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Modelling Light: The transformative role of the model and the miniature studio in the development of lighting design practices in the UK
Get PDFAs a plastic, immaterial medium, the use of light on stage is challenging: how to experiment, test, develop and communicate lighting intentions in advance of the performance? How, in other words, to model light? And for lighting practitioners, how to acquire, hone and reinvent techniques and a design sensibility? Lit models have been used for these purposes since at least the start of the twentieth century, working at various scales from the traditional 1:24 or 1:25 of the scenic designer’s model up to room-sized, quarter-scale model studios. In this article, I trace the crucial role of model-scale lighting and miniature lighting rigs in the development of lighting practice in the UK at key historical moments: in the 1950s when the named role of lighting designer first appeared; in the 1990s when dedicated degree-level lighting design education began and when the model studio concept initiated the practice of pre-visualisation and pre-programming of lighting for the concert stage, before the advent of 3D software visualisation. I argue these developments were vital to the establishment of performance lighting in the UK as an artistic practice in its own right, and propose the model-scale lighting studio has a continuing role for lighting designers’ development
Fun with Cancer Patients: Kanazawa
No full textA major collaboration with 21st Century Museum for Contemporary Art and Hanaume Cancer Support Centre, this 3-day installation featured over 30 cancer patients, medical professionals, support workers and bereaved family members creating one-to-one performances with galleries. Developed over nearly two years with a team of over 50 participants, the work was our attempt to respond to the silence around illness and the difficulty of having challenging conversations, employing methodologies from both intimate and one-to-one performances and patient focus groups.
After a short introduction by Brian (in Japanese, in which he is not nearly fluent), audience members were paired with a Member and taken into the theatre or around the Museum and taken through a benri (a tool of convenience) for conversations about cancer
Playability: A Reinvention of Contemporary Lighting Practice Drawing on Fred Bentham’s 1930s Light Console
Get PDFIn London in the mid nineteen-thirties Fred Bentham invented a theatre lighting control system that was in several key respects a radical departure from the controls of the time. In a pre-digital age, the Light Console made use of cinema organ technology to create a lighting control that for the first time gave full, finger-tip control to a single seated operator, and was compact enough to be placed front-of-house so the operator could see the stage. Bentham saw the lighting operator’s role as essentially artistic, not merely technical, and created a console to allow him to fulfil this vision. However, in the English-speaking theatre world at least, the role of the theatre lighting operator has remained a procedural one with minimal creative input into the performance.
In this essay, I describe a research project that has investigated what might be learnt from Bentham’s ideas – embodied in the Light Console – and how these ideas could be applied in contemporary theatre-making practices. I describe both the initial stage of the research, restoring to working order of one of Bentham’s original Light Consoles, and the second stage in which a new lighting control system was created, based on principles derived from the radical innovations of the Light Console. This new console was used to light a devised performance in order to test how it might support a reinvention of the theatre lighting process in which the lighting operator becomes the lighting artist.
In the essay I argue that to arrive at an embodied, lived understanding of the past – the kind of understanding of the practitioners of the time – the artefacts of the past must be used, not merely examined and documented. Furthermore, the value of examining the artefacts of the past is not only to understand earlier times, but also to inform, and perhaps to radically reshape, present and future practices
When Acting Like Children becomes Acting For Children
Get PDFoai:bruford.collections.crest.ac.uk:6Acting Like Children was a research event held in 2011 examining approaches to the performance of child characters by adult artists, involving Polka Theatre, Action Transport Theatre, Travelling Light, Early Years Theatre expert Jo Belloli, director Sally Cookson, Vice Chair of Action for Children’s Arts Vicky Ireland and David Harradine, Artistic Director of Fevered Sleep. The event was hosted and documented by Jeremy Harrison and the Rose Bruford College TYA Centre, resulting in a conference paper When Acting Like Children Becomes Acting For Children, delivered by Harrison at the NYU Steinhardt conference Which Way TYA? in New York, 2012