This performance is a solo piece of Julyen Hamilton, playing on the border of the graspable and non-graspable, sanity and ghostly, life and death.
I designed light or this performance in 2016 July at Dock11 Berlin as a part of Impro Xchange festival, and on St. John’s Island in Canada, on the Festival of new dance.
This is my take on the beyond
as it resides right in the here and now.
It is both eerie and assuring; it wavers calmly on the edge
of perception and understanding.
It provides little reference except
the movement of
and the sounds from
the body.
Solo performance of Julyen Hamilton, for which I designed lighting at Dock11 in July 2015.
The FORERUNNER’ is the descendent of actions past bringing strands of insight for the future.
He is the pioneer of the next moment; he is apart;
He was born multiple times; he is wild card, thief, idiot and sage.
He speaks the moment and dances the present and dares to talk from
within his understanding to beyond its limits.
He says: ‘here…. a mirror if you wish’
In ‘The FORERUNNER’ full sentences and paragraphs stem from the body dancing and the mind and heart raving.
‘The FORERUNNER’ (performed so far in Germany, Iceland, Spain) follows ‘The Immaterial World’
which has been performed many times throughout Europe and the States and Russia.
(Text by Julyen Hamilton)
Concept / Dance / Decor / Text: Julyen Hamilton
Costume: Orlando
Lights: Emese Csornai
Cover photograph by Patrick Beelaert
This performance of Katie Duck and Sharon Smith is a joined venture of two women who are survivors, mothers, who love and carry on, who go deep in feelings and yet running the distance. In fact this is a performance of three women, two of which are mothers, three of which dressed in bikini for the show, as a tribute to a fourth woman.
Coming to think of which, the show is a performance containing plenty of women, who wrote songs without ever getting credited for, who were or are moms regardless of being thanked, who weren’t or couldn’t be moms, who were the invisible hand, who were not ashamed of their feelings, their bodies, their roles…
Concept, creation and performance: Katie Duck, Sharon Smith
co-creation and lights: Emese Csornai
As Sharon Smith writes:
The inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in the expressed.
The title was a combination of ‘abandon ship’ and some sort of ‘you can’t run away from yourself’ reality check. Somehow, ‘being human’ is what we are stuck with.
The curse of the human must be all these feelings.
Having a child is a most vivid, unbearable emotion…Irretrievable loss. You cannot put them back in, once they have torn themselves from your belly via vagina or scalpel, they set in motion a certain grief… a slow, life-long, death-looming loss. They leave you and leave you and leave you. And that is your job. To help them do just that.
The love is so strong that you can deal with their shit, their piss, their selfishness and their hatred… of you.
Katie and Sharon have daughters. It’s a woman thing. They have shared a friendship that has grown into family feelings over twenty years. This work seemed to explode all that, all those… feelings… all over the stage.
A soundtrack contains the action. It is haunted by female song writers who we love shamelessly and who we want to be in the room with us. There are others, but of course there is not enough space or time in one room (however grand) to include all the awesome women who wrote songs that speak through us and to us, in the work… in the life.
The performance took place at Dock11 in April 2017.
The two performers create an instant composition using their wealth of knowledge and skills.
I was honored with the quest of lighting their duet in 2017 April at Dock11. The assignment was the most free and complex: I had to design a lighting plot that does not facilitate the performance but presents a concept on its own. The two performers work the same way, and through listening and understanding the time-based aspect of the other two players, compliments the performance as a common creation.
The performance was approximately 50 minutes.
I selected some stills to represent the work, from the video recording made by Julyen Hamilton.
This workshop is to encourage dancers, choreographers and performers to bring their practice with real time performance towards a meaningful collaboration with light designer. Real time performance is a challenging art-form. When it is dealt with sincerely, inclusive of light design, real time performance elevates the live theater to it’s highest potential. This demands from the performers a high level of openness and collaborative capabilities, and an increased capability of decision-making. Such high exposure of presence cannot be accompanied with a mediocre staging. It is necessary to include stage lighting as a potent and equal element of play. This workshop will include discussions with Katie Duck and myself about language and technical options with light design, alongside session work in the theater with light design. In these sessions, can take opportunity to place our practice viewing from the public view point, sitting with me on the board and in physical creations with light in the theater space. Feedback and discussions will revolve around shifts, effects and tension that are interactive between light, body, performance.
April 8 and 9 2017 (Saturday and Sunday) 11:00-15:00. Dock 11
€120 Two days, €70 One day. Register: katie@katieduck.com
In the first glimpse I recognize your hands. Slowly I notice your gestures. In her presence I see myself standing there. With her I see the other. Together, “you” and “I” are strangers.
I see you again, and your eyes, in which I encounter the self and recognize a stranger. How many times can we meet one another in one encounter? With this piece an encounter between two people is presented, in which various fragments of gestures, surprises, and playfulness between two are explored.
This is the first piece I directed and showed in Berlin. It is a Multi-disciplinary dance performance.
The performance is dealing with two strangers meeting each other, and how such an encounter can change the life of both participants. The same meeting is introduced from different angles on different levels over and over again. The more levels we meet the story, the more apparent it becomes that meeting a stranger is our best chance for understanding our motivation and character.
This is a playful but critical piece related to the self in context of actual politics and cyber environments, and how fulfilling certain roles take away from our experiencing the world surrounding us. Perhaps solidarity as a term in some cases could be replaced by curiosity or self-interest.
The performance premiers on the 23rd of February 2017 at Dock11, and is made with the help of Dock11, Tanzfabrik, and Wiesen 55e.V.
This five-days practical workshop provides a tool to deal with the multimedia aspect of dance and movement theatre conceptually, and in realisation of a piece. During the week, the performing space will be examined through creative movement tasks, with special attention to how many ways the use of light and music can be invested to the advantage of a creation of set or improvisative performances. The compositional focus of the work makes the deep analysis of the architectural, sonic and emotional aspects of space possible. The awareness from this study can be then applied in one’s own performing practices.
The workshop closes with an informal showing at Studio laborgras.
When: 24-28. October 2016 / 14-17h
Where: Studio laborgras / Paul-Lincke-Ufer 44A 10999 Berlin
Price: 110 € / 95 € for early birds
Contact: info@emesecsornai.com
