Contemporary Performance Lighting: Experience, Creativity and Meaning

(Paperback)

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This is the first major collection of critical responses to performance lighting and includes contributions from award-winning lighting designers, researchers and artists. Showcasing recent examples of work with case studies of lighting practices in Britain, Europe, the US and China combined with theoretical and analytical approaches to practice, this will enrich your understanding of the role and potential of light in performance and related creative practices. This volume explores three core themes and provides a framework for thinking through the role of light in performance: 1. Experience considers both the audience's experience of light and the ways in which light influences the experience of performers 2. Creativity examines both the creative, performative capacities of light in performance, as well as the creative practices of lighting designers 3. Meaning offers an expanded view of performance aesthetics by examining the capacity of light to influence and generate meaning within performance. The case studies are drawn from a wide-array of lighting practice, including: Jennifer Tipton on the role of light as a structural language in performance; Jesper Kongshaug on the lighting of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens; Lucy Carter on her work in installation and dance; Psyche Chui on the productive fusion of Western lighting techniques with contemporary Chinese opera; Katharine Williams on the role of light in feminist political theatre made by RashDash; and Paule Constable on storytelling with light in a range of productions, including War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Angels in America.

Reviews

Contemporary Performance Lighting is a coming of age story for the field of lighting design. On the shoulders of a century of technical and artistic progress, a collection of international designers and thinkers usher in a new era for our discipline one in which meaning finally becomes the central pursuit. Seasoned practitioners and new designers alike will find inspiration in these terrific explorations. * Deanna Fitzgerald, Lighting Designer and Vice Dean, University of Arizona, USA *
Light that immaterial material with the power to dematerialize performs as an agential force in our daily lives. But within the shadowy realms of theatres, galleries, found spaces and nocturnal outdoor sites, it is employed as a transformational aesthetic medium by artists of technical alchemy attentive to the subtleties and intensities of its appearing. This timely anthology critically celebrates light as a performative medium and an event in itself. Meditating on processes, practices and projects its contributors confront the politics of perception and constructions of visuality to challenge conventional hierarchies and assumptions not only in the world of theatre but within the world as theatre. Chapters explore its relevance to the performing, visual and spatial arts including architecture and urban design to reveal how lighting design integrates effects and affects to orchestrate, enliven and shape our individual and communal experiences. * Dorita Hannah, Designer and Independent Academic, New Zealand *

Author Bio

Katherine Graham is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York, UK and currently co-convenor of the Theatre and Performance Research Associations Scenography Working Group. She has published work about light in Theatre and Performance Design and Contemporary Theatre Review and has worked extensively as a lighting designer for theatre and dance. Scott Palmer is Associate Professor in Performance Design at the University of Leeds, UK. His publications include chapters that focus on light, space and the technologies of performance and the monograph Light: Readings in Theatre Practice (2013). Kelli Zezulka is Lecturer in Technical Theatre (Production and Design) at the University of Salford, UK and has previously written for theatre journals and in applied linguistics. A practising lighting designer, she is also a non-executive director of the Association for Lighting Production and Design and editor of its bi-monthly magazine, Focus.