On a rainy September afternoon in 2010, members of the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band departed South Rich High School for Chicago's Chinatown Square. The patter of rain on concrete and metal was cut by snares and the opening strains of Sun Ra's "Space Is the Place" (1973), as the once-empty agora filled with uniformed bodies in musical lockstep. This flash-mob performance marked the culminating event of visual artist and scholar Cauleen Smith's residency with Chicago art organization Threewalls, during which she organized performances of Sun Ra’s archive with different South Side high-school marching bands.

This paper examines how Smith's performances activated archival materials to broaden networks of South Side identity and diasporic memory. Drawing on Daphne Brooks's (2021) theorization of sonic curation as Black feminist labor of Black cultural stewardship and transmission, I frame Smith's work as a form of sonic curation that activates Ra’s archive through cross-cultural performance.

My argument proceeds in two stages. First, I contextualize this particular engagement within Smith's broader Arkestral Marching Band project. Second, I examine the flash-mob as evoking a ritual site where social relations are organized and restructured. Pairing performance and musical analysis with accounts from Smith herself, I show how the marching band structure and flash-mob staging adapt Sun Ra's repertory to engage South Side communities in Ra's spirit of collective minoritarian resistance. The choice of Chinatown Square situates the event as a cross-cultural encounter in which Afro–Asian coalition is enacted through live performance.