RISE
Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments
Led by Dr. Eldad Tsabary and funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE) is a Le PARC based 5-year (2020-2025) research-creation project designed to enact and investigate cataclysmic scenarios in 10 mini-operas.
Various narratives from among humanity’s greatest fears (pandemics, ecological disasters, economic collapse, political strife and warfare, technological disasters, surveillance and loss of human rights, cosmic disasters, etc.) will be dramatized in the opera medium and studied collaboratively. The creative process will involve critical reflection sessions in which the research-creation team and members of the public will freely debate emergent matters related to the narrative of the mini-operas and their impact on humanity, challenges to the opera medium, collaborative strategies among researcher and creators from diverse fields and career stages, and production-centred topics.
The first RISE mini-opera will enact a pandemic-centred scenario and will be released in June 2021. A Workshop will be released in January 2021.
The RISE Team
A diverse research-creation team (with specialists in digital performance, composition, community music, environmental artivism, artificial intelligence, creative writing, and education), RAs, community musicians, and professional artists.
Active Members
With students and professors as co-researchers Tsabary has been exploring strategies, pedagogies, and technologies for sound-focused ear training that encourage critical self-reflection, provide informative timely feedback, and foster self-motivated growth. Most recently, Tsabary has been leading the creation of Inner Ear—a SSHRC-funded browser-based collection of sonic-aural-training tools designed around principles of transformational education and findings from motivation studies.
Dr. Tsabary has a rich experience in administration and leadership. In recent years he has been chair of the International Conference on Arts and Humanities (in Bali, Colombo, and Kuala Lumpur), and he co-chaired the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium (TIES 2016) and the Montreal hub of the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC-ESCOM 2018), among others. At Concordia University he is the coordinator of Electroacoustic Studies at the Department of Music, and previously was coordinator (interim) of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts. He was president (2013-2019) of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community—Canada's national electroacoustic association. Eldad received his doctorate in music education from Boston University.
He has been researcher and consultant on electroacoustic music and media arts history for UNESCO, France; director of the Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technologies, Canada; associated researcher of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University, in the UK; senior consultant of the Amauta - Andean Media Arts Centre in Cusco, Peru; coordinator of the international research alliance DOCAM - Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage; and director of the Multimedia Communication national program at the Federal Ministry of Education, Argentina.
Dal Farra has presented his sound-art, electroacoustic and visual-music works in more than 40 countries, and recordings of his pieces are published in 23 international editions (including CDs by Computer Music Journal and Leonardo Music Journal, by MIT Press). Among others, he received awards and commissions from the Sao Paulo International Arts Biennale, Brazil; the National Endowment for the Arts, Argentina, the Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, France; the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale of the University of Padua, Italy; and the International Computer Music Association.
For UNESCO, he conducted extensive research on Latin American electroacoustic music (https://cutt.ly/Ud7TfhZ in English, and https://cutt.ly/Ud7Ttmi in Spanish). Funded by The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology of Montreal, he created the largest collection publicly available of Latin American Electroacoustic Music, including a database with over 2,000 recordings of works digitally preserved, composed 1957-2007 by almost 400 composers, and +200,000 words (http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=556). Also, he made a substantial contribution to the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site - EARS project (http://ears.huma-num.fr).
Dal Farra is founder-director of the international conference series Understanding Visual Music - UVM (held in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil), and founder-director of the international conference series Balance-Unbalance (held in Argentina, Canada, Australia, United States, Colombia, the UK, and The Netherlands) on how the media arts could contribute to solving the environmental crisis (http://balance-unbalance2018.org). He also has been leading art-science projects, like the three editions of the sound-art international contest organized with the Red Cross Climate Centre, and designed multiple art-science-technology educational programs.
Dr. Dal Farra was the artistic director of the Mexican electronic arts biennale Transitio in 2015, and a guest keynote at Congreso Internacional de Humanidades Digitales (2016) and SIGRaDi - Ibero-American Digital Graphic (2016), held in Argentina, and HDRio - I Congresso Internacional em Humanidades Digitais (2018), held in Brazil. He is an active member of several editorial boards: Leonardo/ISAST (MIT Press, USA), Organised Sound (Cambridge Press, UK), and Resonancias - Musical Research Journal (Catholic University of Chile). He has served in the editorial board of Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press), the Journal of Research on Music Education (ADOMU, Argentina), and the Journal of New Music Research (The Netherlands). Dal Farra is a full member of Colegio Latinoamericano de Compositores de Música de Arte, a member of the advisory board of the Fulldome Festival (Jena, Germany), and member of the board of ISEA International, formerly the International Society for the Electronic Arts.
Recent and ongoing research projects include: the study of the poetics of writing the body in contemporary circus; performative research dissemination through research-creation; the physical, social, and creative impacts of circus practice on school children; and a socio-historical study of Québec theatre.
Recent books include: Contemporary Circus, co-written with Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt (Routledge, 2019), Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, co-edited with Charles Batson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), and Le jeu des positions. Discours du théâtre québécois, co-edited with Hervé Guay (Nota Bene, 2014).
