PHONICA is a multidisciplinary live performance series rooted in Word and Sound, with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental. Conceived, directed, programmed and hosted since January 2016 by Christodoulos Makris and Olesya Zdorovetska, PHONICA aims to explore compositional and performative ideas, and to encourage a melting pot of audiences and artists from across artforms and borders.

After nine iterations PHONICA’s activities were interrupted by a number of factors, notably the onset of Covid-19. We are excited to relaunch PHONICA in the post-pandemic era and to navigate the possibilities of performance in Word and Sound through interactions, innovations and provocations within the newly-fraught realm of the live physical space.

Phonica: Ten will take place in our new partner venue The Complex, and will feature performances and presentations from a range of exceptional, groundbreaking and award-winning writers, poets, performers, musicians and artists.

Phonica: Ten is kindly supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sports and Media, and Dublin City Council, through the Dublin City Local Live Performance Programme Scheme.

About the artists:

Emma Bennett is an artist and academic working with performance and speech. Her academic research focuses on direct audience address and theatricality across media. Her performances involve vocal compositions of speech material we often discount as ‘inarticulate’ or ‘waffly’. Notable works have taken up the exalted rhythms of birdsong (Bird Series, 2012-present), the nervous chit-chat of the performer (WHAT MATTER, 2016), and the irritated attempt to explain the workings of a synthesiser (A Superficial Way, 2019). She is Assistant Professor in Drama and Performance Studies at University College Dublin.

Ellen Dillon is a poet and teacher from Limerick. Her most recent book, Butter Intervention, appeared with Veer 2 in 2022, and Morsel May Sleep was published by Sublunary Editions in 2021. Other books and pamphlets include Heave (Smithereens Press, 2018), Sonnets to Malkmus (Sad Press, 2019), Achatina, achatina! (2019, SoundEye Press) and Excavate (Poems after Pasolini) (2020, Oystercatcher Press). She also edited the Free Poetry Irish Anthology (Free Poetry, 2017).

Panos Ghikas is a London-based composer, improviser and producer. His output encompasses concert music, free improvisation, interdisciplinary collaborations in digital media, film music and pop production. He is a member of surrealist post-pop band The Chap and runs Migro Records. His work features in over 60 releases and has been performed and broadcast internationally.

Cora Venus Lunny is a violinist, violist, vocalist and composer. Free improvisation has become a very strong focus for Cora, and their duo with Izumi Kimura is one of their favourite projects of all time. As a member of Yurodny, Cora has also written for them, and with Kate Ellis, was commissioned in 2016 to write a piece for Common Ground, relating to the 1916 commemorations. In 2020 Cora’s piece 'Theft', commissioned by the NSQF as part of their Beethoven Reflected Series, was premiered by the Ficino Quartet. In 2021, Cora was awarded a Ban Bam Commission Award by IMC, to write Currents, a dramatic improvisation for four musicians. As a freelancer and collaborator, Cora is often to be found playing with Crash Ensemble, notably in award-winning international performances of Enda Walsh and Donnacha Dennehy's operas, The Last Hotel and The Second Violinist. Cora also frequently contributes to albums of recorded music, film scores and theatre soundtracks, recently playing in the Abbey Theatre's production of The Great Hunger, on the soundtrack for Rioghnach Ni Grioghair’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Find You, in Pomes Penyeach with Adrian Crowley & Lisa Hannigan, and with Christine Tobin for her Returning Weather set. In 2021, Folding was released on Farpoint Records, an album which Izumi Kimura and Cora collectively composed in response to Anthony Kelly’s recordings of Dun Laoghaire. This album has been warmly received by critics and musicians, being chosen as one of the favourite 5 Jazz Albums of 2021 by The Ticket.

Óscar Mascareñas is a transcendental Poet working in the fields of sound, light, movement and letters, based in Clare, Ireland. He holds a PhD in Music and an MA in Chant and Ritual Song (University of Limerick, Ireland); as well as a BSc in Industrial Physics and Engineering (ITESM, Mexico). Óscar has published work extensively in Europe, Africa and the Americas for the past 26 years, and collaborated internationally with artists from the fields of dance, music, theatre, visual arts and film. He was the founding course director of the BA in Voice and Dance and was acting and assistant director of the MA Ritual Chant and Song at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in the University of Limerick. He holds the Founding Cage-Cunningham Chair in Contemporary Performance at the Escuela Superior de Música y Danza de Monterrey in Mexico. Óscar’s trans-disciplinary research covers a wide range of subjects and disciplines from poetry, composition and performance in contemporary practice, to monochromatic photography, Gregorian chant, early music, Zen, radical pedagogy and the philosophy of sound and silence. He currently lectures and researches in improvisation, composition, chant and contemporary music at the Academy, and works independently as a writer, composer and performer internationally. His most recent works include, the album Burrenscapes (2022) (www.diatribe.ie/burrenscapes), the book Meditations on the Poetics of Experience, (2020); the album Songs for Jackson Pollock (2018), as well as sound design for Tipperary Dance’s Rising Voices (2022), Turnstile (2021) and Merlin (2019) amongst many others.

Jonathan Mayhew (b.1981) is an Irish artist based in Dublin. Using poetry, literature, technology and theory, he manipulates physical and invisible materials creating works in a variety of media, questioning the world we live in. He is interested in how we think about technology, how we use it and how it in turn uses us; and how fiction and reality are slowly blurring at the edges. He was the TBG&S/HIAP international residency exchange awardee 2019. He is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. Recent Exhibitions include: ‘em-bracing’, LAB Gallery Dublin; ‘Zurich Portrait Prize 2021’, National Galley of Ireland & Crawford Art Gallery; ‘Artworks 2020’, Visual Carlow; ‘Agnes and I’, Library Project 2019; ‘The wind steals music & brings it to me’, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019; ‘Scaffold’, Bomb Factory London, 2019; ‘digital_self’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2018; ‘Sørlandsutstillingen,’ Kristiansand Kunsthall, Norway, 2017; ‘I Wanted to Write a Poem’ Wexford Arts Centre, 2017. His works are in the collections of the Art Council of Ireland and the Office of Public Works, along with various private collections.