Emese Csornai

Distant Memories of the Void

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Distant Memories of the Void is a gamelan music automaton and visual installation, taking the Javanese Gamelan and Shadow Puppet (Wayang) as its starting point. Whereas in the tradition of the Wayang, the puppet master held a one night long performance accompanied by musicians, in this installation we’ll encounter the performing screen of the puppet, the instrument, but no performers. What will an audience find in such a “performance”?

The Gamelan instruments that build the orchestra are here reduced to 21 iron plates, constituting the idealized registers of a melody in the music. The puppet, with no one to perform it, shows itself as figures as images, then disfigures itself in time, making clear of its materiality in face of the performing screen (Kelir), the light, and the shadows with which it traditionally interacts. In the non-existent of the puppeteer (Dhalang), it is the light that creates life for the puppet.

Inspired by an ancient belief from the pre-Hindu Javanese period upon the Great One Void (Sang Hyang Taya), a story unfolds through the narrative of sound and lights. It is primordial yet structured; dense yet empty. A shadow play that unfolds through the perception of its beholder, before the all encompassing shadow finally falls.

By removing the attributes of the (visual) language of the traditional Wayang, and vary elements securing how we may perceive it, we may get to the essence of the practice, the part that cannot be described with words. On the other hand, by removing parts of the signature gestures and narrative, we will understand more how few gestures one needs to remember something one knows.

In this iteration, colors appeared by peeling back the white light of the Wayang, and filmic representations of their protagonists, and overhearing from other dimensions and visual spaces framed a short quote from the Mahabharata.

Project Page

Acknowledgement

The work is funded by Initiative Neue Musik Berlin and supported by Haus der Indonesischen Kulturen. We are grateful for the advice given by Ki Sujarwo Joko Prehatin, Elisha Orcarus Allasso, Trinawangwulan Sudarga, Marius Bratoveanu, and Nina Wesemann.

Credits:

  • Bilawa Ade Respati / Concept and Music
  • Emese Csornai / Visual Concept
  • Adrian Latupeirissa / Technologist
  • Sara Enyingi / Photo
  • John Carlo / Graphic Design
  • Dico Baskoro / Documentation
  • Taïca Replansky / Moderation

All the way around

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In an intimate concert setting this performance processes the form of a ballad, a song of longing and defiance, breaking down into small meaningful gestures. The performance takes us to a concert, to an improvised dance performance, a dialogue of two lovers, a game between two (three) musicians.

On stage Meg Stuart and Doug Weiss with Mariana Carvalho.

I happily dipped my bucket for this work to the well of improvisation, my first language in lighting dance. I felt the going back to simple forms with virtuoso performing tools favored a less conceptual and more intuitive and sensual approach from my side too. Distances of observation are shifted, and so are distances and ways of relating of the performers to one another and to space. I let the space transform through tangible atmospheres of emotions, clear directions of intention. The performance is commanded for the best part by hand, complimenting the realness of music and dance.

A nice summary from Damaged Goods website:

All the Way Around takes a deep dive into what was, riding the waves between the almost-remembered and the unknown.

Concept Meg Stuart en Doug Weiss
Choreography and dance Meg Stuart
Music Doug Weiss (bass) and Mariana Carvalho (piano)
Light design Emese Csornai
Outside eye Mor Demer

cover photo: Oddbjørn Erland Aarstad – Norsk Shakespearestidsskrift\Selection ©

Andrea Macchia © at Bolzano Danza

Oddbjørn Erland Aarstad – Norsk Shakespearestidsskrift © at RIMI/IMIR

Julie de Meester © at Pumpenhaus

Julie de Meester © at Pumpenhaus

Julie de Meester © at Pumpenhaus

Iris Janke © at Lake Studios

Dream Sequence Research

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The study of film through its re-implementation on stage with light and movement, taking both film and theater out of their comfort zones. An attempt to find out where the imagination of today’s audiences can lie and how idiosyncratic the dreams of theater and film really are in comparison.

A 3 month research supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR

Research partners: Silvia Bennett, Janne Ebel, Bilawa Respati, Yvonne Sembene

Many thanks to Anni Lattunen and Wiesen55 e.V.