Recent creative books include: False Starts (Talonbooks, 2016), Ludwig & Mae (in French, Prise de parole, 2016; in English, Talonbooks, 2009), Dialogues fantasques pour causeurs éperdus (Prise de parole, 2012), and Se taire (Prise de parole, 2010).
Dr. Bergler is professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, she obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brandeis University.
She is President of the International Law Association of Canada, Senior Fellow with the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, and INDI PhD in Fine Arts candidate at Concordia University. She earned a B.F.A. (Honours) from York University, an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School, an LL.M. from the University of Ottawa, an S.J.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science) from the University of Toronto, and an M.B.A. from Queen’s University. She is an INDI PhD in Fine Arts candidate at Concordia University. Her work explores, through collaborative research creation, how to innovate a planetary Charter for our times.
In a Canadian public service career spanning three decades Dr. Fitzgerald served as a senior executive, providing strategic leadership in legal policy, advisory and litigation services in international law, national security, public law, human rights and governance at the following departments: Justice Canada, Human Resources Development Canada, National Defence and the Canadian Forces, and the Privy Council Office. For six years she led the International Law Research Program at the think tank Centre for International Governance Innovation, delivering policy relevant research and capacity building on issues of international economic, environmental, and intellectual property law and innovation, and their human rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and gender equality dimensions. For three years she served as inaugural co-chair of the Canadian Environmental Domestic Advisory Group under the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement.
Dr. Fitzgerald lectured and taught courses at the University of Ottawa (Faculty of Law and Telfer School of Management), Carleton University Department of Law, the Balsillie School of International Affairs, l’Institut international du droit de l’homme in Strasbourg, and the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in San Remo. She has mentored many graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and emerging legal scholars. Recognized as a thought leader, she has been interviewed for local, national and international news, television and radio. She has written, edited and co-edited books, essay series, articles, policy briefs and commentaries. She has presented as a keynote speaker or panelist at, and organized or co-organized, national and international conferences and workshops on diverse topics.
Dr. Fitzgerald builds on her practical knowledge of international law and governance and her abiding passion for the arts, to create a unique interdisciplinary research creation project that seeks to reimagine through art and performance a new planetary Charter for our times. This has involved making visual art works and assemblages, executing socially engaged performative art projects, Spring Zine-ing in the Neighbourhood (2021), Jeanne B’Arc, Heroine for the Anthropocene (2021); hosting a virtual international Symposium and developing a Manifesto for the Arts, New Materialism, Posthumanism & Human Rights (2022); leading and co-curating a multi-media group Art Exposition, Arts and Human Rights Conversing Multiplicities (2023), contributing visual arts, props, costumes, libretti, movement for Eldad Tsabary’s Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE) collaborative improvisational micro-operas, Into the Woods, Cyborg, Lost Connections, Lucid Dreams, Handle with Care: Values in our Hearts (conception and leadership), Conversing Multiplicities performance night (2021-2023).
Phil's music explores computational techniques applied to music composition (from Computer Assisted Composition to Artificial Intelligence). His compositions include an opera based on the play by Sarah Kane, Phaedra's Love (2020), the choral work Fragments for an Unfinished Requiem (2019), an opera based on a libretto he wrote for Sophocles' Antigone, entitled Sophocles: Antigone (2021) and Morphogenesis: Hommage to Gilles Deleuze (2022), a piece for small ensemble . Phil describes his music as musical deconstructivism, following the use of the term in architecture.
Phil is presently working on a research-creation project for an opera based A. Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, set in April 1975 Vietnam rather than end of century Russia. The opera is being composed using Artificial Intelligence techniques (GANs, VAEs, RNNs, Convents, etc.). Phil was recently awarded a Gina Cody/Milieux Multidisciplinary Grant to realize a project combining Artificial Intelligence and music with a team of engineers and composers.
Sheena is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Her doctoral project is titled: Composing with the Event—Performance Practices that Move Toward Neurodiverse Perception/Sensation. The project investigates a radical approach to creation and performance practices that transcends disciplinary paradigms—with the aim of utilizing the performing/creative arts as a practice and languaging that facilitates neurodiverse thinking-doing. Sheena is committed to neurodiversity as a concept and movement that attends to the diversity of perception and full range or ways of being/becoming.
"Let's entangle our worlds!" – Valentina Plata
Past Members
For the past 35 years he has toured the world, both as a soloist and with his group Bradyworks. In 2004 he won the Prix Opus “Composer of the Year” prize, given by the Conseil québécois de la musique. In 2007 he was awarded the Jan. V. Matecjek award by SOCAN. He has performed at many major festivals and venues, including the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Festival Présence in Paris, The South Bank Centre in London, the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville, and in 2010 he was featured composer at the Winnipeg Symphony’s International New Music Festival. From 2008 to 2013 he was composer-in-residence with the Orchestre symphonique de Laval, and has worked with the Montreal, Toronto, Québec City and Vancouver symphonies. His CD, “Atacama: Symphony #3”, was named “Création de l’année” for 2012 at the Prix Opus in Québec and it was nominated for a JUNO in 2014.
