Dance Lighting
Lighting Dance is near and dear to my heart, as it was the first type or Lighting Design i ever did. I quickly feel in love with the process of collaboration and communication between the Designer and the Choreographer, sharing each others vision and imagination as we collectively try and create living art. The unique challenges of understanding and interpreting dance's intent and meaning have always been fascinating, providing a glimpse into how someone else thinks and how you may respond to such ideas.
Dancing is, above all, storying-telling through motion.
This Dance was Choreographed and structured in three parts, Recognition, Panic, and Acceptance. It was meant to be a conversation about the fear and anxiety that the newest generation was experiencing with Climate Change and the State of the World that they had Inherited.In the Part One, I first played with Color, I using a shift from gentle Blue/Green to a Darker Blue that signified the gradual awareness of the dancers. Then, complimenting the Choreographers sudden shift in rhythm and tone as the dance became frantic and desperate, I shifted to spiraling and rotating textures that speed up and slowed with the pulse of the dancers. The Final Part, faded back to the Blue/Green of the beginning, only the textures remained. Accompanied by the knowledge and anxiety, the old look blended with the new feel to create a something entirely different.
This Dance was a Hip-Hop piece choreographed by a dancer who had struggled with Alopecia most of her life. She shaved off her hair young, while being raised in a household that could only see it as weakness. When she choreographed this dance, she described it as her journey of growing and becoming, turning from the puppet at the mercy of everyone else's whims into the puppet master in control of how others influenced her life.The lights for this dance remained harsh and saturated through out, playing not with Color, but timing. The Puppets, wreathed in Red, preyed on the Puppet Master marked by Purple. With every interaction and pull of her strings, the lights would shift in sharp transition, snapping between colors or cascading around the stage creating a trail of light as set to the beat of the music and dance. This choreography was fun and fast, with a precise Rhythm that was incredibly fun to play with.
This Dance was based on a dream that the Choreographer had one day. All she remembered was a surreal and fantastical meeting in moonless forest, which she grew into a story of masked strangers meeting on a moonlit night to dance together and share a singular moment where nothing exists beyond them. A moment that stretches until the morning, leaving nothing behind but a memory of a dream.For this dance, I used textured moonlight to set the scene of the mystical night. I played with Red to signify how the dream slowly overtook the dancers until nothing remained but the passion of their meeting, all color fading to Red as the moonlight bleed away. The final sequence of this dance brought back the texture and colors of the moonlit night, as the dancers woke up from their fervor and the night began to fade away. The final moment, a singular Red Spotlight highlighting a lone Black Mask Center Stage, portrayed the last fading echoes of the passion from the night before.
This Choreographer wanted to bring her inner most anxieties and traumas to the stage. To express these feelings, the she played with having a singular dancer center stage, the others approaching and touching her as they gradually become more aggressive and taunting. By the end of the dance, the central dancer begins to buckle underneath the pressure as the others start circling and pulling at her. The final look is her drowning amongst the bodies as they pull her under.To compliment this dance’s choreography, I created a pool of light for the dancers to step in and out of, as they circled and taunted the central dancer. Also, I played with color and texture as the pressure grew and the surrounding dancers began to push and pull, shifting from neutral warm tones to oppressive Blue/Greens and adding a textured breakup as she began to crack. The dance’s final moment is a Blue/Green Spotlight as all dancers settled and pull the central dancer to the floor.
This dance was choreographed by a classically trained Bharatanatyam dancer who wanted to instill those themes and movements into her dance. She created a complex and rhythmically sharp choreography that paired the beautiful precision of Classical Indian Dance with the complexities of Modern. To help emphasize and accentuate her style and movement, I focused on the sharpness and shape of the light instead of color. Keeping Reddish and Orange tones, I created geometric shapes out of light, shifting and rotating them with the dancers as the world was built and shuttered around them. Every movement of light and every shift in their shape mirrored the dancers as they moved through an ever-shifting world.
