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Hit the Wall
No full textMembers of the cast introduce the audience to their stories about Stonewall. “I was there.” Underscored by music and lit in vibrant purples and ambers, we feel removed from reality for a moment.https://ir.uiowa.edu/lighting_design/1166/thumbnail.jp
Faculty/Graduate Dance Concert 2020
No full textThe ending of the seventh and final movement of A Course in Rigor & Cheese: Disney in Abstraction, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” from The Lion King. The main dancers of this section sit downstage and give peace signs while the rest of the cast sits upstage observing them. I lit the main dancers in blue and pink to convey the feeling of love that is present throughout nearly every Disney movie in existence while lighting the upstage cast members in neutral white to convey the juxtaposition of living in the present while reminiscing of the past.https://ir.uiowa.edu/lighting_design/1127/thumbnail.jp
Marat\u27s Dead: Groundplan
No full textCreated in VectorWorks, the groundplan and section drawings for Marat’s Dead were very important. Creating an intimate space requires foresight into audience sightlines and obstructions, as well as planning a quick load in and strike.https://ir.uiowa.edu/media_design/1014/thumbnail.jp
Marat\u27s Dead
No full textIn an age when everything we do is watched, where does the revolution begin? Marat’s Dead is an exploration into an abstract world seeded with questions about our responsibilities and relationships to the world around us, pitting duty against passion and history against future. Char Corday and Johnny Marat have met before, but it is unclear whether it was this life or another. Char faces the internal conflict of the repetitive dance between love and death, as she relives her truth that she both loves and must murder Johnny Marat, in every life.
What interested me most about this script was the conversation between past and present when juxtaposed against the constant surveillance of the world around. Time breaks down and the story between these two characters takes place in a loose timestream that oscillates back and forth. It seemed to be the perfect script in which to explore the convergence of media, scenic, and lighting design in order to both push and clarify the abstraction of time; for that reason I was interested in designing all three elements.
As this is such an intimate conversation between two lovers and enemies, it was a natural choice to put it in the laps of the audience. I presented the option of staging this inside of our light lab–a 24-foot by 28-foot dark-walled room– in which we could create an intimate and nearly voyeuristic experience. Integrating media into this became a large research question for me. Throughout my tenure at the University of Iowa, I have often found myself engrossed in the question of how to create a fluid world. In the world of Marat, media is everywhere. It seemed the perfect canvas to explore the manipulation of time with video speed and environment.
I chose to create a projection surface out of a white silk curtain with which I could help the audience understand when we were slipping through time. When in Marat’s bathroom, the curtain is a curtain, bright and textured, but when time breaks, the nebulas and swirling of the universe overtakes the bathroom and we are transported elsewhere, unstuck from reality. In the present, time stretches as water flows into the bathroom, unnaturally slowed on the scattered television screens. Scenically, the bathroom tile ebbs and flows in incomplete chucks, creating the illusion that the fabric of the world is dissipating beneath them. Nothing is complete in this reality. The lighting alludes both to the bright, unforgiving light of a bathroom and the unyielding television studio light that leaves nowhere to hide.
The challenges within this exploration lie in creating complex visuals that are supportive, but not distracting; trying to unify the screen with the reality in a way that transposed the images onto the action within the minds of the audience. Working closely with the director, I worked to integrate these moments into the action onstage to prevent the very real possibility of disconnect between actor and art. It was important to me to connect the video feeds to the emotional cues and tone from the characters. For instance, when Char obsessively searches the tiles for secrets, a distorted image of the same hexagon pattern appears on the screens and at another time, static overtakes the screens as she recounts the events that led to her family’s deaths.
In order to more thoroughly explore this experiment with integrating technology and story-telling, we applied for external grant funding through the Graduate and Professional Student Government. We were granted with research funding which allowed us to be more specific in our scenic materials. I was able to order fabric for our scenic treatments that reacted well with my lighting, along with the ability to execute the broken tile floor with materials purchased from our shop. Those materials were then routed with the CNC machine to create the honeycomb tile pattern. This grant also afforded us the ability to have an abstracted security camera 3-D printed by one of the graduate students in the 3-D Art Department, Huda Al-Aithan. The opportunity to create a more tangible space allowed me to explore the conversation between the design elements, such as the physical hex-tiled floor with the version that appeared on the screens. Without these details, the media would have appeared to be establishing location instead of emotion.
For my media system, I used the Watchout media server in conjunction with two Matrox screen splitters, as well as a 4k Panasonic laser projector. This gave me seven surfaces on which to use digital media. The ability to surround the playing space with screens allowed me to create a changing background that did not pull the audience’s eyes elsewhere as they were behind the action from every angle. I was also able to project pre-filmed surveillance footage from the angle of our 3-D printed “camera” in order to create the voyeuristic environment we were looking for.
