by Mike Telin
Before there was a soundtrack on the film, there was plenty of great live music being performed in front of the screen.
Beginning on September 15, the Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium — a celebration of the expressive power of early cinema accompanied by live music — will launch its fifth edition with half a dozen films, five of which are celebrating their centenary.
This year’s Festival will feature some outstanding musical talent that will bring the historical films to life. To see the lineup and purchase single tickets and Festival Passes, click here.
The Festival kicks off with East and West (1923) on Tuesday, September 15, at 7:30 pm at the Cinematheque at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
For the past eight months No Exit has been celebrating their 15th anniversary with their most ambitious project to date: 
For the recent set of concerts in their season-long celebration of the surreal, No Exit turned to two pivotal events in the history of dadaism for inspiration — the 1920 Festival Dada and the 1923 Soirée du Coeur à Barbe. This program, “Piano Dada,” included works of poetry, theater, and music that were performed at those historic Paris festivals. I attended the performance on March 16 at Heights Arts.
It’s got to be a daunting task to create something even more surreal than what we wake up to every morning in our 21st-century world, but Timothy Beyer and his No Exit new music ensemble are pulling that trick off with élan in their 
