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).

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, Hi Res and Gallery of Dead Women by Maja Delak and Mala Kline (see Emanat, Dance Production and Education) and collaborated as sound director and composer in the production of three EnKnap dance films, namely Narava Beso, Vertigo Bird, and Taming the Time, all choreographed by Iztok Kovač.

Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts has created a range of interdisciplinary projects, exhibitions, and installations, such as the 2008 sound and visual installation Cantata of the Spoken and the Seen, a multi-dimensional sound installation Sonoria (2006), which marks the beginning of Preuss' s.c. 'sonorous theatre', an avantgarde form of European theatre that introduces 'surround' film sound to the theatre, creating galaxies in which the spectator is positioned, the performance Underwater in the Sound of Japan (2009), created with singer/performer Irena Tomažin, exploring the emotional archetypes of language and including presentations PTIH! in Ljubljana and Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan, a performance with a light and video installation SCI-FI... (2010), Dire Poesia 2010 and Flight of the Vitruvian (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. Recordings of projects are usually available on CD-ROM.

The intermedia performance Drawings. Echoes. Absence. Dreams presented in Cankarjev dom in 2009 was 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. In December 2010, the Drawings.Echoes.Absence.Dreams. production was presented in Kyoto, Japan.

In April 2011, the premiere of the performance NOHSONO took place in the Knight's Hall of the 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 Mr. 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 Slovenian 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.

External links

Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts

Background

Productions

External links

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