In choosing to stage this production in our lighting lab, I had use of a flexible lighting space with enough resources to effectively light the space for an audience that was positioned on both sides of the playing area. Two moving lights also gave me the ability to create several interesting lighting moments for the intense moments of and leading up to the death of Marat. To simulate blood pooling in the bathroom, a red light grew from pin-spot to flood, filling the room with red light as blood swirled in the water on the screens.
With only four days to bring this production to life, it took every member of our team pitching in. It really was an exercise in choosing what could and could not be accomplished in a limited amount of time. I found myself simplifying my design and choosing to focus on visuals and events that would most support the text. This served me well as my original goal was to create a cohesive world. Not having the time to wander down rabbit holes forced me to keep things simple, which in turn gave me more time to consider the conversation that was happening between the visual elements. It became a satisfying exercise in self-restraint and expression
Light in the Piazza
No full textLight in the Piazza was a part of the 2019/2020 Mainstage Season, as a co-production with the University of Iowa School of Music and the Theatre Arts program. This musical takes place in the summer of 1953, following American tourist, Margaret Johnson and her daughter Clara, a child-like young woman, as they vacation in Italy. While exploring Italy, Clara meets Fabrizio Naccarelli, beginning an intense romance between the two. As the cultural differences are explored and secrets revealed Margaret, who is extremely protective of Clara, begins to imagine a new, happier life for her daughter in Italy, and herself as well.
My concept for this design focuses on the various relationships of the play; while the main relationship the play centers around is between Margaret and her daughter Clara, we witness the full spectrum of romantic love. The love between Clara and Fabrizio, is like spring, fresh and blossoming. The love between Fabrizio’s brother Giuseppe and his wife France is hot and lustful like the summer. The love between Fabrizio’s parents, Signor and Signora Naccarelli is like the fall, comfortable. And finally, the love we see between Margaret and her husband Roy is cold and ending like the winter. I took inspiration from this cycle of love and seasons and began to research the colors of Florence, Italy throughout the year. The colors I found for each season is where I drew my color palates from for the corresponding lovers.
While putting a lot of my focus into the color schemes of the show, I also paid a lot of attention in the design to separate Margaret and Clara aesthetically from the Naccarellis. In the 1950s, fashion was peak around Dior’s New Look dress, but there was still a distinct difference between American fashion and the fashion in Italy. To push this difference, I put Clara and Margaret in very quintessential, and recognizable fifties looks; full petticoats under all of Clara’s looks, and a colorful but sophisticated style for Margaret. Their costumes are based in magazines and catalogs from the 1950s and popular sitcoms. For the Italians, I looked towards 1950s runway shows, fashion designers, such as Balenciaga, Dior, and Givenchy, and film icons like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren.
This musical has a cast of seventeen actors, playing thirty-six roles, wearing seventy costumes. To complete this design, I was allotted the budget of $7000. There is a total of eleven costumes being built for this show, and all others are either bought or pulled. The performance of this show was originally scheduled for April 15th – 19th, 2020, however due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, it was postponed until November of 2020
Biopolitical Bollywood: Sexual Violence as Cathartic Spectacle in Section 375 and Article 15
Full text linkThis paper will discuss the representation of sexual violence in two recent mainstream Bollywood films, Section 375 and Article 15, using Laura Mulvey’s argument about the production of visual pleasure. Laura Mulvey states how the male gaze of the camera makes invisible, and produces as reality, the objectification of the woman and the identification of the audience with the male performer. This paper uses these findings to state how the male gaze is used to identify with the male protagonist in both films in order to create an identificatory politics. The films deploy a pathos of familiality: both the familiar and the familial are used to create a sympathetic gaze towards the male protagonists. Further, the paper argues that the use of media and the ‘regime of the visible’ are used in both films in order to enable the production of a biopolitical gaze which shows how the state uses ‘public penology’ in rape trials (Bhattacharya 7). For example, the paper points to the films’ use of techniques such as the depiction of the angry activist crowd or the fiery romanticized police officer in Section 375 and Article 15, respectively. These devices are used to disrupt and affectively regulate the viewers’ emotions towards a biopolitical logic of the goodness of state machinery. The paper concludes that it is a male gaze that affectively controls its viewers and aligns them with statist ends. The films, the paper argues, also act to perpetuate ‘rape myths’: fictions with a repetitive force behind them that seem to pass as truth in discourse
Species Spotlight: A Blog About Biodiversity
Full text linkSpecies Spotlight: A Blog About Biodiversity, was created to educate and inspire college-aged students. Topics included biodiversity, conservation, and endangered species. The blog was updated weekly for several weeks during the semester and then promoted on Latham’s social media pages. In the time that we live in this was the best way to reach as many people as possible since so much learning and communication is done online. On this page you will find a narrative on how the project was compiled, images from the blog (including the banner of the home page), a video going through the narrative, and finally a QR code that you can scan and check out the blog.
You can also go check out my blog by using the following link.
http://speciesspotlights.family.blog
