Medea / They Have Waited Long Enough
21.03.2024 Gewandhaus Leipzig, Mendelssohn-Saal
Leipzig (D)
Composers Annelies Van Parys, Aftab Darvishi and Calliope Tsoupaki create new, contemporary sounds for three women who have had to wait in the wings of the great Greek myths far too long. They shine a new light on these women’s stories, add a new nuance to them and infuse them with new power. Is Medea a revengeful monster or a mother consumed with compassion? Is Circe an evil witch or a heroine filled with great humanity? And what about Penelope’s so-called helpless waiting?
Author Gaea Schoeters found the words that do these women justice: moving yet liberating. Soprano Katharine Dain sings them to life accompanied by the all-female Ragazze Quartet. Three colorful soloists engage in an intense dialogue on klarinet, duduk and canun.
"Every time we play this program, something magical happens on stage. The stories of three Greek heroines, retold by three female composers. In this concert we are complemented by the warm sounds of duduk, clarinet and canun, plus one of our favorite singers Katharine Dain." — RAGAZZE QUARTET
Annelies Van Parys
Medea (for soprano, clarinet in bes and string quartet)
text Gaea Schoeters
translation Rona Kennedy
concept Tamar Brüggemann, Wonderfeel
coproduction Lunalia, Wonderfeel, Antwerp Liedfest, Mittelfest, November Music, Oranjewoud Festival
In the framework of alles ausser flach, during the Leipziger Buchmesse
Notwehr - Belgian première
19.03.2024 Concertgebouw Brugge
Brugge (B)
Volver meets Hiroshima mon Amour in this moving story of injustice and hope.
Two women involuntarily share a prison cell: a young activist who was arrested after an illegal protest and a working-class woman who murdered her boyfriend. Their forced togetherness starts tensely, but as the nights go by, they share their fears and hopes. Notwehr brings together old and new music: a cycle of baroque madrigals by Banchieri provides a sort of echo of the past and of the outside world and intertwines with the new music of Annelies Van Parys.
A commission of La Biënnale di Venezia, in co-production with Studio Minailo, HERMESensemble & Muziektheater Transparant.
Dedicated to Maria Kalesnikava & all other brave women who lost their freedom fighting for a better world.
Annelies Van Parys & Adriano Banchieri - music
Sjaron Minailo - director
Raphael René Jacobs - director’s assistant
Gaea Schoeters - libretto
Sjaron Minailo & Maarten Warmerdam - scenography
Patricia Hofstede - costume design
Johanna Zimmer & Els Mondelaers - soprano & mezzosoprano
HERMESensemble - ensemble
B’Rock Vocal Consort - choir
Annelies Van Parys
Concertgebouw Brugge
tele-present wind
07.03.2024 - 31.03.2024 Kontejner
Zagreb (Croatia)
tele-present wind by David Bowen consists of a series of 126 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in a gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting the motion to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.
The sensor is installed in an outdoor location adjacent to the Visualization and Digital Imaging Lab at the University of Minnesota. Thus the individual components of the installation moved in unison as they mimicked the direction and intensity of the wind halfway around the world. As it monitored and collected real-time data from this remote and distant location, the system relayed a physical representation of the dynamic and fluid environmental conditions.
Organism at Mois Multi
01.02.2024 - 11.02.2024 Mois Multi
Québec (CA)
ORGANISM
In collaboration with Garnet Willis
Centered around a robotically prepared century-old pipe organ, Organism is an investigative platform for stochastic co-patterning via the sono-ecological indeterminacy of turbulent processes of formation.
A Casavant pipe organ built in 1910 is brought back to life after being removed from the indifference of gentrification at a heritage site in Sud-Ouest, Montreal. Organism dismantles the far-too-clean tones of the pipe organ—that reductive triumph of Western civilization over the turbulence of nature—in order to excite the natural turbulent materiality hidden within the heart of its sound-generating process.
The rescued pipes, along with their pneumatic architecture, have been carefully modified to remove stabilizations which historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrolled sound world, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression.
The Dark Rooms vertical
18.01.2024 - 04.02.2024 secret location
Berlin (D)
tele-present wind - This installation consists of a series of 42 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in a gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting the motion to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.
L’HORIZON DES ÉVÉNEMENTS
29.11.2023 - 17.12.2023 Stereolux / Plateforme Intermédia
Nantes (F)
Impetuous, we sought to tame the infinite, to dominate time, to shape space in our image, to control the climate.
Now our glaciers are disappearing. Their disappearance threatens the balance of the Earth system. New Climate Regimes are taking hold. Rather than encouraging us to slow down and adopt the time of the glaciers, these New Climate Regimes have introduced a strange hope: the exploitation of hitherto inaccessible resources and new commercial opportunities offered by technosolutionism.
In his exhibition, artist - éleveur d’icebergs Barthélemy Antoine-Lœff presents a body of work that acts as a narrative to alert us to the current situation and to try to grasp the event horizon.
