Just shortly after all the Midsummer festivities are over, PAiR Summer Stage will kick off the summer season with their opening night on Saturday, July 1 with the acclaimed artists Elizabete Balčus and Jeļena Glazova. Elizabete and Jelena are both multi-disciplinary artists whose practices span music, poetry, and performance.
The free shows on the Summer Stage will take place next to the Pavilosta Artist in Residency and will serve as an incubator for the creation of new work in art, music, poetry, performance, dance and theatre. As an extension of Residency, it will serve as an outdoor space for inventive encounters, where artist can develop their projects in a stimulating, distraction-free environment of interdisciplinary dialogue. Stay tuned for more events.
Elizabete Balčus is a Latvian musician and performance artist who creates neo-psychedelic dream pop from surprising, collaged, genre juxtapositions that is simultaneously melodic and experimental. She works with a strong visual aesthetic that draws upon modern surrealism, contemporary fashion and geometric imagery. Elizabete attended Latvian Academy of Music in order to study classical and jazz flute, plus opera vocal in Rome’s Santa Cecilia Academy. Anything is permitted in her musical cosmos: looping flute and voice, clicking electro pop beats and playing vegetables as a synthesizer, leaving the listener in a blissed out trance like state, somewhere between the waking and sleeping. Live performances engage the audience with a psychedelic and theatrical situation that is as befuddling as it is mesmerizing.
Jelena Glazova is a sound artist/visual artist and a poet. Working in interdisciplinary areas of contemporary art, combining in her works image, poetic text, experimental sound and installation.
Experimental music activity field – noise/drone, usually constructed from processed vocals. As a visual artist Jelena had 8 solo exhibitions, including solo shows at Latvian Museum of Photography (2010) and Latvian Contemporary Art Centre (LMC) (2011), participated in numerous group exhibitions, festivals and projects in Latvia, Russia, USA, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia, Lithuania, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, South Korea, Canada and other countries. As a poet she participates in poetry festvals and has numerous publications. Jelena is the author of 3 books of poetry. First book “Transfers” (2013, in Russian and Latvian) was nominated for Latvian Annual Literary Award (LALIGABA), second book “Plasma” (2014) was published in Estonia in Estonian and English, third book “Greed” was published in 2019 and was nominated for Latvian Poetry Days Award. Jelena’s poetry is translated into Latvian, English, Finnish, Polish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Swedish, Hungarian languages.
As a sound artist started performing in 2012 – she performed at experimental music and sound art festivals and contributed to art projects – at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art (Berlin, Germany), BOZAR (Brussels, Belgium), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid, Spain), Sound around Kaliningrad (Kaliningrad, Russia), Noise and Fury (Moscow, Russia), Poetronica (Moscow, Russia), Vilnius Noise Week (Vilnius, Lithuania), adventurous music festival Skaņu Mežs (Riga, Latvia), electronic music festival Art’s Birthday (Stockholm, Sweden), Vienna Art Week (Vienna, Austria) etc. She was as a guest composer at EMS Stockholm, WORM Rotterdam, etc.
Jelena has chosen experimental and drone/noise/ambient form of expression after disappointment with tonal music, as she did not find it creative enough as a form of expression (she was playing few instruments and had classical vocal training, as adolescent performed parts in children’s operas).
