Pointe to Point China 2007

Born in Spain, I have been living in France since I was seven years old. My teacher in the orchestra in Paris inspired in me an interest in music and I started to play alto saxophone at about fifteen years of age. I studied history of art at the Sorbonne University, and later on I studied jazz, free jazz and contemporary music improvisation in the Conservatoire Nadia et Lili Boulanger in Paris. Through workshops and performances with the Magpie Music and Dance company, I started to learn with improvised musicians and dance performers such as musicians from the Instant Composer Pool (ICP) based in Amsterdam, and later on I have studied from the double bass player Barre Philips and the performer Julyen Hamilton. I am presently playing with the improvised collective music In-Sit-U (Paris), the image and music Ressac project (Paris) and working with improvised dance with the following companies; Ekla, Danses Plurielles, Orbitallink (Paris), This Torsion Dance Theatre Company (Dublin) and Layers (Istanbul).

I grew up in Lebanon and Australia, and am currently based in Paris, France. An improvising musician with an academic background in ethnomusicology, I play contrabass as a primary instrument. My musical and artistic history was initially rooted in the languages of jazz and classical / contemporary music, before branching out in other directions, leading me to work and perform with artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, with a special focus on non-western music, and improvisation, as well as less idiomatic, more abstract forms. Particularly captivated by dance and movement research, I am now actively engaged in various projects and collaborations with choreographers and dancers, as a performing artist and composer. Working with contemporary choreographers and dancers was an essential experience, in that I discovered a creative world closely connected to mine, with many parallels, and yet one in which the instrument and role of the performer’s physical presence was remarkably different. This opened the way to a lot of questioning of my own practice and research, sparking a strong interest in physicality, both on and off stage, which proved to be a refreshing and enriching change from purely sound-based research considerations.

Before attending the Conservatoire, my first artistic experience was that of a puppeteer at the Toone Theatre in Brussels. That sparked my interest in various forms of contemporary artistic expression and prompted me to undertake serious musical studies. My musical experiences as a student were punctuated by numerous concerts in a variety of different contexts. After graduating from the Conservatoire Royal de Musique of Liège in 2005, I founded the group Wang Wei Quartet in 2006 with 3 other musicians. As I am very interested in Chinese poetic language, I wished to move beyond mere curiosity and find out the extent to which the infinite subtleties of that language and the beauty of emerging images and movement could have an impact on my approach as a composer and as an improviser. I am also considering engaging plastic artists and animation film artists in order to add a further dimension to the project. I would love to invite other musicians to explore other themes such as baroque music, hip hop and music from Martinique, Brazil and Africa. I am presently dedicating myself mainly to writing (composition and arrangements) and to improvisation in the several projects I am engaged in, with particular focus on dance.