In 2015 “Atacama: Symphony #3 had its New York premiere at the prestigious National Sawdust Concert Hall, in a performance featuring the Grammy-nominated Trinity Wall Street Choir.
His chamber and orchestral music is often influenced by strong jazz and rock rhythms, combined with a subtle sense of harmony and texture, and a flair for dramatic forms and structures. Delicate melodies inhabit the same world as dense, jagged, syncopated chords, giving the music a sense of openness, surprise and intrigue. 24 CDs, 4 operas, 10 symphonies, and dozens of international tours later, his music continues to engage listeners around the world.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Concordia University and a Master’s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music.
He is also a saxophonist and performance poet who has traveled widely to apprentice, record and perform with renowned artists and elders from diverse traditions, and at festivals across Canada, the USA and Europe. He began his musical career in Montreal in the late 1970s, playing regularly in downtown clubs from the age 15.
John has also worked extensively in digital media, having at various times been Co-Curator of digifest (Canada’s largest digital festival), Manager of Brand and Digital Strategy at the Canada Council for the Arts, founder of several arts-based web startups, and a digital strategist for a wide range of arts organizations and businesses.
John graduated from Concordia’s Liberal Arts College a very long time ago. He is married with two children, one of whom is currently a Concordia student, also at the Liberal Arts College!
My research-creation project is provisionally entitled: "Virtual ISLANDs, postcolonial hybrid identities in Virtual Reality." Building on my own experience as a white Euro-Jamaican, and past research in the portrayal of my hybrid identity within contemporary Jamaican culture, I’m exploring how this can be represented in VR. Building on research in the central role of water in Caribbean cultures, my project is informed by the violent histories of transatlantic slavery and Atlantic modernity through the framework of Paul Gilroy’s notion of the “Black Atlantic.” This project invites a reading of VR practices towards aesthetic/artistic aims through the exploration of submersion as an alternative notion to describe VR’s immersive experience.
Alana is the co-coordinator, resident musician and sound designer at the Acts of Listening Lab at Concordia University, and is currently working on the score for the Restorative Justice Project, while researching the intersections of musicology and generative soundscapes in installation work. Alana is an experienced audio mixer for live and recorded work, with a specialization in multichannel diffusion.
After finishing her undergraduate studies in both piano performance and musicology, Ms. Moazzeni specialized her master’s degree in contemporary piano performance and she is currently undertaking her individualized doctoral studies in Fine Arts at the Concordia University in Montreal. Alongside her performance studies, Ms. Moazzeni studied composition, electroacoustic music, new media arts and different coding languages in Europe.
The development of her art incorporates interaction between artistic interpretation and scholarly reflection. Particular areas of my interest in research-creation include artistic research, philosophy on stage, autoethnography, epistemology, women and feminist studies, post-human condition, decolonial theories, critical race theories, music performance studies, new strategies for interdisciplinary performance design, mixed-music composition and performance, interactive musical technologies, interface design and robotics, extended techniques and unconventional instrumental and vocal performance practice.
Anoush Moazzeni has received multiple awards and nominations from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Canada Council for the Arts, Première Ovation, L’Ampli Québec, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), Concordia University, University of Tehran, Laval University, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and National Museum of Fine arts of Quebec City. Ms. Moazzeni, with more than 15 years of teaching experience, has been continuously giving workshops and master classes around the world and she currently collaborates as teaching assistant with the Concordia University.
Her musical prowess and collaborative spirit have provided her with opportunities to
perform with the city’s premier ensembles, notably l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, and l’Opéra de Montréal.
Frédéricka holds a Bachelor of Music degree in vocal performance and a Master of Music degree in conducting both from the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She is passionate about music education and has taught in various educational institutions such as the Schulich School of Music, and primary schools of the Commission scolaire Marguerite Bourgeoys.
A believer in creating a space for vocalists to participate in music making and build community, Frédéricka provides artistic leadership to the River’s Edge Community Choir and begins her doctoral studies in Music Education at the Schulich School of Music in September 2021.
Frédéricka is scheduled to perform as a soloist with the Black Theatre Workshop in August, Musique 3 femmes in Fall and Ensemble Paramirabo next Spring.
She has made a name for herself as an accomplished performer of the contemporary repertoire, premiering over 30 works in Canada and Europe. She can regularly be heard on CBC and has made several award-winning recordings.
Equally active on the classical stage, she performs as a soloist with several ensembles and has participated in many soundtracks, such as The Red Violin and Paul à Québec. Marie-Annick is also very active in her community, as a teacher in charge of classical vocal instruction at UQAM, at Camp musical Père Lindsay and CAMMAC music center, and as a performer for La Société pour les Arts en Milieux de Santé.
Before starting her Master's, she was as a Digital Design Architect at Poplify, a digital solution development startup in India, where she was responsible for the visuals and design management in all the projects, with products and services including, but not limited to - branding, graphics, front-end, theme development etc. As a student in the Computer Science department of Concordia University, given her prior expertise, as a part of RISE team, Sunanda is responsible for managing the design and development of the website.
When she is not working or studying, she likes to immerse myself in arts, literature or music and can often be found lost in reading or thought, sketching on a napkin or simply fiddling with her uke.