Biographie:

Adja Fassa is a singer, composer and theatre-creator, who also writes and performs. In recent years she has traveled between education and countries: from the theatre department at the KASK Conservatory in Ghent, to India, Nepal, Greece, Portugal and Spain to delve into her interests surrounding ecological self-sufficiency and sustainable living. She then returned to Belgium, where she studied jazz/singing at the Conservatory in Leuven, afterwards re-entering the theatre training where she did the groundwork for creating her own style, connecting singing, theatre and physical performance. Recently she created her first Spoken Word and music performance, called ‘Adjabet, chapter I’, the first part of an interdisciplinary trilogy.

From an early age Adja Fassa wanted to understand the deeper layers of the human heart, in search of what exactly the core of a soul contains. She also has a fascination for ‘the world that lives inside a symbol’. Those elements have become her motivation for creating her own language: an alphabet made up of the sensory – movement, smell, sound – and text, her writing style consisting of deconstructing and abstracting language, trying to get closer to the rhythm of the meaning. An attempt to describe the feelings and atmospheric worlds that we all (?) experience, but are difficult to define.

Adjabet, chapter I

‘Adjabet, chapter I’ is a Spoken Word and music performance, as well as the first part of an interdisciplinary trilogy. In this first performance, Adja’s emotional worlds are channeled into a symbolic alphabet made up out of elements like smells, sounds, movement and writing. The Archetypes of this alphabet are embodied by the primary colors, each representing a universe of human energy and emotion. The process of creation started from a ritual with questions such as “what does blue taste like? How does yellow move? What does red smell like?” which led the colors to be developed into layered characters who translate their experience of reality through text, image, sound and especially through the performers – into an earthly form. The colors in turn, ask questions such as “What does sadness smell like? What color is shame? How does disappointment move?”.

The general question of the performance being: “What does ‘returning to the source’ mean?”. Inspired by the internationally acclaimed novel ‘Things fall apart’ by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Adja created a performance that serves as a space for conversing with spirits of the other world, her old traumas and losses, as well as connecting with the spirit that embodies new, sought after life-chapters. Through rhythmic monologues that bleed into soulful songs, that which is no longer at the service of inner growth will be respectfully released.