Under the title Dada / Non Dada, Transcultures invites you to an evening entirely dedicated to sonic and visual experimentation. Opening the night, the duo Barsics & Ink (Catherine Barsics & Stephan Ink) present their project Data, an immersion into an electro-performative universe where narration, sound processing and digital textures intersect, followed by Dada Terminus (Christian Leroy, Isa*Belle, Eric Therer, Fred Chemama), which brings piano, electronics, poetry and Dada/surrealist imagery into dialogue.
Somewhere between sound laboratory, offbeat cine-concert and poetic performance, this evening at L’An Vert sets out to shake up listening habits and to celebrate the free and irreverent spirit of Dada.
Dada Terminus
Dada Terminus is an audio-visual installation built from a corpus of Dadaist and Surrealist films for its visual dimension, reworked, transformed and recomposed by Fred Chemama. The sound component takes the form of an original score in which electronic music, piano and fragments of poetic text are interwoven.
Dada Terminus is the last multi-form project created by Philippe Franck (sound and intermedia artist, author and director of Transcultures) together with Christian Leroy (composer, pianist and film-concert performer), who took over the project, along with the rest of the team, after the death of Philippe Franck in January 2025.
Originally, the project took shape as a series of around ten “comprovisations”, blending piano, soundscapes and poetry inspired by the Dada and Surrealist movements, from Tristan Tzara to Paul Éluard via Paul Nougé. These hybrid performances explored the shifting frontier between written composition and improvisation, spoken text and sonic material.
Artist Isa*Belle then came to enrich this audio-poetic journey, where voice, piano and electronics converge, by adding the vibratory dimension of her singing bowls and gongs. This immersive experience is supported by live lighting design, created and performed by visual and multimedia artist 眯腊 (mira), in dialogue with the projected images and the music.
Following the unexpected death of Philippe Franck, sound poet and performer Eric Therer also joined the Dada Terminus adventure to bring his voice into the project, thereby extending the spirit of research, freedom and decompartmentalisation so dear to its initiators.
Drawing on a set of texts read or embodied aloud by Eric Therer, Christian Leroy creates sonic atmospheres in real time at the piano, occasionally adding a synthesizer. On these sound fabrics settle the interventions of Isa*Belle on singing bowls – Tibetan, Vietnamese and crystal. Each piece preserves a large share of unpredictability, making these “comprovisations” into small, shifting tableaux, by turns irreverent, playful or more gently swaying.
The texts by major figures of the movement (see excerpts and references at the end of the dossier) are subjected to resolutely Dadaist treatments: cut-up, remix, collage, even flirting, in certain pieces by Hausmann and Ball, with pure sound poetry. A brief historical detour, fed by documents describing Dada and Surrealism (notably by André Breton), is also woven into the performance, offering audiences less familiar with these references some points of entry to better grasp what is at stake.
On the visual side, 眯腊 performs live with his “Fōz Machine”, an interactive capture/projection device that can adapt to any space. In doing so, he creates a form of real-time mapping during the performance, using only incandescent or luminous objects, extending the sonic gesture into a flow of images in constant metamorphosis.
Philippe Franck (Be/Fr)
Under the name Paradise Now, Philippe Franck has been developing, since the early 1990s, a multifaceted artistic journey in a forward-looking and willingly collaborative approach. He has produced numerous choreographic music, exhibitions, performances interdisciplinary, videos (notably for Régis Cotentin, Hanzel & Gretzel and Thomas Israel), multimedia devices (with digital artists, Philippe Boisnard, Marc Veyrat, art2network).
In addition to its collaborations with the holistic performer Isa*Belle (several installations and body/sound performances since 2005), Paradise Now also works with musicians electronics Christophe Bailleau (the duo Pastoral), Gauthier Keyaerts (within Supernova), Stephan Dunkelman, Christian Leroy, Didié Nietzsche, the vocalist/performer Maja Jantar as well as several poets (including Ira Cohen, Gerard Malanga, Werner Moron, Eric Therer, Catrine Godin, Habiba Sheikh…).
His recording productions can be found notably on the Transonic, Optical Sound and Sub Rosa labels.
Christian Leroy (Be)
Composer, pianist and live film-concert performer, Christian Leroy began accompanying silent films at a very early age and has been doing so for over forty years. In this way, he has explored the silent cinema repertoire by improvising to nearly two hundred films. His ability to blend elements of classical music with electronic music is one of his truly distinctive hallmarks. He regularly performs film-concerts in Belgium and internationally, on the stages of numerous festivals and institutions across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, as well as North and South America.
In addition to his compositions for silent cinema, Christian Leroy has written around fifty film scores — for animation, documentaries and auteur films — selected and awarded at major festivals in Rome, New York, Istanbul, Hyderabad, Taiwan, Porto, Cannes, Clermont-Ferrand, Berlin, Toronto, Annecy, Bogotá, Montecatini, Brussels, Namur, and many others.
