Phonica: Eight
Phonica: Eight
Monday 26 March 2018
Boys School, Smock Alley Theatre
7.30pm
Admission: €8.00 / €6.00
with:
Alex Bonney
SJ Fowler
Diamanda LaBerge Dramm
Alice Lyons & Justyn Hunia
Benjamin Dwyer w/ Jonathan Creasy & Nick Roth
Joanna Walsh + community performers
Phonica is a series of events rooted in Word and Sound with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental. Conceived, directed, programmed and hosted by Christodoulos Makris and Olesya Zdorovetska, Phonica aims to explore compositional and performative ideas and to encourage a melting pot of audiences and artists from across artforms.
Phonica: Eight will feature performances from a range of award-winning writers, musicians and artists based in Ireland and internationally, including a polyphonic stage adaptation of a digital novella (an Irish premiere), a poetic collaboration set in rural Poland, a three-way musical collaboration based on Samuel Beckett's 'Neither', and a song cycle for solo violin and voice, among more.
Featured Artists:
Alex Bonney is a trumpeter, electronic musician and recording/mix engineer and producer based in London. He was born in Reading in 1978 and grew up in the flight path of Concorde, instilling a deep attachment to subsonic frequencies. He leads the Alex Bonney Quartet, is a member of Splice, Leverton Fox, BABs, Golden Age of Steam, Sefiroth, plays in a duo with bassist Dave Kane, performs solo with electronics and in a variety of other improvising ensembles. When not performing Alex works with a variety of artists producing and engineering music for leading jazz, improvised and contemporary music record labels including ECM, HCR, Two Rivers, Whirlwind, Babel, Loop, Jellymould, Not Applicable and Edition. He also works as a music educator and photographer.
Steven J Fowler is a writer and artist. He has published multiple collections of poetry and artworks, including Subcritical Tests with Ailbhe Darcy (Gorse Editions, 2017). He has been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Tate Britain, the London Sinfonietta, Wellcome Collection and Liverpool Biennial. He has been sent to Peru, Bangladesh, Iraq, Argentina, Georgia and other destinations by the British Council and has read at festivals including Hay on Wye, Cervantino in Mexico, Berlin Literature Festival and Hay Xalapa. He was nominated for the White Review prize for Fiction in 2014. His plays have been produced at Rich Mix and Toynbee Studios, and he’s been translated into 27 languages. He is editor at 3am magazine and executive editor at The European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture (Versopolis). He is lecturer in creative writing at Kingston University, teaches at Tate Modern, Poetry School and Photographer's Gallery, and is the director of Writers' Centre Kingston.
Diamanda La Berge Dramm has been playing the violin since the age of four. Growing up in Amsterdam among the leading figures of the Dutch classical, avant-garde and improvisation scene, her own concerts reflect all of these elements. At the age of thirteen, she premiered 'Raadsels' by Louis Andriessen in the Concertgebouw for the opening of the Holland Festival 2005, and has gone on to perform internationally as a soloist, chamber music player and band member. She has worked extensively with modern music luminaries such as Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier, Gunther Schuller, Chaya Czernowin, Garth Knox and George Benjamin. Recent performances include a collaboration in Florence with Georg Friedrich Haas and concerts in Brussels and London with avant-garde rock legend John Cale. You can hear her on New World Records as a soloist on Burr van Nostrand’s Voyage in a White City, and on Tzadik Records with Anthony Coleman. She completed her Bachelor of Music at the New England Conservatory in Boston with James Buswell and Nicholas Kitchen, and previously studied with Lex Korff de Gidts (Conservatory of Amsterdam). At graduation she was awarded the John Cage Award for her contribution to new music. Diamanda received her Masters of Music from the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, studying with Vera Beths. She was awarded the Nicolai Prize for the most special exceptional recital. Current projects include the editing and premiering of a new series of violin studies by Garth Knox, and a duo with pianist Helena Basilova focusing on early 20th century Eastern European repertoire. As a founder of Splendor - a collective of 50 musicians, composers, and stage artists who transformed an old bathhouse in the heart of Amsterdam into a local cultural paradise - she plays and hosts concerts regularly. Diamanda plays on an Andreas Grütter bow (2015) and an Andranik Gaybaryan violin (2014), purchased with the generous support of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the Stichting Eigen Muziekinstrumentenfonds.
