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)
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.
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.