Shades of Light selected for the 2023 ISCM World New Music Days in South Africa
24.11.2023 - 03.12.2023 2023 ISCM World New Music Days
South Africa
ISCM South Africa (NewMusicSA), the organizer of the 2023 ISCM World New Music Days, has announced the works that have been selected for performance from the call for scores.
From the Flemish entry for ISCM's Call for Works, the international selection committee chose Shades of Light by Annelies Van Parys.
Statement from the jury:
"How Annelies Van Parys continues to discover new paths and worlds in her musical language is greatly admired. In Shades of Light, the cello and electronics fuse together very beautifully. With limited material, a lot happens in this composition."
Shades of Light was created by Séverine Ballon during the previous edition of Transit
Shades of Light will be performed during the 2023 ISCM World New Music Days in South Africa (24 November – 3 December 2023), the first ISCM festival ever held on the African continent.
Echo Chamber & Elusive Matter
18.11.2023 Hexagone Scène Nationale Arts Sciences
Meylan (F)
With Elusive Matter, a minimalist light and sound performance, Martin Messier transforms simple wisps of smoke into a veritable projection screen. In a room submerged in darkness, armed with a projector as his sole source of light, Messier draws a myriad of ghostly spaces, architectural shapes and dreamlike images from the intangible haze, juxtaposing light and sound in order to conjure atmospheres both ethereal and soothing.
ECHO CHAMBER by Martin Messier an audiovisual performance in several tableaus, Echo Chamber takes its inspiration from technologies that let us probe inside the body, such as ultrasound and acupuncture, generating a sound composition in which the idea of resonance predominates.
In creating a modular interface of three panels allowing multiple manipulations, Messier has determined the boundaries of the possibilities for the performance of a choreography of sound and light.
He wields long needles as if they were notes from an instrument, piercing through an audio-reactive plate that sets off sound sequences.
Like the ultrasound needle palpating the body to reveal what might be in its interior – a living yet invisible presence? – Messier’s performative gestures are the sources of images in which the body eventually appears, magnified as a transported shadow.
The Echo Chamber device is continually transformed during the performance: by a series of movements and position shifts, an entire scenography unfolds before our eyes. The panels increase in number; the light sources appear, disappear, multiply, and mutate.
Cut-outs of light cause visual elements to materialize in response to the sound echoes, to the magnetic resonances of the body left in shadow, now turned into a shadow.
The panels then become screens in which we see the body’s interior, where scintillating cells are in motion. Window to the interior, the function of the device is reversed: Messier takes us through to the other side, under the invisible skin.
The interface-membrane becomes a passageway, a porous surface through which time is transposed and transforms the living matter.
Carrier of an electric charge, the matter of the body itself is a vehicle, a vector. This is what the final sequence of Echo Chamber suggests: the link between the world and the self, between the outside and the inside – remanence emanating from the echo chamber.
ECHO Chamber
11.11.2023 FIAV - Festival International d'Art Vidéo de Casablanca - du VHS à l'Intelligence Artificielle
Casablanca (MA)
ECHO CHAMBER by Martin Messier an audiovisual performance in several tableaus, Echo Chamber takes its inspiration from technologies that let us probe inside the body, such as ultrasound and acupuncture, generating a sound composition in which the idea of resonance predominates.
In creating a modular interface of three panels allowing multiple manipulations, Messier has determined the boundaries of the possibilities for the performance of a choreography of sound and light.
He wields long needles as if they were notes from an instrument, piercing through an audio-reactive plate that sets off sound sequences.
Like the ultrasound needle palpating the body to reveal what might be in its interior – a living yet invisible presence? – Messier’s performative gestures are the sources of images in which the body eventually appears, magnified as a transported shadow.
The Echo Chamber device is continually transformed during the performance: by a series of movements and position shifts, an entire scenography unfolds before our eyes. The panels increase in number; the light sources appear, disappear, multiply, and mutate.
Cut-outs of light cause visual elements to materialize in response to the sound echoes, to the magnetic resonances of the body left in shadow, now turned into a shadow.
The panels then become screens in which we see the body’s interior, where scintillating cells are in motion. Window to the interior, the function of the device is reversed: Messier takes us through to the other side, under the invisible skin.
The interface-membrane becomes a passageway, a porous surface through which time is transposed and transforms the living matter.
Carrier of an electric charge, the matter of the body itself is a vehicle, a vector. This is what the final sequence of Echo Chamber suggests: the link between the world and the self, between the outside and the inside – remanence emanating from the echo chamber.
SHRINK 01995
04.11.2023 Post-Umano L’ulteriorita
Scalo Valdocco, Torino (IT)
SHRINK 01995 by Lawrence Malstaf
Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body (in this case the artist himself) vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.
Post-Umano L’ulteriorita
Curated by Simome Sensi