and planning discussions. This costume fitting was the first opportunity for the whole team, including costume designers Alyssa Wright (Rocky Vintage) and Renee Moreno, to be in one room together.

Zetina had connected with Moreno at one of Bobbi O’Keefe’s long-running series of underground dinner parties earlier this year and proposed the project there. At Rocky Vintage, Moreno streamed her “Ghey” playlist in the background, and as the fittings commenced, Zetina broke into a bottle of champagne. Everyone held aloft multicolored goblets and crystalline glasses while Zetina gave a quick toast to acknowledge the excitement in the room. A joyful commotion suffused the day, with multiple conversations starting and ending in di erent rooms, as Angelíca Grace, Liviana, Arevalo, and Zetina tried on their looks.

Zetina’s powerhouse troupe of friends also includes emerging mixed-media artist and makeup designer Tali Halpern and drag icon and Rumors organizer Dutchesz Gemini. Dutchesz (who I’m hoping will make a special appearance at Pitchfork) is doing hair and styling alongside the designers. At one point she had to set a hard boundary with Zetina, who’s still in her long-lasting athleisure phase.

“No sneakers,” Dutchesz said. Performers will wear thigh-high boots instead. Zetina surrounds herself with creators and makers she trusts. Though much of the discussion at the fitting was directly about the performance, people also made time for casual chats about hookups among friends and serious dialogues on the complexities of working as trans women of color in a drag and performance scene still dominated by cis white gay men.

As the girls got in and out of their costumes, everyone agreed on one thing: how striking Arevalo looked in her tight pink mesh bodysuit. It fit her in all the right places, and Wright quickly decided that they’d be able to build Arevalo’s cerulean costume from the pattern.

As Arevalo twirled and posed, it was easy to imagine her onstage at Pitchfork, singing “Gemstone” with dancers Angelíca Grace and Liviana flourishing around her, her vocals complementing the song’s bubbly synths and upbeat breakbeats as they pour over the crowd. Like standout Cyclorama tracks “Slab of Meat” and “Have You Ever,” “Gemstone” explores the lived trans experience. The song revels in the euphoria of transitioning, celebrating the immeasurable beauty that women are free to explore and display on their own terms.

The album’s cover pictures Zetina, Arevalo, and Monāe on a theater stage, starring in an imagined production that features only trans women of color. With this Pitchfork set, Zetina brings her production into the real world, its performers and their looks supported by the local queer community.

Zetina plans to unveil new tracks as well as extended and remixed versions of her older songs, and this performance will also preview an upcoming collaboration with Arevalo. With the help of a recently awarded DCASE grant, Zetina is making a video for “Gemstone” with Arevalo, shot by Chicago film director Aliya Haq (who’s also worked with Tatiana Hazel and Shawnee Dez).

Cyclorama is a performance experience that builds power with each iteration, and Zetina capitalizes on this momentum. She’s pulled together artists from several disciplines to build upon the creative potential of her album and career. Her use of the stage reflects her penchant for interconnection and draws much-deserved attention to the immense talent in the present-day queer Chicago arts ecosystem.

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