Emese Csornai

Tag: light design

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

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

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

Underneath

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The piece of Aline Landreau explores both the feeling of losing ground and that of finding it again, in focusing on the different notions of foundation and (under)ground. What kind of structures are carrying us, concretely as well as metaphorically ? From which areas emerges the desire to set (down) movement and voice, until gesture and speech appear, in the temporary common space proposed by the piece ?

I have collaborated with Bruno Pocheron on lighting this work, him designing a system of communication between vvvv, and parameters of sound input, choosing color, me drawing upon the dramaturgy of the piece and designing the rest what concerns light for the performance. I have been imagining a finite place (that has been represented by the set) and made it appear unstable in a variety of ways. The choreography lead us out from this microcosm to a much broader space with a different orientation.

Full cast:

Concept: Aline Landreau
Performance, voice and text: Aline Landreau, Sébastien Chatellier
Music: Antoine Monzonis-Calvet
Light: Emese Csornai, Bruno Pocheron
Scenography: Aline Landreau, Bruno Pocheron
Dramaturgic advice: Thomas Schaupp
Costumes and outside eye: Marion Montel
Vocal coaching: Ute Wassermann

Photos by Dieter Hartwig

Production Raisa Kröger / M.i.C.A. – DE, Charlotte Giteau & Sandrine Barrasso / Météores – FR
PR Barbara Gstaltmayr
 
Coproduction Tanzfabrik – funded by Senate of Berlin for Culture and Europe, La Cabine / Le Pad Angers, Honolulu Nantes (FR).
With the support of the city of Nantes, CCNN – National Choreographic Center of Nantes, the Loire Atlantique Department, the Région Pays de la Loire, CNDC Angers, Wiesen.55 Berlin and Fonds Transfabrik – the French-German fund for performing arts.      

Performances
→ 24th of November 2017 • GRAND HUIT, Honolulu and CCNN – National choreographic center, Nantes
→ 1st and 2nd of June 2017 • Tanzfabrik Berlin

Summer news

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Sounddance Festival is rapidly approaching! I am glad to invite you to Dock 11, where a nice collection of Berlin-based artists are going to show their recent works that relate to or are instant composition works. The festival organised by Jenny Haack will take place from the 20th of July. Both weeks there will be different performances each night, Thursday through Sunday. I am doing the technical direction of the festival and will be the lighting designer and technician for some of the performances too, alongside with Aurora Rodriguez and Asier Solana.

Another good news for performing artists: the dates of the next workshop ‘Performing Space’ has clarified!

The workshop will be October 2-6, each day between 14-17h at Studio Laborgras in Kreuzberg.

More information will follow soon!

The immaterial world

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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.

“Welcome to the Immaterial World.”

(text by Julyen Hamilton)

More information here

Stills taken from the performance at St. John’s Island

The Forerunner

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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

Video link can be found here

Rest of the photographs are stills from the video recording made at Dock11 in July 2015

Abandon Human

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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.
More information at: http://abandonhuman.com/
Photographs of the performance by Izabela Pacewicz-Wysocka