Alice Lyons, a poet and cross-disciplinary artist, was born in Paterson, NJ and has lived in Roscommon and Sligo since 1998. Her third collection of poetry is The Breadbasket of Europe (Veer Books, London, 2016). Lyons’s poems have appeared in publications such as Tygodnik Powszcheny (Kraków) and Poetry (Chicago), as poetry films, public artworks and in gallery contexts. Among the honours she has received are a Radcliffe Fellowship in Poetry & New Media, Harvard University; the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry; the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; and an IFTA (Irish Film and Television Award) nomination for The Polish Language, a poetry film she co-directed with animator Orla Mc Hardy.
Born in 1975, Cracow, Justyn Hunia has been active as book translator specializing in the humanities. He has translated, among others, Zygmunt Bauman and VS Naipaul, and is currently working on essays by Zadie Smith. For the last 10 years he been filming the life of his grandmother in a wooden cottage in a remote hilly and forested corner of Southeast Poland with an eye to making a documentary.
Benjamin Dwyer has given concerts worldwide and has appeared as soloist with all the Irish orchestras, the Neubrandenburg Philharmonic Orchestra (Germany), the Santos Symphony Orchestra (Brazil), VOX21, the Vogler String Quartet (Germany) and the Callino String Quartet (UK). He is the guitarist in Barry Guy’s Blue Shroud Band, which headed the bill at the Krakow Autumn Jazz Festival in 2014 and 2016. Dwyer is a founder member of Coterminous—a multi-disciplinary ensemble of musicians, dancers and filmmakers. Recent CD recordings include Twelve Études (Gamelan Records, 2008), Irish Guitar Works (El Cortijo, 2012), Scenes from Crow (Diatribe Records, 2014) and Umbilical (Diatribe Records, 2017). The Alchemia Sessions Live from the Autumn Jazz Krakow 2014 (4-CD set) for Notwo Records and Barry Guy—The Blue Shroud on Intakt Records were both released in 2016. A new CD of contemporary Irish music will be released on Farpoint Records this year. Dwyer is an elected member of Aosdána and an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London (ARAM). He earned a PhD in Composition from Queen’s University (Belfast) and is currently Professor of Music at Middlesex University, London.
Jonathan C. Creasy is a Dublin-based poet, essayist, publisher and musician. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he studied under jazz greats Peter Erskine and Jeff Hamilton, and later under Charlie Haden at CalArts. Creasy has recorded at Interscope/Geffen Records and Capitol Studios in Hollywood. For the last decade he has lived and worked in Ireland, where he founded and runs New Dublin Press, an award-winning independent publisher. In 2016, Dalkey Archive Press published Creasy’s book of poems and essays The Black Mountain Letters, and he was Writer-in- Residence with the Lannan Foundation. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin.
Nick Roth is a saxophonist, composer, producer and educator. His work seeks the liberation of improvisation from composition, the poetic syntax of philosophical enquiry, and the function of music as translative epistemology. Engaging in conversation with mathematical biologists, astrophysicists, canopy ecologists and hydrologists, his compositions interrogate the inherence of meaning in musical form, whilst simultaneously subsumed by an insatiable appetite for literature, exploring the symbiotic resonance of language as sound and text. A curious predisposition and a steadfast refusal to accept the existence of boundaries between the real and the imaginary has led to collaborations with an array of international performers, composers, choreographers, visual artists, poets, sculptors, directors, festivals and ensembles. In 2017 he was artist-in-residence at the European Space Agency (ESTEC) and dlr LexIcon, and in 2015 at the California Academy of Sciences and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). He is artistic director of the Yurodny Ensemble, a founding member of the Water Project, and a partner at Diatribe Records, Ireland’s leading independent record label for new music. His work is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre and the Association of Irish Composers.
Joanna Walsh is an award-winning UK-based writer. Her latest book is Worlds From The Word's End, published by And Other Stories. In 2018 Break.up will be published by Semiotext(e) and Tuskar Rock. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Granta Magazine, gorse journal, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and The Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction. She was awarded the UK Arts Foundation 2017 Fellowship for Literature. She edits at online literary journals 3:AM Magazine and Catapult.co, writes literary and cultural criticism for an number of publications including The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian, and runs @read_women.
Phonica acknowledges generous funding support from Dublin City Council, Poetry Ireland, and Arts Council England.
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