Hannah Wasileski

           

some work Hannah produced on the Music and Visual Art BA.....

Virtuosic is four-screen video installation of Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden', performed by a virtual string quartet. It falls somewhere in between the boundaries of performance and installation art. Four musicians were recorded playing their parts of the Allegro from Schubert’s 'Death and the Maiden' in isolation from each other, only coming together to form a string quartet in the virtual realm of this project. Through recording each player’s performance separately, the four parts become unrestricted by the score of the original quartet, and are at liberty to fragment and disperse, and recompose themselves — sometimes in relation to the score and sometimes with total disregard to Schubert — in order to create an experimentally estranged rendition of the movement.
The piece explores the unconventional presentation of a string quartet, probing the musical and gestural communication between the performers and their instruments. The use of various video cameras at the original performances served as a tool for capturing the gestural language that might otherwise go unnoticed in a live staging, and have here been drawn to the foreground to emphasize the musicians’ performative idiosyncrasies.

Virtuosic exploits both the visual as well as the musical nature of a string quartet performance, allowing for unconventional forms of manipulation, abstraction, and elaboration. This virtual representation of a famous Schubert quartet strives to open out the horizons of the interplay between musical performance and the visual arts, as well as to transcend traditional notions of classical music through its creative expression in an alternative medium.

In 'Sonata for Violin and Hammer', through the destruction and then altered reassembly of the instrument itself as well as its sound, I intend to create a sense of estrangement; I would like the audience to experience this classical instrument and its traditional music in an unconventional way, and gain new insight into its potentiality. By creating this unfamiliar presentation of the violin, I want the viewers to be able to estrange themselves from their preconceptions of the instrument; I hope to create a new recognition of the possibilities of this “old fashioned” style, and provide the audience with a suggestion of ulterior uses of the instrument, questioning or even negating the stereotype, and giving the violin new meaning.

For the sound element of the piece, I have used the real time (about 1:30 min) of the process of destroying the violin and have laid it over the same amount of time of Bach’s Ciaccona from his Partita No.2 in D minor for solo violin. I have then cut up and rearranged the sonata as counterpoint to the smashes of the instrument, creating a disassembled sonata, determined by the timing of the destruction process.

I have furthermore explored an alternative form of visual notating and scoring, which graphically represents the shattered violin. I composed this by covering the back wall with blank manuscript paper, and then tracing around the cast shadows of the shattered violin. This leaves a permanent imprint of the piece; like a musical score. It furthermore links to my idea of estrangement in the sense that the shape of the disassembled violin is extracted and represented separately from the instrument itself. The outlined shadow illustrates the distinctive form of the violin’s reassembly, and creates an alternative way of presenting the abstraction of its original structure.

what Hannah did after graduation.... 

After graduation, I traveled to New York where I was offered an internship at the Museum of Modern Art. I also began to explore the experimental downtown theatre scene. I found myself drawn towards projection design and began working on shows with directors creating shadow puppetry, live overhead projection, live-feed projection and video design. I can see a clear link between my current interests and the work with video, lighting, projection and sound which I did for my final degree show.

I am currently at the Yale School of Drama Projection Design Program pursing an MFA in Theatre Design. My undergraduate studies on Music and Visual Art have laid a solid foundation for this course and I am looking forward to learning more about sound design, set and lighting design as well as costume design. 


See more of Hannah's work at http://hannahwasileski.com