Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts

Contact

Hanin atelje sonoričnih umetnosti

Gornji trg 23, SI-1000 Ljubljana

hannasatelier@gmail.com

Phone386 (0) 40 885 207

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.

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'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.

Hanna Preuss has collaborated 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 dance works by Maja Delak, Mala Kline, Iztok Kovač, Irena Z. Tomažin, etc.

Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts presents its productions at Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana Castle, Španski borci Culture Centre, Križanke. 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.

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). Atelier is known to have produced the first sonorous fairy tale Madam Beanpole and the Stray Little Sound (2013), which was co-produced by Beavers Festival of Culture and Art Education.

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.

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

Nohsono

In April 2011, the première of the performance NOHSONO took place in the Knight's Hall of Križanke in Ljubljana, in co-production 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 extremely different ways of making theatre is documented in an experimental documentary film SonoLog directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Hanna Slak.

See also

• Španski borci Culture Centre