Among other works, he composed the music for *Nanook of the North* by Robert Flaherty, *Dracula* by Tod Browning, *The Last Laugh* by Murnau, *Gosses de Tokyo* by Ozu, *Cenere* by Febo Mari, *El Sexto Sentido* by Manuel Sobrevilla, *Tabu* by Murnau and Flaherty, *Sunrise* by Murnau, *The Fall of the House of Usher* by Jean Epstein, *The Passion of Joan of Arc* by Dreyer, as well as the complete filmographies of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
His works have been released on Polydor, Igloo, EMI, Gega New and Cristal Records. He has performed alongside both classical and jazz musicians, including Louis Sclavis, Pierre-Alain Volondat, Steve Lacy, Barre Phillips, Fred Van Hove, Marilyn Crispell, Boyan Vodenitcharov, Rona Hartner, Irène Jacob, among others.
Isa*Belle (Fr/Be)
Isa*Belle develops her artistic approach for and through the well-being of the body – in its multiple dimensions – associated with personal and spiritual development.
Evolving between Belgium and France, she has been working since 2005 in collaboration with Paradise Now to produce several performances and sound installations supported by Transcultures / City Sonic and broadcast internationally.
She has also collaborated with several musicians (Maurice Charles JJ, Matthieu Safatly, Stephan Dunkelman …) and visual artists (Simone Simon, Joseph Dadoune, Régis Cotentin), created the duet Unda with Ariane Chesaux and joined, in 2015 Werner Moron and Philippe Franck in the audio-poetic combo “Les ours bipolaires”.
Eric Therer (Be)
Eric Therer draws both on sound experimentation and on the post-Dadaist legacy. His biting performances and “sur-real” texts are inspired by the most immediate layers of our everyday environment, putting Belgitude on stage in order to give it a universal resonance.
His texts address human relationships as they are constrained and organised by relations of production, and structured by the division of roles that these relations impose.
This (trans)poetic and energetic a(r)titude runs through both the dozen or so small collections he has published since the early 2000s (including Le déficit des années antérieures) and his collaborations with various musicians (Stephan Ink in the duo Ordinaire, Philippe Franck in the project & Stuff).
Fred Chemama (Fr/Be)
“Photographer, videographer, and multimedia artist, Fred Chemama, also known as 眯腊 (mira), is a multidisciplinary artist who studied audiovisual production at ESRA Maroc and photography in France. He currently lives and works between Belgium, France, and his travels that lead him to encounter other artists and cultural institutions across Europe and beyond.
In the final year of his academic journey, he traveled to Mexico to create a series of underwater portraits of fishermen from the state of Oaxaca, using a reportage camera and an original waterproof casing. These portraits are now immersed in luminous casings where they decompose underwater, a process ongoing for several years. Over time, he has undertaken several long-exposure self-portrait projects.
Action, encounters, and a self-reflective approach towards capturing imagery from reality lie at the core of his artistic pursuit. This has led him to occasionally adopt an iconoclastic stance and create transient on-site installations using discarded ink ribbons sourced from souvenir photo booths.
Preconceived actions carried out collectively and the exploration of diverse processes in producing images “drawn from reality” stand as focal points of his initial approach, already casting doubt on the authority of photographic imagery as an informational conduit and instead, transforming it into what he truly feels: a pretext for the poetic gathering of individuals.
Today, 眯腊 continues to engage in experiments at the intersection of photography, video, and digital arts; exploring the realms of the body, light, movement, situation, and place within an approach connected to bodily action.
His recent projects of interactive installations (“cyclo-kino,” the “Gestographer,” the “Fōz machine”…) blend disciplines, mediums, and transcend them into playful and intriguing devices.”
Barsics & Ink (Be)
Barsics & Ink is the encounter between the performed poetry of Catherine Barsics and the electro-sonic explorations of Stephan Ink, brought together in a duo where text, voice and electronic materials merge into a single experimental gesture.
Catherine Barsics
A poet and performer from Liège, Catherine Barsics develops a body of work in which writing resonates with the stage, music and other artistic disciplines. Author of several collections, including Disparue (L’Arbre à Paroles), she explores a poetry that is both narrative and sensitive, often nourished by reality, which she brings to life in readings and performances in collaboration with musicians.
Stephan Ink
A musician, producer and sound artist based in Liège, Stephan Ink moves between experimental, electronic and improvised music. Active since the 1990s, he has multiplied collaborations with artists from various backgrounds and takes part in several long-term projects. His work is marked by a special attention to textures, listening spaces and the intersections between sonic and performative practices.
Informations
- 07.11.2024 | 20h30
- L’an Vert
- Rue Mathieu Polain, 4 – 4020 Liège Belgique
- 12€ / 6€ (students)
- As seating is limited, reservations are strongly recommended via anvertreservations@gmail.com
- lanvert.be
Production
- Transcultures, Easterm Belgium at night
- In partnership with L’An Vert
