Felt Works: A Theremin Performance by Emma Korantema

The theremin, an instrument played without touch, becomes a way of exploring the relationship between the intangible and the embodied: how distance, gesture, proximity and breath can become musical material. In an era increasingly shaped by digital mediation and attempts to extract human experience from the body, Emma’s practice asks what remains irreducibly embodied in every transmission.

Having witnessed the threshold between life and death through her former work as a doctor, Emma approaches presence as a fundamental form of aliveness. The performance considers the body notas a limitation, but as the place where meaning, memory and magic are continually created. Emma approaches performance as an act of divination, responding in real time to sound, space and the bodies gathered in the room. Melodies return altered; gestures become scores; and the magic of meaning is made in the moment, inseparable from those who are (and aren’t) present to witness it.

This performance is the culmination of a year-long research project into gesture-based sound, movement and embodied technology, supported by artists now (formerly a-n, the artists’ information company) through the artist bursaries programme 2025–26. Developed through experiments with theremin, movement and live sound, the work asks what remains irreducibly embodied in an age increasingly shaped by digital mediation.