Limbs and Thresholds is an immersive multimedia performance of poetic texts, involving layered voices and live vocal play, sampled sounds, effects pedals, a theremin, and textured projections of poems and images (created in collaboration with Jessie Altura). In a world where the political, linguistic and bodily border is a place of strife and violence, Limbs and Thresholds explores ways of rethinking the border by breaking down the boundaries between word and sound, sense and resonance, original and translation, image and reflection. Based on Avasilichioaei’s recent book Limbinal (Talonbooks 2015), the performance presents a series of phonotopes, in-between places of sound and figure, orchestral and in flux, generative and inhabited.
Oana Avasilichioaei’s current interests include polylingualisms, intermediary spaces, and translations between words, sound and image. She explores the transgressions and aural possibilities of these terrains through poetry, translation, performance, and sound work. She has published five poetry collections, including We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn 2012, winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and most recently Limbinal (Talonbooks 2015), a hybrid, multigenre work on notions of borders, as well as six translations of poetry and prose from French and Romanian. Her work has been made into a documentary on poets and orality, reinvented into video poems, set to music for soprano and violin, and her most recent sound performance is THRESHOLDS (see teaser at https://vimeo.com/142337608). She lives in Montreal and has given many readings/performances in Canada, USA, Mexico, and Europe (http://www.oanalab.com).
Thresholds excerpt: https://vimeo.com/142337608
Interview about this work in The Puritan: http://puritan-magazine.com/limbinal-and-its-performances-an-interview-with-oana-avasilichioaei/
Free admission!
This performance was made possible through the financial assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013 – 2018: Education, Immigration, Communities. The art centre also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, and the government of Nova Scotia’s department of Community, Culture, and Heritage.
