Ensemble Klang commission / light design by Pavla Beranová
/ composer Ela Orleans (electronics, voice + video collage)
duration: 40–50 minutes

Forma Nubium is a meditation on impermanence, perception, and light. It explores how clarity and obscurity coexist, how order can emerge within change, and how, even in moments of loss, the shifting sky can feel like a kind of home; it explores change, vagueness, and the quiet beauty found in uncertainty.

Forma Nubium follows the long human fascination with clouds, from their ancient and medieval symbolism of the divine to the early scientific urge to understand how they refract and scatter light.

The music is built from small repeating patterns and fragments that pulse like hidden metronomes. These patterns blur and shift, creating textures that feel both structured and fluid. The ensemble moves as a single atmospheric body, with electronics and instruments merging until distinctions disappear. Piano surfaces hesitantly and dissolves like traces of thought. Melody sometimes appears, but it is brief and fragile. There is only one song. It is made of juxtaposed Polish romantic poems about clouds and water.

Forma Nubium invites the listener to dwell inside movement itself, to sense how form continually dissolves and reappears, and to find a quiet calm in the unpredictability of transformation. Visually, light and sound move together, oscillating between opacity and illumination. Pavla Beranová’s design would explore light as substance: refracted, diffused, sometimes almost tactile. Her work could trace the same passage as the music: turning the stage into an optical instrument. 

The video work will draw inspiration from the NASA cloud recordings and historical cloud illustrations tracing humanity’s changing vision of the sky.