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Reflecting Light Fanzine Nr 8

2025-11-20T18:26:52Z

EmeseCsornai:

November 2025

[https://reflectinglight.gangplank.group/fanzine/Reflecting%20Light%20-%20Issue%20nr%208%20October%202025%20-%20WEB.pdf screen version]

[https://reflectinglight.gangplank.group/fanzine/Reflecting%20Light%20-%20Issue%20nr%208%20October%202025%20Print%20at%20home.pdf printable version]
[[Category:Reflecting Light Fanzine]]

2023-07-17T11:58:50Z

EmeseCsornai: Created page with "== Benjamin Verdonck: Regenbog + Waldeinsamkeit == === Factual description by the students of the second workshop on light, organized by Reflecting Light research group aroun..."

== Benjamin Verdonck: Regenbog + Waldeinsamkeit ==

=== Factual description by the students of the second workshop on light, organized by Reflecting Light research group around the notion of Synesthesia, as part of the project week at KASK 2023 March ===
The conversation was recorded and typed out. The description was a practice addressed to Piet Devos.<blockquote>By Benjamin Verdonck and Lucas van Haesbroeck</blockquote>There were two consecutive theater pieces we have seen, and we have not left for the intermission.<blockquote>The first piece was around 23 minutes, the second one 13 minutes.</blockquote>When we entered the space the tribune was set up in diagonal, facing a machine that was performed upon. It was completely wooden on the outside, very light wooden panels, and he had these strings or ropes he was pulling that changed the scenery. It was basically a ‚kijkbox‘, (a peeping box i would say), so you look through it, and the panel opens, so there are these moving panels.

The title was Rainbow, but at first you would only see shades of grey, and black. You had these light sources on the right side, and the panels changed depending on how he pulled the ropes.

And it had this illusion of (maybe this is an interpretation already) of depth. It kept moving. In the beginning there was this moving panel that was completely black, so it really shadowed the other parts. There was some contemporary music accompanying the performance, a soundscape.

It was very synchronized together, movement and rhythm.

Next to it you would see his hands from the little light leaking to the side of the box.

The music that he made made it really into a synesthesia show, the way it was activating the two senses at the same time.

And then colors happened, after a long time.

It was called Rainbow, and I think I saw why- because all the time these panels were shoving over each other, so they were always separated and there were always different colors next to each other, and when they went over each other the colors changed each other. So when a dark panel shadowed a bright one it changed its color into dark, and became bright again when the dark panel got removed…

I remember at the transition between the gray and the colors there was this light source that became stronger, so there was this light source on the right dim, and when the colors got introduced it became much brighter. First I think it was purple, then blue then green and then red next to each other, like in panels, and then they got before each other and became different colors, but in the beginning it was mostly purple and blue.

The music became less dissonant as the colors started to come in. First it was all dissonant chords and it became harmonious, pleasant. In the end it became a very simple piano progression while in the beginning it was a more complex soundscape.

The first piece there was just left to right panel movements, in the second one it was multi-directional.

In the second piece they were not super expressive colors, almost pastels. On the other hand we were allowed to look at the machine after the performance, and we have only seen LED.

And with LED the quality of the light is very different to halogens. This time they were integrated in such way that you wouldn't get this harsh LED light quality and blunt colors, so possibly pastels were a functional choice. The light quality was also because of the diffusion of the panels. They have a distinct color, not gray, not white. That shifted a little bit the overall color.

It was a really nice ending with e sound, and it never went back to black and white, it stayed color.

The light of the room came back, we have seen the machine, with a palette lifter it was carried away, and another similar looking machine was brought to the space.

We could see a lot of light leaking from the side, which was not like that in the previous machine.

There were two panels in the middle, and when he opened them, we realized those two panels made the black out. And then afterwards the focus came back to the machine, that was great.

Then we entered this world of moving panels both vertical and horizontal. Four different pairs of panels opened up, really like the movement of a diaphragm.

From where I was sitting I didn’t see depth so well, so it looked like a theater with many curtains, endlessly opening.

The panels were not full rectangles, some had cut-outs.

It made us think about the experimentation of Bauhaus with color and shape, very geometric…

He told us at the beginning the title was Waldeinsamkeit, that is a German word without a literal translation to Dutch, and it means when you are in nature, in an amazing view, in something very big, and you feel very tiny as a person compared to the scenery.

And then in the end of the piece something happened that I don't know what it was but I need to discuss it with you. It was with red back light, t looked like a bone of an Osso buco, and it was completely breaking all the spatial ideas I had till then from my angle. What I got was that there was no more panels, just this object with low intensity backlight, playing on the border of visibility. Who tells me what it was?

It was his hand!

..It was not a space steak..

t was his hand, it was moving.

From my angle, I have seen his black clothes with silver dots on it, which dots got some dim light,

from which I could clearly see his posture.

It was also lit in such a weird way, so it was very 3D in the beginning and then it was lit in such a weird way, I was weirded out, I did not know what it was, I thought it was a rose that was dying.

It was back diagonal light in red.

Piet: I am interested if any of you felt synesthetic, because I have the impression that the piece seems to have played on several senses at the same time, or was it a mainly visual impact?

For me it was quite visual.

For me too. I have more memories of the form and the perspective who create his, and the black wall in the end, and this kind of kaleidoscope always moving. And if I have a memory of this piece my visual sense was most stimulated. Sound felt more accompanying it.

Yes it felt like sound was made afterwards.

Which for me was working very intricately in the first piece. Some colors and movements in relation to sound were very intricate. In the second piece I felt indeed the sound was a translation of all those visual happenings.

For me it was seeing James Turrell with the set design of the’30-s. A combination of some things super visual, and some things super artisan.

There was another very nice thing, that he was always pulling the strings, never pushing anything.

That gives a very nice quality of the movement, it is almost like weaving.

Piet: so actually apart from the lighting, the piece was rather mechanical?

Yes I was speculating on the second soundtrack masking a motor sound because I was expecting a motor somewhere.

