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.