Photo: stills from the video by Janne Ebel assembled by Emese Csornai in the spirit of Edweard Muybridge.
(Photos feature Rihanna, Romy Schneider as seen by Henri Georges Clouzot, and a blurry millenial pause)

A slightly curving place

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Curated by Nida Ghouse, this work is a 120 minute ambisonic piece created in 2019. It deals with the archeology of a site through its sounds. The piece was comprised of sound artworks from seven different sound artists, and rendered to the auditorium by two sound artists and myself. A group of set designers built an environment that reacted to visual shifts in the room. The created space had a symbolic altitude and functioned as a disguised seating arena.

I found great possibility in taking directional input primarily from sound, and reacting to that with a number of LED tiles, limited to warm and cold white light. I worked intuitively based on a setup of haptic tools, fed back to the lighting system of the museum. The LED tiles being the primary light source to the space, the only outstanding visual impulse and one
of the dominant media perceptible in the room, there was much space to play. 

The palette was perceived broader than it was, as I could address all tiles individually. All relative values of hues and saturation was perceived as an unique color palette supported with only a small number of special lights in the room. The spatial rendering of sound and light made the room animated, and gave the audio piece a new incentive.

My work has been generously technically supported by Eduardo Abdala.

Photo: Laura Fiorio

 

contributors and in collaboration with Umashankar Manthravadi, Bani Abidi, Mojisola Adebayo, Vinit Agarwal, Sukhesh Arora, Anurima Banerji, Lilia Di Bella, Moushumi Bhowmik, Madhuri Chattopadyay, Padmini Chettur, Arunima Chowdhury, Emese Csornai, Padma Damodaran, Hugo Esquinca, Jenifer Evans, Eunice Fong, Tyler Friedman, Janardan Ghosh, Brooke Holmes, Alexander Keefe, Sukanta Majumdar, Robert Millis, Farah Mulla, Rita Sonal Panjatan, Ayaz Pasha, TJ Rehmi, RENU, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Sara, Yashas Shetty, The Travelling Archive, Maarten Visser and others.

Video excerpt:


One Hundred More

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Rooted in friendship and alliance, One hundred
more is co-authored by Laurie Young and Justine
A. Chambers, and created in collaboration with
Emese Csornai, Neda Sanai and Sarah Doucet.
On tour music has been performed by Vic
Cheong. This work is urgently informed by our
current socio-political climate, which has
produced an ever-greater groundswell of
racialized bodies resisting, moving in collective
anger, revolt and counter-resistance, captured
and replayed in an endless torrent of images.
Through incremental and iterative actions, an
iconic gesture of political resistance becomes the
site to house quotidian physical strategies for
resistance as embodied by two women of colour.
The gestural vocabulary of this work is
simultaneously archival and emergent allowing
the notion of the minor gesture, as articulated by
Erin Manning, to inform action
and structure.


“The major is a structural tendency that
organizes itself according to predetermined
definitions of value. The minor is a force that
courses through it, unmorring its structural
integrity, problematizing its normative
standards”. (Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture)

Through the emergence of the minor gesture
from rhythmic repetition, Young and Chambers
invoke the illegible and in the words of Edouard
Glissant, “ the right to opacity”.


On a conceptual level of lighting this
performance, I am playing on the ideas of
neutralizing, empowering and overpowering,
making the skin tone of the performers more
or less apparent at different times, making
white as a reference less and less readable.
I go along with rhythm at times and not at
others, guiding the audience perception to
question togetherness, question the obvious,
subliminally touch upon different imprints of
perception relating to color, and touch upon
racial profiling in a less conscious process.

Justine A. Chambers was featured artist with both the performative and video installation version of this work at the Toronto Biennial of Arts in 2024

https://torontobiennial.org/exhibition/one-hundred-more

Full documentation

CREDITS

Concept, Choreography, Performance: Justine A. Chambers and Laurie Young

Composition, Sound design: Neda Sanai, later Vic Cheong

Costume Design, Rehearsal Direction & Dramaturgy: Sarah Doucet

Lighting design: Emese Csornai

Artistic Support : Josh Hite

Outside Eye: Sergiu Matis

Production: M.I.C.A. – Movement in contemporary art

Thank you: Bruno Pocheron, Kemi Craig, Lee Su-Feh

A PRODUCTION BY LAURIE YOUNG + JUSTINE A. CHAMBERS in co-production with the Visiting Dance Artist Program, a joint initiative of the National Arts Centre and the Canada Council for the Arts, Agora de la Danse – Montreal, and SOPHIENSÆLE.

Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the Canada Council for the Arts, Dance Victoria’s Chrystal Dance Prize, British Columbia Arts Council and the Goethe – Institut.
MEDIA PARTNER: Taz. die Tageszeitung 


Photography by Josh Hite, 2019, Berlin and still from video documentation Toronto Biennial of Arts 2024

Lime Rickey International: Future Faith

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Lime Rickey International is the superconsciousness of Leyya Mona Tawil, an artist working with dance, sound and performance practices. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American. Lime Rickey International emerged as a container for the world of lost homeland. Born of ‘noise and nation’ and displaced in time, she dives into a sea of ancient and future unknowns in order to describe diasporic confusion and craving. Future Faith is rooted in Tawil’s practice of Arabic folk forms, specifically dabke and tarab. Tawil embeds political sub-narratives and cultural confusions into Lime’s performance transmissions. 

I had the absolute pleasure to work together with Leyya on her already existing performance, and re-stage the work through innovative lighting. I have heavily used comic book references translated to theatrical space, and color temperature shifts as indicators of singularity, multitude and otherness. Time is pictured as Lime must have experienced it.

The piece had me travel to Abrons art centre in New York and New performance art festival in Turku.

Photo by Jussi Virkkumaa

Future Faith features the following collaborators beside myself on lighting:

Costume: Scott Tallenger

Set: Tim Clifford

This generous artist’s curatorial projects like the Arab.amp is an exemplary work of creating new grounds of cultural exchange.

Trailer to be seen here:

Immerhin ist mein Himmel hin (Sonata #5)

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This work has premiered in lock-down, and finally found its audiences as a video. In this particular time I had to find a new way to dance, the chosen area of my artistic work, as the social context of the time created obstacles for my usual and ever-renewing fascination for this language of expression. Samuel’s concept created an appeal, that was method and practice as theme (and resource). He used the musical form of the sonata and rendered it into a choreographic score. The two performers brought this score to space with a flawless technique, and I could relate to the spaciality and score in more than one ways of segmentation in parallel.

I set up a rig half LED half halogen, and let them contrast one another with showing off their own strength of ornamentation. Subtle shifts of color, orderly and chaotic unisons of the two sides were creating a man-made second nature that was easy to relate to at the time. Light as a landscape and as dynamic presence informing space, time and their ever changing perception was keeping conversation with the hour of dance.

Choreography, music, dance: Samuel Felhandler

Dance: Lena Schattenberg

Costume: Lise Lendais

Choreographic feedback: Alix Eynaudi, Anne Juren

Production: mollusca productions

Film: Elsa Okazaki

Pictures are stills from the video work.

Password: immerhin

Zoo mantras a.k.a. Sleepwalkers/ reconstruction

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In the framework of Tierforme(l)n, a small festival that took place at Sophiensaele, I was lighting Zoo mantras and an improvisation entitled Tierforme/l/n, 2017 September.

Simone Forti is an iconic figure of dance of today, and she took this place in the most unpretentious manner. For me the interest to participate came from different motivations: I have been a longtime admirer of Capoeira Angola, so for me examining interpretation and intentions of embodying animal behavior, experiencing an array of objectives was important. To make a reconstruction of an existing work never happened before in my working life. I took on the challenge of the expectation of staying visually quiet, yet bringing another direction and rhythm into the room, and bring a tone of presence to the performance. I was glad to work together with unpretentious performing artists who would playfully channel the work.

This was my first time working at Sophiensaele, and this was a dream for me from years before I moved to Berlin. Not only was I working there, but I was making lighting design for two rooms in the same week. One idea to brush through two completely different rooms, in one improvised, in another scripted, with the video reference of Simone Forti’s original performance.

Choreography and Original Performance: Simone Forti
Dance: Claire Filmon and Martin Nachbar

Dramaturgy: Sigrid Gareis
Light: Emese Csornai

Photos by: Renata Chueire

Production management: Susanne Beyer