One thing that I found rather interesting is that the two machines had temporality, meaning that you would start them, and go to the end of the sequence, and then that is it. I like this relation to time, and the pulling and sliding, the machine and life span.
[[Category:Lighting designs described as experienced]]

A crock of bull at the crack of dawn

2023-07-14T21:05:46Z

EmeseCsornai:

=== '''Factual description by Henri Emmanuel Doublier''' ===
'''of the lighting for Rachid LAACHIR's show'''

== '''A CROCK OF BULL AT THE CRACK OF DAWN.''' ==
'''Lighting design Emese Csornai'''

'''16/06/2023, Buda, Kortrijk'''

Public entrance: the space is dimly lit, and cushions are handed out at the entrance. On the stage is a huge tent that takes up almost all the space, and seems to be covered with dark fabric strips.

As we enter the tent, we can distinguish a central space with black floor, surrounded by white strips of dance marley. We can see hands moving slowly passing through the back curtain of the tent. They are dimly lit by a Pinspot, which also illuminates the red strings hanging from the center of the space.

We guess that we have to sit down in the black space, and that the performance will take place around the audience, on the white strips. Everyone is seated, the light grows brighter on the hands and the show begins.

The hands shake frantically, and we can see that they are trying to open a small box (like a pill box). The box falls... suspense, but immediately, as if by magic, another box appears and the hands shake again, until it falls, until another appears and so on exponentially until a blackout.

Is there already a hint of the red visual installation in this first interlude? I'm not sure.

The red visual installation consists of survival blankets laid on the ground outside the tent, lit by red-filtered par 64. The blankets are set in motion by fans. This installation will sometimes appear for varying lengths of time during the blacks that punctuate each scene. Three sides of the tent are lit by this installation: thanks to the transparency of the fabric, we can see the red reflections dancing on the walls of the tent, and a kind of 3D perspective is created.

It allows the space around it to exist.

In fact, the space that surrounds the tent also exists in other ways. We can feel the performer's presence between scenes, during the blacks. We can hear his movements, costume changes and props preparation. There's also the glow of the technical booth, creating a transparent halo of light on the front of the tent. Finally, the loudspeakers from which the sound environment is generated are also located outside the tent.

We soon realise that the show's dramaturgy is built on a succession of performative scenes, interspersed with black, where the red visual installation may appear with increasing prominence. This linear dramaturgy will lead us to the large-scale visual installation, scenography and lighting, the jubilant climax of the performance.

But first, let's describe the different scenes and their lighting aesthetics.

(I may have got the order wrong, or forgotten a few).

First scene: mysterious, hysterical hands. back middle. Hysterical hands, trying to open pill boxes, lit by pinspots that also light up red strings.

scene two: front right side. Rachid eats a mango and burps more and more. It's disgusting and funny. Hard lighting with two strong par 64, one from face, the second from back right.

Third scene: middle stage left. The little can empties into the big can like piss. Two strong side light (par 64).

Fourth scene: stage right middle. The masked salesman. Pathetic: Rachid wears a magnificent silver mask with silver jeweled whiskers. He seems to be trying to sell us a bone. He doesn't believe it at the end and leaves depressed. Illuminated by two strong white lights, left and right.

Fifth scene: back middle. The death of gloves. Two cans have latex gloves covering their necks. By squeezing the cans, the air inflates the gloves. He caresses his face with these swollen hands, kisses them, then, after violent lovemaking, the gloves die and water comes out like blood. In the end, he drags them, pathetic corpses, into the light of a sensitive fade to black. The main lighting was also from the left-right sidelights made of two par 64.

Sixth scene: middle stage right. Death on the hospital bed: He screams terribly and dies on a bed in the harsh light of 2 par64 sidelights.

Seventh scene: the singer Superstar!

Object hijacking: a piece of wood becomes a micro hand, red plastic for making bubbles a micro mouth. A piece of string becomes hair, a funnel a telescope. He tries to blow bubbles. It also evolves into a warrior and the warrior evolutes in a pop star. Lighting still lateral with strong par 64.

And again, and again, the same principle of lateral, strong, hard, unfiltered light, for the next dazzling scene: diarrhea!

He sits on a can in the liquid spurting out like diarrhea.

The next scene has a completely different lighting principle and heralds a change in the dramaturgy of light.

The granny and the ladder: He's dressed in a big dress red in front and a blue behind. Two battery-powered lights are inside the dress, one in front and one behind. He trembles as he tries to climb the ladder, dimly lit by the battery lamps.

Dracula, the next scene, returns to the lighting principle of the first scene, i.e. a Pinspot. Rachid stands at the front left corner of the tent. He's wearing black lipstick make-up, screaming and grimacing against a powerful, frightening soundscape of filtered, chilling voices. The light is a stroboscopic crescendo of pinspot. Scary stuff!

Then, the final scene: the frightening Performers have gone to manipulate the giant tent roof, which descends on the audience and breathes like a monstrous organism, layering, ingesting. The light then develops organically and subtly on a colourful palette of green, yellow and, finally red, licking the fabric drapes, bringing its transparency and brilliance to life as it breathes and oppresses. It appears to be a play with 2 kW placed above the tent, surrounding it by the right choice of angle.

The dramaturgy of light accompanies the dramaturgy of the writing and gives rhythm to the show.

The main stage lighting concept with two par 64 unfiltered, creates a powerful light on the performer. This hard light sculpts his face with sharp shadows. This reminded me of images from German expressionist films, reinforcing the drama of this wordless character, this contemporary Charlot in a kappa tracksuit, who shits on the world as we free ourselves from our shackles, who shows us death as the enjoyment of a strong brutal sexual act, where the sweetness of the mango makes us burp, where the warrior becomes Madonna, or Dracula ingests us and perhaps gives birth to us. The Pinspot at the beginning, illuminating the bodiless hands, finds its resolution in the last scene, illuminating Dracula with that pertinent strobe movement.

During the blacks that punctuate each scene, the red visual installation announces the color on which we will end the show, red, which will shine through the roof of the tent and slowly fade, leaving us in a bluish black of retinal persistence, blue being the only primary color not used, our brain recreates it at the end and we then find the whole color spectrum.

