Multi-Media Performance (songs, poems, art, cooking, & food tasting)

NYS Writers Institute, February 16, 2007
8:00 p.m.Performance | WAMC Linda Norris Auditorium,
339 Central Ave., Albany

Tickets $15 | Phone: 518-465-5233 Ext. 4

PROFILE
To celebrate the release of their CDs "The Bi-Continental Chowder" and "Routes, Not Roots," performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte and poet Pierre Joris have created a multimedia event. They will perform a selection of Peyrafitte's songs and Joris' poems that are featured on the CDs. The evening will be framed by Peyrafitte's "Bi-Continental Chowder" prepared, commented, simmered, and served right on stage--a truly synesthetic experience that will stimulate all the senses.

Pyrenean-born Nicole Peyrafitte is a performance artist who sings, paints, films, writes, and cooks. She draws on her eclectic heritage to perform songs ranging from French cabaret to jazz standards and contemporary poetry. She was born in Luchon (French Pyrenees) into the fifth generation of a family of restaurateurs. She received her early cooking training from her grandfather - a renowned chef - and later perfected her skills interning at several award winning restaurants in France. She moved to the United States in 1987, settling first in Southern California where she was a private chef and started her work as a collage artist and painter. Since moving to Albany in 1992, she has dedicated herself to multimedia art work.

Peyrafitte was named Best Performance Artist of 2005 by "Metroland." She is also the founder of "Nicole Peyrafitte's Experimental Cabaret at Tess' Lark Tavern," which "Metroland" named Best Performance Art Venue of 2006, calling it, "a marvelous boon to thinking-outside-the-box artists."

"Nicole Peyrafitte is a brilliant and most original performer. Her vocalizations, her songs, her gestures are provocative: both stunningly beautiful and powerfully unnerving at times. She is the chthonic goddess come to tempt you, scare you, transform you. She is in the poetic lineage of Greek tragedy, Café Voltaire antics, of dada and surrealist play but with a post-modern, hip sensibility. I am transfixed when she's on stage." - Anne Waldman, founder/director, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

Pierre Joris is a poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist whose most recent publications include "Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999" (2001) and a collection of essays, "A Nomad Poetics" (2003). Recent translations include "Lightduress" (2004) by Paul Celan which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award. Joris teaches in the UAlbany English Department.

Joris recently co-edited and co-translated (with Jerome Rothenberg), "Pablo Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems" (2004), a collection of little-known poetry by the influential visual artist. Joris is also co-editor with Rothenberg of the monumental anthology, "Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry" (1995 Volume 1, 1998 Volume 2). In 1996, he received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature for the first volume, "From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude." The anthology, which strongly favors avant-garde poets and poetry, is one of the most ambitious efforts to define the poetic history of the 20th century.

Additional Links:
Times Union Article
Nicole Peyrafitte
Pierre Joris
Joris & Rothenberg