BETALEVEL


O-Society

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O-Society
Sunday, December 16 at 7:00pm

Join us at Betalevel for O-Society, an evening of transnational aural and textual collage, presenting work by Paula Cronan, Vanessa Place, Mikael Plunian, Lamya Regragui, Anna Joy Springer and Juliana Snapper.

Parisian actress Lamya Regragui and Paris-based musician Mikael Plunian will present the premier performance of Lamya’s “Je Suis/I am.” Done in collaboration with Los Angeles writer Vanessa Place, Lamya’s performance uses cuts from all cultural corners to demonstrate the defeat of mindless globalization and the triumph of loose translation. How do you say “the company had not yet been able to speak to anyone on board?” How do you say “sympa!”

Lamya Regragui is a French stage actress from Paris, and an award-winner of La Villa Médicis in 2007. Her work focuses on female contemporary literature and performance, incorporating collage, music, and improvisation. She is inspired by the Surrealists Unica Zurn, Mina Loy, and Leonor Fini; and punk singers Patti Smith, Exene Cervenka, and Lizzy Mercier-Descloux. Lamya’s Betalevel performance will be based on the study of American and French language, in part collaboration with American writer Vanessa Place. Lamya met Vanessa in LA and it’s the beginning of a great collaboration.

Lamya’s music will be provided by Paris-based Mikael Plunian, a French composer, musician, and performer. Ranging from contemporary composition to electronica, pop and hardcore, Mikael has composed for theater and dance productions, sound poetry, and film soundtracks.

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and a co-founder of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novel, and a chapbook, Figure from The Gates of Paradise. Her nonfiction book The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published by Other Press; her novel La Medusa is forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2 in Fall 2008.

Paula Cronan is a painter, videographer, and installation artist originating from Philadelphia. Her work has been collected and exhibited nationwide. She is a former member of the San Francisco dyke punk bands Cypher in the Snow, Deathcard 13, and The Dodge Brothers. She currently lives in San Diego.

Vocal artist Juliana Snapper creates and interprets experimental opera. Her work has been recognized by the Metropolitan Opera Council and journals such as The Drama Review, Art in America, and Salon magazine. Her voice has been described as “a flayed shred of human need, desire, pain.” She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Anna Joy Springer is a prose writer who makes grotesques. That is, she creates hybrid texts combining sacred and profane elements in order to prompt intensely embodied conceptual-emotional experiences in readers. Formerly a singer in the Bay Area bands, Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, Anna Joy has toured the US and Europe being a wild feminist punk performer, and she has also toured with the all-women spoken word extravaganza, Sister Spit. She is an Assistant Professor of Literature at UC San Diego where she truly loves teaching courses in experimental writing, graphic texts, and contemporary feminist literatures. She’s currently finishing her first novel, The Vicious Red Relic, Love.