The loop is complete, and we return to our bodies with a round of applause.

== Credits ==
Concept, performance, set and costume: '''Rachid Laarchir'''

Dramaturgic assistance: '''Amelia Malfait'''

Music: '''Stef Heeren'''

Lighting: '''Emese Csornai'''
[[Category:Lighting designs described as experienced]]

A crock of bull at the crack of dawn

2023-07-14T21:02:40Z

EmeseCsornai: Created page with "=== '''Factual description by Henri Emmanuel Doublier''' === '''of the lighting for Rachid LAACHIR's show''' == '''A CROCK OF BULL AT THE CRACK OF DAWN.''' == '''Lighting des..."

Hauntology inteviews / Emese Csornai

2023-06-04T19:47:55Z

EmeseCsornai: language corrections

<pre>

Wikipedia: Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.

In 2022 I made a series of interviews with my colleagues involved in this research. I was looking for answers to my questions regarding the evolution of lighting design. From colleagues’ previous anecdotes of their professional history, an intricately non-linear development of this particular work started to outline in front of my mind’s eye.

In order to understand the future of lighting design in performing arts, the variables defining its past and presence, and the visions shaping it need to be summoned.

This is the first written publication that builds mainly upon and around the overlays of the interviews I have made so far. I am planning on further interviews and texts following this one, hopefully giving a complex picture of lighting design and performing arts relating to one another.

'''‘…It was light itself. Whatever comes with it, I take it.’ (Tomi Humalisto)'''

Lighting designers come from the widest array of backgrounds, many of us educated in theater itself. The versatility of lighting design as a field allows various approaches. We all found something captivating there. Tomi Humalisto for example has been studying in art education, which at the time was less compartmentalized than it is now. He followed a course mentored by a scenographer and a costume designer. They made a theater piece that today would be called ‘devised’, back then the term was not used. Later on on an exchange year in the fine arts course he took a workshop of lighting installation, led by the lighting designer Tarja Ervasti in a fortress on an island outside of Helsinki, with endless caves and rooms and cellars. They rented equipment and built a light installation. He was blown away by the tool and its impact, and learned that there is a school for studying lighting. For him it wasn’t so much about theater, it was light itself he was impressed with, and he decided, whatever comes with it, he takes it. Bruno Pocheron and his friends from art school were hired by their professor to assist an audiovisual installation of dia projections and moving screens, in the palace of festivals in Cannes for the launch of the perfume Egoist by Chanel, making it his first encounter with stage. Jan Maertens entered Stuk Leuven as an extracurricular activity, taking responsibilities as a volunteer and getting entry tickets for performances in return. For him the change of mind has been remembered as a decisive factor: in an engineer‘s curriculum things are taken seriously in their functioning. The art world represents another set of values, being not very output driven, its added value is not through usefulness.

In the rarest cases it is obvious that someone will work in theater, like in the case of Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, who himself comes from a theater family. He entered with the ambition to be a musician, nonetheless involving himself in performing and stage work from the young age of eight.

There is a complex toolbox that shows itself in its functioning and in its effect we catch glimpse of and get driven by. Through a complex hands-on study, we understand the basic toolbox and we gain knowledge enough to be innovative. Unsurprisingly our path to get to theater contextualizes our ambition in it, informing our development in it and always leaves a trace of legibility on our further body of work. There is always a little window of time and space where our younger self shows themselves, just getting mesmerized by what they see, upon first peek into theater and lighting.

'''Choosing methods of working- 'The Yes-attitude' (Bram Coeman)'''

Bram Coeman remembers from the beginning of his work trajectory hacking the Buda Fabriek, creating their own there and then while making Dans in Kortrijk from 2002, that ‘here and now’ of there and then that described the festival as a whole. He continues in those footsteps with Buda, making a variety of things possible. How to make things possible is the central question. This is now the establishment of the still prevailing yes-attitude at Buda on the technical and curatorial level.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier, early in his career reaching the boundaries of the classical theater scene in which there was a steep hierarchy, joined the Superamas and started working together as a collective. They showed work at Dans in Kortrijk, where, opposing his previous history, it felt everything was possible, and chaotic. He also appreciated the different way of organizing technical work in Belgium, where with less technical staff more is possible, because of the involvement instead of the professionalization, the counterpart he often came across in France.

Sharing work has been an issue of overlay. When not in a collective, but sharing the oftentimes lonesome work of a lighting designer has been something both Tomi Humalisto and Bruno Pocheron have practiced that has been a healthy exchange creating more agency and resulting in uncomplicated tour schedules or normalized workloads.

Geert Belpaeme has been talking about the foundation of his presence in his work which is a result of him participating in different functions, as a performer, director, teacher, dramaturg, writer, and this different involvements and perspectives help him take him to a place of practicing theater, as opposed to producing. This practice of changing roles, perhaps in other ways than in his clear example, has been accompanying most of us participating in the research project, and keeps us running to be not codified by roles. If one is limited to a singular role, work gets codified in a way that is not reflective to the potentiality of theater, it leads to the notion of professionalization, a both socially, and weirdly professionally limiting phenomena. The idea of being reduced to one’s potentiality of producing comes up as an issue in each single interview.

In all interviews the intertwined development of the media involved has been mentioned.

Stage arts as a multiplicity, as a collection of visions, with a lot of personal engagement as opposed to professionalization is praised as a nourishing mental space to grow together in theater. Bruno Pocheron has been talking about experiencing the physicality in theater that plays out in a different way as it did in fine arts in his experience: in fine arts a projection of the results define the meanings while in theater the means are many and they also generate the vision.

Fine arts from another testimony, Tomi Humalisto mentioned the Russian avant-garde as an aesthetic reference close to which his experimentation in theater-making has taken off. In the late 19th early 20th century a number of strong-minded artists created experimental theater works, some of which proved to be a complete failure in front of the critics of the time and at the same time paved the way to future experimental lighting design and stage works in theater and film. One better known artist to mention is Vasilij Kandinskij. Tomi has been talking about an early collaboration where he has been working with a slow and dreamy set designer with a very strong vision, who persistently found out how to make a huge piece of canvas move in space. Strong colors in geometric shapes were hitting the scenography, projecting dancers’ shadows on the vast backdrop. The media developed in respectful cooperation. Those reflections both have to be noted down for us to look into the eye of the complexity that is understanding theater in the larger loops of time and space.

A common wish and attempt that has been coming up in the interviews of the freelance lighting designers is creating continuity in work, through long committed artistic collaborations in which all parties involved can develop. Another way of creating continuity that has been mentioned was through transmission, knowledge-sharing in different formats and contexts.

This mentality of personal involvement and making things possible, risk-taking and skillful collaborations (and likely favorable micro-climates) marked an era of placing experimental theater and dance performances on the map from the ‘90-s on. Contemporary dance scene was emerging, that is how Jan Maertens understood it, fighting for its position. The lighting design aspect of it played a big role there, or it was emerging intertwined with contemporary dance.

It was an era of extreme engagement, dedication, of exciting works that are sometimes dangerous, group defining their own terms. Artists cared way more for their art than for their careers, says Bruno Pocheron. The work was more untamed, he continues, with less safety rules, technical common sense was the agency called for.

The downside: self-exploitation, doing things at all costs. One lets oneself go within the drive, this leads to burnout. Saying no is healthy, it is good to know where one’s capacities lay.

Never saying no makes you feel indispensable. The graveyard is filled with people who cannot be missed. The trap, we all might have stepped in it once, says Jan Maertens.

'''Stage rules- 'Theater is forgetting its skills' (Bruno Pocheron)'''

The theater nearly all of my interviewed colleagues and myself entered, was much less specialized compared to how it is now. Knowledge-base acquired through hands-on practice, instead of formal training in a study institute (remote from the theater and collaborating art forms) was the base of the engagement. Personal engagement in each case, (whether coming from, leading to or bypassing school) at the theater, was a strong choice, out of genuine interest.

This relates to the origin of the yes-saying of Bram Coeman and the greater organizing principle at Buda: figuring out how to make something possible, working towards what is possible, following a technical common sense rather than safety guidelines. In this layout professional respect and a sense of working together towards the best outcome clearly exceeds the importance of a generic system of rules external to the site of the theater and current potentialities within a space and a group.

Knowledge sharing is the nature of this hands-on way of working, and negotiating, actualizing rules according to the situation is the trajectory of the work. Thinking efficiency, from down to up considering the right investment is essential in this way of working.To quote Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, if the head is good, the whole team goes good. In this practice of collaborating between theater technical crew and lighting designer among others, being omnivolent is a key character of the motivation and practice of the work, as opposed to specialization.

In theaters some old pulley systems for hoisting individual pipes, sliders for adjustable hanging, motors, drop-boxes, scrims, and dimmer cities communicating via Ethernet bundles and so much more can co-exist. Traditionally theater is not a place like the market, where one system wipes out another, here an accumulation of witty and practical solutions takes place, where the relevance of a technical solution is indicated by its simplicity, precision, ease of operation and installation, its capacity to be developed. This is also a ground for inventions as there are some archetypes of solutions that can be developed and customized infinitely.

Situations that would be evaluated case-to-case on a common sense ground by knowledgeable and devoted technicians operating day by day in that versatile knowledge-base have gradually shifted to a regionally uniform safety regulation system that compliments the idea of specialized experts and not risking the holistic knowledge base. Of course in the framework of the holistic knowledge base, the technician is personally responsible for the potential tragedy taking place, in the reality of the specialized experts in a generic regulation, it comes down to regional insurance systems and this is how risk-taking and responsibility are dissociated from one another, in a place where everyone goes because no generic events take place.

I feel the urge to mention that most young technicians I meet still go to theater to learn in such a holistic way on both ends of computing and phenomena of physics, from the older colleagues who are a living archive of this versatile knowledge, coming from all different backgrounds.

Another, with the safety regulations comparably strong example of the generic is the repertory plot. The phenomena comes from, but is not exclusive to the United States (and in all fairness it is not an absolute rule but a likely risk).

I think it originates from the idea that lighting is a more sober and functional service, and it inevitably will contain side-lights, back lights and front lights. Taking in consideration what the generic best use of each fixture is imagined, and how many fixtures are needed for a wash without a dip, an optimized rig is serving as a base of the production entering the theater. In this way less manpower is needed to set up, and it all can happen in a shorter time. A contemporary version of a repertory plot is exactly the same, but comprised of moving head LEDs.

In this layout the idea of the generic is taken a step further, as each fixture can produce a variation of colors or even shapes, nothing needs to be added to the repertory plot.

In this ideology of practicality the angle of light, one main parameter defining the use of a light source, is already disappearing, if we do not count color and the quality of light. These moving heads of course are a lot heavier and non-modular, compared to traditional theater fixtures, so diverging from a repertory plot is even less possible for practical reasons. One example of Jan Maertens, where a lower rig has been placed with the fixtures placed in accordance to his plan, right under a repertory plot that was not to be touched is perfectly symbolizing the ideology of efficiency overgrowing common sense. Here a theater is built within the theater in order not to touch the supportive generic plot that was supposed to save time and manpower.

The myth of efficiency is echoing back in the thinking about LED in theaters, which is a topic worth its own chapter and author (here we could link Tomi’s text on LED)

'''Politics- 'Quality beyond attempt' (Henri-Emmanuel Doublier)'''

In Bram Coeman’s experience, theater he encounters now has never been as diverse as today, and as closely connected to the world. A lot of activism is happening on the research level. Artists want to question decision makers' doings, and decision makers want nice arts to be presented, and there is a friction, he says. The friction lies between the expectation towards artists to produce, and on the other hand securing a time and space to reflect on topics.

Artists are to be recognized according to their presence and not according to their production, but it is a laborious process to put that concept into an ongoing practice.

