Elsa Grégoire
KunstKraftWerk, Leipzig
27.06.2015   23.07.2015
Elsa Grégoire’s musical journey goes a long way. Born in Belgium, spending her childhood in New Orleans and now living in Germany. Elsa’s musical territory is located where spoken words, classical contemporary music and improvisation intertwine. In this performance, she is playing a musical extract from a three-movement piece called “je suis” (“I am”). This song is the result of a collaboration with one of her friends, the photographer Margret Hoppe.
She started her solo project as a laboratory, a box of sounds and stories she can come back to whenever she feels the need to fill her mind with inspiration and focus on the creative process.
Her solo project is also the basic source of her singing for other projects. In her musical collaboration “Tremula” with which she released an album called “I sing because”, she delves into the origins that drive her and other human beings to sing. Her passion resides both in the style and content of music. Words matter. So does language.

Elsa studied the violin, the cello and developed her musical and creative skills through jazz singing at the Brussels Royal Conservatory where she got her degree. She also expanded her knowledge of music taking part to workshops with many different artists. She is the co-founder of the a cappella sextet “Brussels Vocal Project” which recently recorded an album featuring original music exclusively composed for the band by some of the Belgium’s most famous composers.

The KunstKraftWerk is an “Art Power Station” located in the neighbourhood of Lindenau in the western part of Leipzig in Germany. It originally was a gas plant built by the gas engineer Albert Gruner Jr. in 1863 and supplied the west part of Leipzig in gas. At that time, gas was essentially used for street lighting and the tramway network. After a series of changes in the 1950’s, the gas plant was made into a power and heat supply station. In 2012, the building was purchased privately and converted into an art space. It is now a cultural centre featuring dance, music, theatre with an extensive art programme. The exhibition programme at the Kunstkraftwerk is organised as a partnership with institutions in European countries and abroad.

Weblinks:
» Elsa Grégoire on SoundCloud: soundcloud.com
» Tremula on Facebook: facebook.com
» Website of KunstKraftWerk: kunstkraftwerk-leipzig.com

Text by Thomas Cacciapaglia (facebook.com).
Other sessions we suggest you to watch: