French vocalist and poet Alice Bertay, a New Yorker, and Argentine guitarist and composer Martin Gabriel Lopez, known as Janiwa, create work that moves between music, poetry, theater and performance. But what they are really exploring is what happens when the borders between us begin to disappear.
What happens when we cross to the other side? Beyond the boundaries we have built around ourselves: between cultures, disciplines, intimacy and expression, and the person we are and the person we allow ourselves to become.
The duo has developed a body of work that moves between poetry, performance art and immersive experience.
Bertay and Janiwa met in Tulum, where a romantic relationship gave birth to an artistic collaboration. Their work carries that intimacy into something universal, expressed through the exchange between voice and guitar. Their performances have already crossed borders, taking No Borders for Lovers into different countries and cultures, from Costa Rica and Mexico City to Ibiza and beyond. Each place offers a different context for the work, while its essence remains the same.
An invitation to enter a portal of self-exploration through sound and presence.
Alice’s voice moves from angelically soft to operatic, while Janiwa’s Spanish guitar creates its own language: tender and soul-stirring, pulling at something just beneath the surface, at your heartstrings.
Together, they create an atmosphere in which the audience isn’t simply watching two musicians perform. You are witnessing two souls meet in another dimension through the art of love.
And perhaps that is the more expansive lens through which to experience No Borders for Lovers: to feel so deeply that you transcend the everyday and become one with the sound.
The borders we encounter can be harder to see: the invisible boundaries we create around ourselves, telling us how we are supposed to be and behave, what we are supposed to feel, and how much of ourselves we are allowed to reveal.
Art has always found ways to cross those lines. Music is a universal language. A voice can communicate something before the words arrive. A guitar can evoke a memory you didn’t know you had. A room full of strangers can suddenly move to the same rhythm.
No Borders for Lovers is an invitation to explore, to feel, to live — and to remember that being human was never meant to be a perfectly contained experience.
Beyond the Performance
On October 15, doors open at GOSPEL in SoHo for Chorus Extaticus, where No Borders for Lovers performs alongside producer Kevin Deroos.
The evening begins with a live performance shaped by voice, guitar, poetry and sound. Then the energy shifts from listening to movement, from watching to participating, as Deroos takes the room toward the collective experience of the dance floor.
That transition brings together contemplation and celebration, art and nightlife, individual experience and collective expression.
Rather than following the familiar format of a concert or club night, the evening allows the experience to evolve.
The Space Between Us
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the name is that “no borders” doesn’t mean that differences disappear. It means allowing those differences to meet, creating space for something new.
We live in a time of increasingly defined categories of identity, culture, taste, community and belonging. Yet some of the most compelling experiences happen in the spaces that resist categorization.
The lover who becomes a collaborator.
The audience that becomes part of the work.
No Borders for Lovers exists in those spaces, exploring what becomes possible when we move beyond the familiar and allow ourselves to encounter one another differently.
What if we crossed the line?
What if we allowed ourselves to feel?
What if living meant being willing to move between worlds rather than choosing only one?
These are invitations to cross, if only for an evening, to the other side.
Because beyond the performance, there is us.