An ethical layer that hasn't been so visible before, a new kind of awareness is unraveling before our eyes, joins Tomi Humalisto. There is a tangible relation shift of staged arts and arts at large towards politics. This by itself is a phenomena of a revolving non-linear expression of arts in history, referencing the phenomena of Hauntology from a very tangible perspective.It reminds Tomi of the 70-s in Finland, which was a decade of political theater.

In the current layout of elements, the artist appears as a politician, within the leftist global layer. At times these politicians are merely orators, and the ethics unreflected in the fiber of the work. As Bruno Pocheron points out, under the flag of political correctness, many possibilities of examining a thought gets lost. When an artistic voice is changed to an artistic language, or a lack of a certain language used as an artist (and a game of taboos), no repositioning is yet, or any longer made possible.

Now ethical concerns around racism, gender, equality, ecology is the zeitgeist of the makers, continues Tomi Humalisto. Something they cannot go by.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier encounters better and better works, being aware of problems of society and summoning them on stage from interesting angles. This contrasts quite some artists from the past who did not disturb anybody, who just gave the audience a pleasant moment. But on the other hand theater is in a marginal position in society at large (definitely so when compared to its position of society 30 years ago) and these uncompromised artists he fondly summons, are playing for 200 people while pop culture reaches millions, so the polarization of society shows itself ever stronger in our time, which gives the best face of the phenomena a double edge.

What makes this situation even more confusing, is that due to different developmental factors of western societies and the individuals they are comprised of, under constant technological stimuli and productional pressure, the functioning of pop culture may also be at a hinge moment. Progressive political concepts are quoted by its icons but not contextualized, even at times misinterpreted. The stars of pop culture and media personalities will be judged based on their prompt statements in a pass or burn (thumb up and thumb down) manner, seldom using their media coverage to exploring a thought- possibly because it is not needed, or in the fear of being misinterpreted and being virally torn down. A risk nobody can afford in the realm of likes. We could pretend the functioning of theater and pop culture largely differ, and I would like to keep this question open to our guarding gaze. Exploring at depth how controversies are handled in theater today in small and large can show us an accurate picture about how wide that gap is, and if it is shrinking (which I here propose without offering a ground to it) what is the speed of that shrinking.

On the top of all of this as laid out from some facades in the chapter stage rules, and on the link of eco-crisis: theater is held both captive by and responsible for wrongly understood consumption of values, that further complicates the collaborative styles, the norms of touring, production, and material use, which all creates a hinge moment what compelled me to make this article based on interviews and likely will be the reason of a sequence of actions, discussions and reads to come.

'''Luxury: 'The only shared language we have is what happens on the stage' (Geert Belpaeme)'''

The notion of luxury around lighting design work (again I am aching to have a better wording describing the work) mostly comes up related to time.

The most efficient time to work on lighting design is in a studio or on a stage that is with a rig and there is a possibility (with electricity and decent dimmers) to make at least a sketch if not a full setup of the lighting one is considering related to the other media on stage. The distance of the rig from the floor, the color of the floor, the quality of the walls and the distance of them from one another, the flexibility of the rig, the quality of the equipment in use, the possibility of darkening the space, not to mention a full black-out, are all important factors in understanding what is it actually we are working with.

The closer these parameters are to the ones of the performance, the more representative the work will be to its physical manifestation in front of audiences. Inherent to working with lights is setting up, striking down and making changes. That also means that if the room is free but the rig needs to be rearranged in-between rehearsals for another purpose, one will lose significant time by setting up the same plot repeatedly. The amount of time and its conditions is an agreement of the working group, and it is based on concepts of working together, and the producing institutes resources and ideas of support.

A small theater for example can come up as a possible luxury too, as one may get permission to work from an inventory by oneself, or being allowed to make changes without a technician being present. In this way one can have a freer schedule and an easier handling of non- pre-amped changes.

What I am writing here so far are trivialities related to lighting, but I felt the necessity to put that down, as from all people I interviewed, Geert Belpaeme was the only one to elaborately discuss the topic of choosing the right space to rehearse. The work has to define, and find its own methodology, emerging from the making. The communication around and within the work is not to be tamed with external moderation, he points out.

These are values I assume we all would gladly agree with, nonetheless on the long run we lighting designers fail limiting ourselves to the rare chances these are the conditions of a work.

Geert in this statement thinks primarily from the maker’s point of view. It is not that my lighting designer colleagues do not initiate creative processes or would avoid putting on the hat of the makers. We eventually give up on some discussions and surrender to the more sensful or more threatening ones when we are devoid of the luxury of time.

Establishing continuous artistic relations as a method of creating favorable working conditions, and deepening multimedia collaborations and defining methods and strategies over time is a popular choice of many of us, to provide continuity for our creative processes and develop common values, upon which future working conditions can be based.

Another luxury is well working fixtures with good optics. That requires maintenance from the venue, and a sincere listing of instruments- some fixtures sharing parameters are never going to function in the same way. Tomi Humalisto likened old Niethammer profiles to old mercedes-benzes: they are bulky, heavy and reliable. Here time for and transparency and trust of the communication between lighting designer and technical team is essential. The little examples I have been bringing up here are evocative to the non-generic nature of technical communication.

Enough time seeing rehearsals and understanding the movement language is a necessity that is at times considered luxury. Time to negotiate both with technicians and in rehearsal, making try-outs, time for starts-stops and making precision work is the ideal set of circumstances defined by Tomi Humalisto.

Participating in warm-ups and not always looking from the back of the rehearsal room was another frequent mention, or in any ways using the focus point of but not reducing activity to light and its prerequisite to be a quality work, which is the technique.

In another form Jan Maertens talks about this phenomena in an autobiographical context.

Doing technical work, he recalls, growing in it created a vision that lighting design could be his artistic language. He learned to express himself in a non-rational, creative way, and from that angle of his research to add to a broader artistic discourse.

I needed to learn this, Jan says, and that learning process is still going on. It comes with the necessity of being rational and non rational at the same time.

