Les duos Choeur(s)
The Event
The duos Chœur(s) are lengthy correspondences between poets and audio artists from different locations in Canada, from the East Coast to the West. Some write and create in French, others in English. This project was driven by the concept of encounters: multidisciplinary meetings between poetry and audio art that allow the creation of collages where poetic and audio influences intermingle. The soundscapes reverberate with the poets’ words, offering audiences a unique poetic listening experience.
This show features a Montreal duo comprised of poet Kaie Kellough and sound artist Oana Avasilichioaei, as well as a duo made up of British-Columbian poet Fred Wah and Quebec sound artist Miriane Rouillard.
The Artists
Kaie Kellough
Website | Instagram
Writer, poet and performer, Kaie Kellough was born in Vancouver, grew up in Calgary, and now lives in Montreal. He roamed the country on the poetry and spoken word stages, some of his performances alsmot reminding audiences of Claude Gauvreau. He has published three poetry books, including Magnetic Equator, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, received virtually because of the pandemic. His first novel, Accordéon, published in 2016, has for background the student crisis of 2012 and is inspired by the 1960 and 1970 experimenal quebec novels. His short story anthologies Dominoes at the Crossroads was finalist of the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and was part of the Giller Prize first selection.
Oana Avasilichioaei
Website | Soundcloud
Oana Avasilichioaei mixes poetry, sound, performance, image and translation to explore a wider idea of language, polylingual/polyphonic voices, phonotopes, borders and listening skills. Her recent creations and sound performance commissions include Longitude (Quebec, 2020), Eight over Two (Bucarest, 2019), OPERATOR (2019), and Cells of Wind, a booklet for a one-act opera (Toronto, 2020). Her six photography and hybrid poetry anthologies inclue Eight Track (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 2019), Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), and We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, Hamilton, 2012, A. M. Klein Prize). She regularly performs in theaters, art galleries, and festival throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. She lives in Montreal.
Fred Wah
Fred Wah has been writing since the early 1960’s, publishing first as a founding editor of Tishmagazine in Vancouver in 1961. Though the majority of his publications have been books of poetry, he has also edited, written short fiction and criticism, and anchored his writing career through teaching literature and creative writing in colleges and universities. Since the early 1990’s many of his projects have been collaborations with visual artists, photographers, and musicians.
Miriane Rouillard
Miriane Rouillard has been playing a wind instrument since her childhood, was admitted to the Musique classique and Arrangement jazz programs of Cégep Saint-Laurent, pursued the Programme de conception sonore assistée par ordinateur at Cégep de Drummondville, and received a first Prize at the Conservatoire Royal de musique de Mons in Belgium in electroaccoustic composition. Flute-player, she also samples and tinkers with all the sounds she hears in order to compose original music and design soundtracks, notably for several of the Où tu vas… projects of the Carrefour international de théâtre de Québec; for recent plays including a Trident production by director Alexandre Fecteau (N’essuie jamais de larmes sans gants), Théâtre Humain by the American playwright and actor Kevin McCoy and with the artistic direction of R. Lepage. She contributes to many creations and shows in literary spaces, museums (MNBAQ, Musée de la Civilisation…), theatres, the rock scene, cinema, danse, visual arts, etc. She is currently working, since May 2023, with Bernard Gilbert on his literary show Les Singes Bariolés for the next itteration of the carrefour international de théâtre, and on the sound design for the musée de la forêt Boréalis, and is participating in the Ligue d’improvisation musical de Québec shows.
The duos Choeur(s) are a Rhizome production. Rhizome is a creator of interdisciplinary projects with a literary core. Their process, rooted in research and innovation, never loses sight of the literary object. The text, as well as its author, are its very foundations. Rhizome initiates, accompanies, creates, produces, co-produces, and welcomes projects in which authors participate, as much during the creative process as during the performance. Formats are diverse – performances, installations, shows – and frequently take advantage of the possibilities created by digital technologies. Through their productions, Rhizome strives to find new ways to make literature participate, as an artistic field, in an interdisciplinary creation process.
This event is held in partnership between Rhizome and the Morrin Centre.