Fopsa'24
The Festival of Poetry-Shaped Art had its third edition on May 25th 2024. It was held at the Untited Cowboys arthouse in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. On this page you find the descriptions of the participating artists.
Jaap Blonk & Marie Guilleray - Ode to Greta Monach
Jaap is a composer, performer, poet, and visual artist. As a vocalist, he is unique for his powerful stage presence and almost childlike freedom in improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure.
Marie studied jazz and classical singing. Over the years, she developed a growing interest in contemporary, experimental and improvised music. This led her to extend her artistic practice from a vocalist/performer to a composer/sound artist.
At Fopsa they performed a selection of Greta Monach's sound poetry.
link to Jaap's website
link to Marie's website
Sarah Prescimone - Persona non grata
Sarah is a Sicilian choreographer, dancer, and performer. Her affinity with movement reaches out to many realms and genres, including Butoh, Experimental, and Urban styles. She found an interest in the functionality and intelligence of the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu movement practice, which she integrates in her work - thus developing a new movement language in her own personal laboratory of movements.
Especially for Fopsa'24 Sarah developed a new piece based on the paradox that language can be divided into discrete units (sentences, words, syllables, phonemes) and yet has an amazing fluency and coherent wholeness.
link to Sarah's Instagram page
Inez Wolters - Interdisciplinary Sonnet
As part of the Natuursonnetten project by A.H.J. Dautzenberg and Rob Moonen (see below), Inez created an interdisciplinary sonnet. She is an interdisciplinary artist combining dance, music, costumes, text. She is part of the Zwermers collective as well as the performance band LaPiratesse.
At Fopsa she presented her contribution to the Natuursonnetten project. She was joined by Wouter de Belder (multi-instrumentalist, composer) and Sander Verbiest (visual artist). They are both also members of LaPiratesse.
link to Inez's Facebook page
link to the website of LaPiratesse
Rianne Wilbers - Sonnet, Stripsody, Récitations 11, Unseen
Rianne evolved from a classically trained soprano to a multidisciplinary artist who blurs the lines between disciplines. She captivates audiences with her stunning voice and boundless creativity.
At Fopsa she performed her contribution to the Natuursonnetten project (see below). Next to that, she performed 'Stripsody' by Cathy Berberian (a comic book style musical score), 'Récitations 11' by Georges Aperghis.
(Photo by Paul Janssen)
link to Rianne's website
Bart van Dongen & Stefan Jung - Wereldgemiddelde
Bart is an audio artist: composer, musician, musical organiser. He has been city composer of Den Bosch and is the creative and organising force behind the amazing venue Pavillion for Unheard Music.
Stefan is an experienced allround theater maker: actor, director, scenario writer, dramaturg, .... you name it. He is currently the artistic leader of the Carte Blanche theatre company.
At Fopsa'24 they performed their interpretation of Wereldgemiddelde ('world average'), a poetry book by Harry van Doveren consisting of could-be words. It is based on the experience - when in a foreign country, or at an airport - of hearing people talk in an unknown language. You don't understand the semantics of the words, but still recognize it as the words of a language.
link to Bart's website
link to Stefan's Facebook page
Natuursonnetten - a multidisciplinary sonnet cycle
A.H.J. Dautzenberg and Rob Moonen initiated this project. Dautzenberg wrote the Master sonnet for the cycle. Then they asked diverse artists to create a work in their respective art discipline based on the sonnet structure, and 'between' two of the Master sonnet's verse lines. Apart from Dautzenberg, there are 14 artists contributing to the cycle, covering a wide range of art disciplines from photography to dance, and from music to contemporary art.
Participating artists are (in order of their position in the sonnet cycle): Rob Moonen, Bart de Vrees, Skypunch Collective, Sabina Timmermans, Merijn Bisschops, Inez Wolters, S. Lloyd Trumpstein, Rianne Wilbers, Reinoud van Vught, Frank Crijns, Eric van der Westen, Rohiet Tjon Poen Gie, Jenny Ymker, William van der Voort.
Fopsa'24 presented an overview of the project in an interactive installation as well as live performances of some of the contributions.
link to the project's website
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Jaap Blonk - visual poetry
Jaap Blonk performed as a sound poet at Fopsa'22, and this year he will present some of Greta Monach's sound poetry (together with Marie, see above). Apart from being an outstanding vocal artist, Jaap is also a composer, a musician, as well as a visual artist.
In the preface to Jaap's book Possible Gardens, Derek Beaulieu tried to describe Jaap's visual works using phrases like 'writing beyond writing', 'an alien script', 'distant descendants of functional phonetic notations, turned asemic', 'a language on the edge of dream', and 'radical orthography'.
At Fopsa'24 Jaap exhibited some of his visual poetry, focusing on small and intimate works.
link to Jaap's website
Ellipsis - a Poetry-Shaped food experience
'The ellipsis ... (/əˈlɪpsɪs/; also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning.' (Wikipedia) An ellipsis is a placeholder. It is suggestive, calls on the reader to fill in the blanks by using their imagination, reasoning, .... basically everything at their disposal.
As Fopsa'24 started at the end of the afternoon and lasted until the evening, the audience enjoyed this Poetry-Shaped food experience during the event.
Concept, recipe and preparation by Jeroen van Keulen.
Greta Monach - In Her Own Words
Greta (1928 – 2018) was a sound poet, composer, visual artist, and a pioneer of the field of computer poetry.
At Fopsa'24 we presented an exhibition of her early computer poetry, paying attention to her ideas and way of working by selected quotes about her work she wrote herself. The concept of letters and words as material entities is the basis of her work. She used a process that is a combination of intuitiveness and procedural strictness. She also used the outcomes of her computer poetry as scores for sound poetry performances. Jaap & Marie (see above) will also pay attention to that in their performance of her work. The exhibition also included an interactive installation based on one of the computer programs she used to create her early computer poetry. This re-implementation is developed by Emiel van Miltenburg of the Digital Literature Consortium.
Page about Greta on Monoskop