Expressing yourself with lighting should be the main form of expression as opposed to verbally elaborating on it to represent the work to collaborators, he continues. That is (the possibility to express oneself with light) limited in time, and that suppression makes one communicate rationally he concludes his worry about not well formed working circumstances.

There is a big chance to be misinterpreted and misread, as the content of lighting is non-rational. That can mean freedom in the void of understanding…

Too much rational lighting design is too much one on one of what needs to be expressed and what is expressed. Finding a voice in that non rational communication was a big event, says Jan Maertens. Lighting as a medium was giving me an opportunity, he says. It was a means to getting out of a forced monocultural approach.

Jan’s thought process is continuing towards the theater of today, as a continuation of the history of theater, politics, stage rules and experts. It allows us to gaze at the reality we are dealing with, and on what grounds do essentials become luxury. Let me follow through the thought here as an extracted quote:

Reproducing a piece of only the human stage performance is denying the nonhuman performative factor, the human interface of the non humanistic elements.

Non-human theory is present on a discursive level but practically denied.

In the free scene this phenomena is most often understood, but not dealt with because of the lack of the tools and the lack of time. There is an air of survival, creativity is invested to implement only that.

Institutionalized world of staged arts is in a dire need of fresh blood, not capable of implementing, because there is a border between creation and touring, and it is not possible to overcome. Live arts in this way become dead arts.

Staged arts and lighting design needs to stay useless otherwise it loses its point.

In this section of luxury I must blink back at the idea of experts. In this ideology lighting design is an isolated service almost, not mixing in with other media. Although lighting design dressing up a work before the public sees it is a non-contemporary concept, it haunts us in collaboration agreements, financial plans, and at times post-education ideas of young makers. It is interesting to witness different collaboration models in performances as an audience and compare for oneself what outcome is based on what system of collaborations. In most mid-career and senior artworks touring Europe, the one media beyond the rest and hermetic artforms are not to be seen. It seems what is a tougher format to support being a bigger investment is more desired as an artistic work to show. On the other hand there are completely different social norms and place for individualism in society and career paths in the arts compared to 30 years ago, that makes the basis and shape of collaborations a loaded topic.

I have started with time in an equipped space that is determined by the common decision of the group and resources available, and this is where I am returning. Tomi Humalisto recalls the time he started working in Finland, it was not so common that touring groups would come technically prepared. He remembered a strict looking technical director turning to him, saying: give me your lighting plot! He used the plot as an example to another group, that this is how prepared they should have arrived.

Today there is a culture of devised and process working in which the participants may be scared of pre-planning, thinking that could ruin the principle. In that way there is a return of a form in time, but resulting from a different set of circumstances.

This plan may change, it is a basis of discussion, a matter of use- this is Tomi’s advice for agreement to have the initial plan not a final choice one could not adhere from.

As a conclusion on luxury, the language and words of lighting design need to be carefully differentiated from each other. If something is technically defined, it means it is capable of providing the words but not yet or not consequently the thoughts explained through words. The wording can change. The hard wired reflex of searching needs to happen in a non-technical space is an economic conditioning which does not do its justice to lighting design in relation to the rest of the media, and makes lighting look like a luxurious commodity, pushing it back into a cliche role of making things look good.

Real luxury is working with artists who understand and accept the different growth curves of the different media at play in the work they bring to life, artists who are willing to shape the making of the work according to a common vision. In such an environment different artforms can generously cross-pollinate each other and inevitably something new emerges just by generous interaction over time.

[[Category:Discursive Practices]]

Emese Csornai

2023-04-04T16:56:54Z

EmeseCsornai:

{| class="wikitable"
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{| class="wikitable"
|Emese Csornai studied architecture at the Technical University of Budapest (2002-2004) and post- audiovisual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (BA 2009).
Her interests in fine arts led her to lighting design, which two principles keep informing each other in her work as a practicing lighting designer, engaging in installative and fine arts projects too.

Csornai finds re-discussing well discussed topics from newer angles can create a rupture in rigid perspectives, and can introduce novelty.

She has a strong interest is the ongoing examination of colors and the physiology of their perception.

Her study in instant composition has driven her to the exploration of dynamic use of spaces.

Ongoing discourse and study with Ellen Knops and long-term collaboration with Bruno Pocheron helped her work evolve.

Since 2010 she has been regularly giving workshops for dancers and choreographers on collaborating with multiple media, notably with light, most recently 2015-2019 the workshop series ‘Performing space’ in Berlin.

Csornai is part of a lighting designer collective formed around Buda, Kortrijk, and participates in the 4 year research project 'Reflecting Light' in the framework of KASK,Gent.

She works in choreographic, multimedia and music performances, and instant composition pieces, recently with Julia Plawgo, Yvonne Sembene, Ruben Reniers, Anne Juren, Meg Stuart, Samuel Feldhandler, Leyya Mona Tawil, Renae Schadler, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke, Silvia Bennett, Shannon Cooney, Bruno Pocheron, Laurie Young, Justine A. Chambers, Padmini Chettur and others.

Her recent collaborative works include:

‘Georges Tremble’ with Samuel Feldhandler

‘One hundred more’ with Laurie Young and Justine A. Chambers

‘Chromopoem’ and 'Sensorial Transference' with Anne Juren

‘Non-playable character’ with Julia Plawgo

‘Silkworms’ with Renae Schadler and Mirjam Sögner

'Stimmung' of Karlheinz Stockhausen with Margaux Marielle-Trehoüart and Operalab Berlin

‘Requiem/Mangongkal Holi’ and 'Awal' with Ruben Reniers

‘A slightly curving place’ of Nida Ghouse

‘Fluid Resilience’ with Shannon Cooney

‘Water Sports’ in collaboration with Bruno Pocheron, choreographed by Karol Tyminski

‘Philosophical enactments 1&2’ with Padmini Chettur

[[www.emesecsornai.com]]
|}
|}
[[category: Participants]]
[[category: Connections]]

Hauntology inteviews / Emese Csornai

2023-04-03T13:35:30Z

EmeseCsornai:

<pre>
Wikipedia: Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.

