Rehearsal 7 Pulse

Dancers: Sarah Alexander, Vicci Viles and Alice Moran

In this rehearsal the exploration point was a low rigged parcan light which was pointed directly downwards creating a powerful funnel effect and a pool of white light on the floor. As you can see in the image above the light almost drowns the dancer in light. The space between the top of the dancer's head and the light was approximately 80cm and so great care had to be taken to ensure that the light did not set the dancers' hair on fire.

The resulting material used the tone and structure of the light as the starting point - the dancers follow the spatial features of the beam and take turns to bravely step into the intensely bright centre spot. Once the movement material had been generated the intensity of the light was adjusted in response. At the beginning a pulsing effect is added which serves to add an increased tension to the circling walks. The music (composed by Soviet France) and sound effects were added after the rehearsal.

Rehearsal 6 Between the Lines

Dancers:  Vicci Viles and Alice Moran

Two parallel lines provided the starting point for this investigation.  The lines were approximately 3 x 0.5metres which created a long, thin performance space.  This session threw up lots of different questions for me which I am still digesting:

• Does movement have more 'value' when you can see less of it? 
  
• What concerns need to be considered when choreographing for the disappearing body?
  
• Does light help to highlight the skeletal system? (at moments in the material the clavicle, humerus and mandible all seem to be sharply defined)
  
• Does light increase our visual perception of width and depth?
  
• Do we perceive an increased sense of speed if a movement passes through structured light sources such as a beam or a column?

Rehearsal 5 Four Arches of Light

The first lighting state I explored was a line of four small arches of light measuring approximately 30cm by 100cm.  The effect had been created by using a gobo of a church door in a profile lantern and restricting the amount of the image which was projected with the lantern shutters.  The effect created was of four small distinct performance arenas which could either be seen as equal size when viewed from the front or of graduating size when viewed from the side.

For this session I was working collaboratively with dancers Vicci Viles and Alice Moran.  Both dancers are currently members of Verve, the postgraduate company of Northern School of Contemporary Dance.   We began by placing small parts of the body into the individual pools of light in quick succession and rapidly built up a short phrase of material which incorporated a variety of hand gestures and movements of the feet and elbows.  At times, gestures are drawn sharply out of arches leaving the light empty for a brief moment.

The film above documents the result of the rehearsal.  Two 30 second clips can be seen - the first is shot from the side and allows the light and the movement to graduate in size from foreground to background, the second shows the same phrase shown from a variety of angles.  There is the potential for the phrase to be seen in a number of different ways during live performance.  The light certainly provided a spatial and dynamic starting point for the material but a dialogue between the light and the movement is not present because the light does not response to the movements created.  

Rehearsal 4 Collaboration with Karl Thurston Brown

collaborate:     v. to work in partnership The Oxford Paperback Dictionary

The man on the ladder is Karl Thurston Brown - lighting designer, technician, stage manager and freak show performer extraordinaire! (these are just a few of his many talents...).   I was delighted that Karl had agreed to work collaboratively with me on my research project.  

After brief initial discussions in March we spent a day in the studio working together to create a series of different lighting states which would act as the starting point for choreographic investigations.  The aim of the session was to design a series of states which paid attention to both the architectural lines of the light and the psychological mood which was created.  It was important that the states we established would allow for an interesting visual interaction and the potential for an interconnecteness between light and movement.   

Actor Matt Thompson (pictured above) worked alongside us by being our 'body in the space'.  Matt was an extremely valuable person to have involved in the session as he was happy to improvise and try out ideas with each lighting state we explored.  It was vital that we were able to assess the possibilities and limitations of the various states both with and without a body in the light.  

Working collaboratively with Karl has been an extremely fruitful part of my research process.  After enjoying the 'play' of our explorative partnership we eventually selected six distinct and contrasting lighting states - the subsequent postings detail the choreographic material which resulted from our selection.

Rehearsal 3 Disappearing Light

I was intrigued by the concept of a disappearing light source and decided to explore this idea further in a second rehearsal.  This session was a collaborative exploration with dancers Sarah Alexander and Tash Hubert.  We created 8 short phrases of movement (movement snapshots) and placed the material into a small rectangular space of approximately 3x1 metres.  OHP light projected three columns of light onto the back wall of the space.  The 8 snapshots were placed into specific places with careful attention paid to how much light hit the dancers' body and how near or far the dancer was from the original light source.  Once the spatial aspects of the phrase were set I experimented with adding and removing the light by simply switching the OHP machine on and off.  The phrase was performed many times - at points the light revealed a static position, or a dancer already moving in the darkness.  Playing with changing the dancers' distance from the light source helped to add moments of surprise and also served to give the black void a sense of three dimensionality.  The final version can be seen in the 30 second video footage below (the original material was devised in silence but music has been added to the version shown - Memoria by Murcof Martes)