Kaja Draksler (piano) & Susana Santos Silva (trumpet)

Draskler and Santos Silva have performed together since 2008, first in the European Movement Jazz Orchestr and later in KASU and Cows on Trees. Their first duo release, This Love (Clean Feed 2015), was followed by Grow (Intakt 2022), which documents their performance at the 2021 Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane, Distances Bending for synthesizer & quarter-tone flutes

Etienne Nillesen, solo for two snare drums

The duo Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane gathers around the investigation of perceptual space, collaborative processes, and the development of pieces that are, more than settled compositions, elastic systems for ceaseless states of becoming. Central to their practice is an investigation into harmonic and time proportions as well as psychoacoustic phenomena such as difference tones. Combining various flutes and electronics as a foundation for their pieces, they study the edges of their instruments within their ability for simplicity, morphing into each other through the process of tuning. Since they first met in 2018, the duo has been developing their project Distances Bending, which has taken many forms, also occasionally incorporating other musicians. 

Etienne Nillesen employs circular motions and precise control of contact points to draw out an extensive range of pitches, harmonics, and overtones from his drumheads. His work reimagines the snare drum as a complete sonic entity, transforming it from a percussive instrument into a rich source of melodic and harmonic material. As part of his approach, Etienne uses precise tuning to create a carefully balanced harmonic interplay between his two snare drums, expanding the instrument’s tonal palette and allowing for unexpected resonances to emerge. 

Sifters 

Marc Ducret (guitar), Jeremy Viner (saxophone, clarinet) & Kate Gentile (drums)

Kate Gentile and Jeremy Viner have played together for over a decade in Gentile’s bands Find Letter X and Mannequins, as well as in sideman roles with Matt Mitchell and Anna Webber. Marc Ducret contributes a broad harmonic and structural palette that contextualizes Viner’s abstract melodic phrasing.  

Making Waves #9

Lebanese actress, director and playwright Lina Majdalanie performs Do I Know You? (2017) for solo performer (in French, with English subtitles), followed by a discussion with Mazen Kerbaj.

In her solo performance, Lina Majdalanie explores the origins and political, social, and ethical implications of prosopagnosia: the inability to memorize and recognize faces. Based on her own experience, she examines prosopagnosia’s consequences within a society whose political and historical legacies are entwined with metaphors and narratives of the face. Intertweaving the personal with the political, Majdalanie investigates the grounds on which strategies of identification, categorization, and recognition are put into practice. 

Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics author, visual artist, and musician. He also works on selective illustration and design projects and has taught at the American University of Beirut. Kerbaj is the author pf 15 books translated into more than 10 languages, and his work has been shown in galleries, museums, and art fairs around the world.

Seeds

Tamara Walcott (voice, poetry), Rasha Ragab (voice, text), Christoph Nicolaus (stone harp) & Lucio Capece (bass clarinet, composition)

Seeds performs a new work based on Tamara Walcott's Poem for Oryza. The poem is informed by the history of how a specific, all-but-forgotten African variety of rice made its way to the Americas in the braids of enslaved girls and women. 

Program:

Tamara Walcott, Mid Atlantic post traumatic blues 

Rasha Ragab, solo performance

Seeds, Poem for Oryza

Making Waves #10

Rabih Mroué performs his non-academic lecture Before Falling, followed by a discussion with Elisa Giuliano

Starting from an incident that occurred to him during his preparation for an art exhibition in the city of Salzburg, Rabih Mroué's solo performance raises a number of questions about the relationship of art to the public sphere. What are the boundaries between fiction and reality, when the artwork goes outside the art-institution and is in a public space? This issue is raised through the story of the warning leaflets that are usually dropped from warplanes: How might an art-object might lose its definition as art, and become a threat-object? These questions interweave with other questions and stories among them the warning leaflets dropped from warplanes, and the story of the crocodile who ate the sun.

Rabih Mroué's work exists at the crossroads of theater, performance and visual arts, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, using videos, photographs, and historical documents to challenge the hegemony of archives. Rabih Mroué is co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC) and was a member of the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universitat in Berlin in 2013-2015.

Elisa Giuliano is a curator, researcher, and theater maker. Her curatorial and theater work focuses on the demythologization of modernity and capitalism, by reflecting on both sexuality and gender roles in religious histories, folklore, and myth-making, particularly in modern Italy.