In 2022 I made a series of interviews with my colleagues involved in this research. I was looking for answers to my questions regarding the evolution of lighting design. From colleagues’ previous anecdotes of their professional history, an intricately non-linear development of this particular work started to outline in front of my mind’s eye.

In order to understand the future of lighting design in performing arts, the variables defining its past and presence, and the visions shaping it need to be summoned.

This is the first written publication that builds mainly upon and around the overlays of the interviews I have made so far. I am planning on further interviews and texts following this one, hopefully giving a complex picture of lighting design and performing arts relating to one another.

'''‘…It was light itself. Whatever comes with it, I take it.’ (Tomi Humalisto)'''

Lighting designers come from the widest array of backgrounds, many of us educated in theater itself. The versatility of lighting design as a field allows various approaches. We all found something captivating there. Tomi Humalisto for example has been studying in art education, which at the time was less compartmentalized than it is now. He followed a course mentored by a scenographer and a costume designer. They made a theater piece that today would be called ‘devised’, back then the term was not used. Later on on an exchange year in the fine arts course he took a workshop of lighting installation, led by the lighting designer Tarja Ervasti in a fortress on an island outside of Helsinki, with endless caves and rooms and cellars. They rented equipment and built a light installation. He was blown away by the tool and its impact, and learned that there is a school for studying lighting. For him it wasn’t so much about theater, it was light itself he was impressed with, and he decided, whatever comes with it, he takes it. Bruno Pocheron and his friends from art school were hired by their professor to assist an audiovisual installation of dia projections and moving screens, in the palace of festivals in Cannes for the launch of the perfume Egoist by Chanel, making it his first encounter with stage. Jan Maertens entered Stück Leuwen as an extracurricular activity, taking responsibilities as a volunteer and getting entry tickets for performances in return. For him the change of mind has been remembered as a decisive factor: in an engineer‘s curriculum things are taken seriously in their functioning. The artworld represents another set of values, being not very output driven, its added value is not through usefulness.

In the rarest cases it is obvious that someone will work in theater, like in the case of Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, who himself comes from a theater family. He entered with the ambition to be a musician, nonetheless involving himself in performing and stage work from the young age of eight.

There is a complex toolbox that shows itself in its functioning and in its effect we catch glimpse of and get driven by. Through a complex hands-on study, we understand the basic toolbox and we gain knowledge enough to be innovative. Unsurprisingly our path to get to theater contextualizes our ambition in it, informing our development in it and always leaves a trace of legibility on our further body of work. There is always a little window of time and space where our younger self shows themselves, just getting mesmerized by what they see, upon first peek into theater and lighting.

'''Choosing methods of working- 'The Yes-attitude' (Bram Coeman)'''

Bram Coeman remembers from the beginning of his work trajectory hacking the Buda Fabriek, creating their own there and then while making Dans in Kortrijk from 2002, that ‘here and now’ of there and then that described the festival as a whole. He continues in those footsteps with Buda, making a variety of things possible. How to make things possible is the central question. This is now the establishment of the still prevailing yes-attitude at Buda on the technical and curatorial level.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier, early in his career reaching the boundaries of the classical theater scene in which there was a steep hierarchy, joined the Superamas and started working together as a collective. They showed work at Dans in Kortrijk, where, opposing his previous history, it felt everything was possible, and chaotic. He also appreciated the different way of organizing technical work in Belgium, where with less technical staff more is possible, because of the involvement instead of the professionalization, the counterpart he often came across in France.

Sharing work has been an issue of overlay. When not in a collective, but sharing the oftentimes lonesome work of a lighting designer has been something both Tomi Humalisto and Bruno Pocheron have practiced that has been a healthy exchange creating more agency and resulting in uncomplicated tour schedules or normalized workloads.

Geert Belpaeme has been talking about the foundation of his presence in his work which is a result of him participating in different functions, as a performer, director, teacher, dramaturg, writer, and this different involvements and perspectives help him take him to a place of practicing theater, as opposed to producing. This practice of changing roles, perhaps in other ways than in his clear example, has been accompanying most of us participating in the research project, and keeps us running to be not codified by roles. If one is limited to a singular role, work gets codified in a way that is not reflective to the potentiality of theater, it leads to the notion of professionalization, a both socially, and weirdly professionally limiting phenomena. The idea of being reduced to one’s potentiality of producing comes up as an issue in each single interview.

In all interviews the intertwined development of the media involved has been mentioned.

Stage arts as a multiplicity, as a collection of visions, with a lot of personal engagement as opposed to professionalization is praised as a nourishing mental space to grow together in theater. Bruno Pocheron has been talking about experiencing the physicality in theater that plays out in a different way as it did in fine arts in his experience: in fine arts a projection of the results define the meanings while in theater the means are many and they also generate the vision.

Fine arts from another testimony, Tomi Humalisto mentioned the Russian avant-garde as an aesthetic reference close to which his experimentation in theater-making has taken off. In the late 19th early 20th century a number of strong-minded artists created experimental theater works, some of which proved to be a complete failure in front of the critics of the time and at the same time paved the way to future experimental lighting design and stage works in theater and film. One better known artist to mention is Vasilij Kandinskij. Tomi has been talking about an early collaboration where he has been working with a slow and dreamy set designer with a very strong vision, who persistently found out how to make a huge piece of canvas move in space. Strong colors in geometric shapes were hitting the scenography, projecting dancers’ shadows on the vast backdrop. The media developed in respectful cooperation. Those reflections both have to be noted down for us to look into the eye of the complexity that is understanding theater in the larger loops of time and space.

A common wish and attempt that has been coming up in the interviews of the freelance lighting designers is creating continuity in work, through long committed artistic collaborations in which all parties involved can develop. Another way of creating continuity that has been mentioned was through transmission, knowledge-sharing in different formats and contexts.

This mentality of personal involvement and making things possible, risk-taking and skillful collaborations (and likely favorable micro-climates) marked an era of placing experimental theater and dance performances on the map from the ‘90-s on. Contemporary dance scene was emerging, that is how Jan Maertens understood it, fighting for its position. The lighting design aspect of it played a big role there, or it was emerging intertwined with contemporary dance.

