Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts

Established in February 2006 by Hanna Preuss, Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts Ljubljana is a comprehensive centre for the exploration, creation, development, and promotion of sound arts and related disciplines in Slovenia and abroad.

Hanna's Atelier explores the role, function, and meaning of sound arts in individual, social, interpersonal, cultural, and artistic contexts through educational and research activities, film, performance, interdisciplinary projects, exhibitions, and installations. The Atelier’s aim is to enhance the appreciation, understanding, and value of sound arts and to positively position sound arts in the eyes of artists, general public, and funding institutions. The Atelier's programmes and activities include workshops on the role of sound in perception and in the evocation of emotion and meaning in an artistic context (designed for students of all ages, backgrounds and skill levels).

Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts often presents its productions at Festival Ljubljana. In the period 2012–2015 it ran the management and programme of the Vodnik Homestead in Ljubljana turning it into a Centre for Sonorous Arts.

Background

Born in Poland, Hanna Preuss studied sound design and direction at the Polish Film Academy, Lodz. Since 1979, she has worked as sound designer and sound engineer on more than 120 short, animated, documentary, experimental, and feature-length Slovene or international films. For her accomplishments, she has gained numerous awards including the Golden Medal at the Belgrade Film festival in Yugoslavia, the Golden Arena at the Pula Film Festival in Croatia, the American Westrex Award in Trieste, Italy, and several Metod Badjura Awards for best sound at the Festival of Slovenian Film. In 1988, she received the Župančič Award of the City of Ljubljana for her research of the sound based art forms.

Productions

Hanna Preuss collaborates with a wide range of artists from the field of theatre, film, contemporary dance, visual arts and graphic design, mostly on international basis. She has been engaged in the creation of sound compositions for the theatre and visual installations. She designed soundscapes for the dance/theatre performances Mezzanino (2001), Hi Res (2004), and Gallery of Dead Women (2005) by Maja Delak and Mala Kline (see Emanat Institute) and collaborated as sound director and composer in the production of 3 En-Knap dance films, namely Narava Beso (1995), Vertigo Bird (1997), and Taming the Time (2002), all choreographed by Iztok Kovač.

Sonorous Theatre

Hanna Preuss's 2006 multi-dimensional sound and light installation Sonoria, produced by En-Knap Productions, marked the beginning of Preuss's so-called "Sonorous Theatre", an avant-garde multimedia research form of European theatre which comprises the elements of mobile three-dimensional sound installation in a space (emerging from Surround Sound technique from cinematography) with expressive means of the theatre and other arts. Sonorous Theatre deals with expressive and emotive working and innovation of sound in the theatre and with technological developments in the area of sound processing and reproduction. This kind of theatre is understood as a sound aquarium in which the spectator floats between darkness and light, immersed in a moving soundscape and the emotive and narrative power of the sound, traversing his/her emotional landscapes.

Other sonorous theatre performances to date include: a gallery intervention Soniferus (2007), which offered tangible, bodily experience of phenomena connected with the sound; the 2008 sound and visual installation in the cistern of Ljubljana Castle Cantata of the Spoken and the Seen [Kantata na besede in podobe], Pandora's Loom [Pandorine statve], and a site-specific work Requiem for Sunken Thoughts [Rekviem za potopljene misli].

Rekviem za potopljene misli / Requiem for Sunken Thoughts by hannas atelier on YouTube

The intermedia performance Drawings. Echoes. Absence. Dreams. (2009), presented in Cankarjev dom and co-produced by the Eẋ Ponto International Festival, Teatro Miela (Trieste), Cultural Center of the University in Celovec/Klagenfurt UNIKUM (Austria), and the Norway Production Network for Electronic Art, presented a mature sonorous theatre creation with a great development potential. In December 2010, the Drawings.Echoes.Absence.Dreams. production was presented in Kyoto, Japan. Further, the performance Underwater in the Sound of Japan (2009), created with singer/performer Irena Tomažin, exploring the emotional archetypes of language and including presentations titled PTIH! was also presented, besides in Ljubljana, in Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan. The last two sonorous theatre productions were a light and video installation SCI-FI ... (2010) presented in the "Kazemate" hall of Ljubljana Castle and Flight of the Vitruvian [Pobeg Vitruviana] (2011), which presents the artist's development from a Renaissance man of reason to post-atomic virtual immaterial being through sonorous interventions into the space, presented at Španski Borci Cultural Centre.

Nohsono

In April 2011, the première of the performance NOHSONO took place in the Knight's Hall of Križanke in Ljubljana, in coproduction with Ljubljana Festival, Teatro Miela (Trieste), and Nipkow Programm (Berlin). The performance was developed by Hanna Preuss and got a special permission of Kongo Hisanori, Twenty-sixth Head of the Kongo school of Noh and the Japanese Noh organisation Nougakukyoukai, Association of Noh theatre, that one of the school's prominent young actors Tatsushige Udaka appears in a European theatre performance. This extraordinary team, which also includes the Japanese contemporary dancer Haruna Tanaka and a number of Slovene artists, gently composed an environment of light and sound that accommodated traditional Noh invocations of five ancient spirits, creating a forceful allegory of loneliness and yearning, the calling of legacy and the dreams of freedom and love. This extraordinary encounter between two extremly different ways of making theatre is documented in an experimental documentary film SonoLog directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Hanna Slak.

Recent projects

In 2013, Hanna's Atelier, in co-production with Ljubljana Castle and Vodnik Homestead, produced a multimedia performance Sonocalypse (Sonokalipsa), in which the featured international cast explore the challenges of human relations in the present time, and by welcoming to the stage a common language of poetry, play, sound, and light, attempt to concieve a new community, a new means of existence.

In 2013, Atelier has produced the first sonorous fairy tale Madam Beanpole and the Stray Little Sound (Gospa Sulica in mali izgubljeni zvokec), co-produced by Bobri Festival, telling the story of the sounds living in an old theatre by using an abstract and fictitious narrative, and in 2014, the performance Cepetepetanc, co-produced by Mladinsko Theatre and presented at Bobri Festival.

External links