It was an era of extreme engagement, dedication, of exciting works that are sometimes dangerous, group defining their own terms. Artists cared way more for their art than for their careers, says Bruno Pocheron. The work was more untamed, he continues, with less safety rules, technical common sense was the agency called for.

The downside: self-exploitation, doing things at all costs. One lets oneself go within the drive, this leads to burnout. Saying no is healthy, it is good to know where one’s capacities lay.

Never saying no makes you feel indispensable. The graveyard is filled with people who cannot be missed. The trap, we all might have stepped in it once, says Jan Maertens.

'''Stage rules- 'Theater is forgetting its skills' (Bruno Pocheron)'''

The theater nearly all of my interviewed colleagues and myself entered, was much less specialized compared to how it is now. Knowledge-base acquired through hands-on practice, instead of formal training in a study institute (remote from the theater and collaborating art forms) was the base of the engagement. Personal engagement in each case, (whether coming from, leading to or bypassing school) at the theater, was a strong choice, out of genuine interest.

This relates to the origin of the yes-saying of Bram Coeman and the greater organizing principle at Buda: figuring out how to make something possible, working towards what is possible, following a technical common sense rather than safety guidelines. In this layout professional respect and a sense of working together towards the best outcome clearly exceeds the importance of a generic system of rules external to the site of the theater and current potentialities within a space and a group.

Knowledge sharing is the nature of this hands-on way of working, and negotiating, actualizing rules according to the situation is the trajectory of the work. Thinking efficiency, from down to up considering the right investment is essential in this way of working.To quote Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, if the head is good, the whole team goes good. In this practice of collaborating between theater technical crew and lighting designer among others, being omnivolent is a key character of the motivation and practice of the work, as opposed to specialization.

In theaters some old pulley systems for hoisting individual pipes, sliders for adjustable hanging, motors, drop-boxes, scrims, and dimmer cities communicating via Ethernet bundles and so much more can co-exist. Traditionally theater is not a place like the market, where one system wipes out another, here an accumulation of witty and practical solutions takes place, where the relevance of a technical solution is indicated by its simplicity, precision, ease of operation and installation, its capacity to be developed. This is also a ground for inventions as there are some archetypes of solutions that can be developed and customized infinitely.

Situations that would be evaluated case-to-case on a common sense ground by knowledgeable and devoted technicians operating day by day in that versatile knowledge-base have gradually shifted to a regionally uniform safety regulation system that compliments the idea of specialized experts and not risking the holistic knowledge base. Of course in the framework of the holistic knowledge base, the technician is personally responsible for the potential tragedy taking place, in the reality of the specialized experts in a generic regulation, it comes down to regional insurance systems and this is how risk-taking and responsibility are dissociated from one another, in a place where everyone goes because no generic events take place.

I feel the urge to mention that most young technicians I meet still go to theater to learn in such a holistic way on both ends of computing and phenomena of physics, from the older colleagues who are a living archive of this versatile knowledge, coming from all different backgrounds.

Another, with the safety regulations comparably strong example of the generic is the repertory plot. The phenomena comes from, but is not exclusive to the United States (and in all fairness it is not an absolute rule but a likely risk).

I think it originates from the idea that lighting is a more sober and functional service, and it inevitably will contain side-lights, back lights and front lights. Taking in consideration what the generic best use of each fixture is imagined, and how many fixtures are needed for a wash without a dip, an optimized rig is serving as a base of the production entering the theater. In this way less manpower is needed to set up, and it all can happen in a shorter time. A contemporary version of a repertory plot is exactly the same, but comprised of moving head LEDs.

In this layout the idea of the generic is taken a step further, as each fixture can produce a variation of colors or even shapes, nothing needs to be added to the repertory plot.

In this ideology of practicality the angle of light, one main parameter defining the use of a light source, is already disappearing, if we do not count color and the quality of light. These moving heads of course are a lot heavier and non-modular, compared to traditional theater fixtures, so diverging from a repertory plot is even less possible for practical reasons. One example of Jan Maertens, where a lower rig has been placed with the fixtures placed in accordance to his plan, right under a repertory plot that was not to be touched is perfectly symbolizing the ideology of efficiency overgrowing common sense. Here a theater is built within the theater in order not to touch the supportive generic plot that was supposed to save time and manpower.

The myth of efficiency is echoing back in the thinking about LED in theaters, which is a topic worth its own chapter and author (here we could link Tomi’s text on LED)

'''Politics- 'Quality beyond attempt' (Henri-Emmanuel Doublier)'''

In Bram Coeman’s experience, theater he encounters now has never been as diverse as today, and as closely connected to the world. A lot of activism is happening on the research level. Artists want to question decision makers' doings, and decision makers want nice arts to be presented, and there is a friction, he says. The friction lies between the expectation towards artists to produce, and on the other hand securing a time and space to reflect on topics.

Artists are to be recognized according to their presence and not according to their production, but it is a laborious process to put that concept into an ongoing practice.

An ethical layer that hasn't been so visible before, a new kind of awareness is unraveling before our eyes, joins Tomi Humalisto. There is a tangible relation shift of staged arts and arts at large towards politics. This by itself is a phenomena of a revolving non-linear expression of arts in history, referencing the phenomena of Hauntology from a very tangible perspective.It reminds Tomi of the 70-s in Finland, which was a decade of political theater.

In the current layout of elements, the artist appears as a politician, within the leftist global layer. At times these politicians are merely orators, and the ethics unreflected in the fiber of the work. As Bruno Pocheron points out, under the flag of political correctness, many possibilities of examining a thought gets lost. When an artistic voice is changed to an artistic language, or a lack of a certain language used as an artist (and a game of taboos), no repositioning is yet, or any longer made possible.

Now ethical concerns around racism, gender, equality, ecology is the zeitgeist of the makers, continues Tomi Humalisto. Something they cannot go by.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier encounters better and better works, being aware of problems of society and summoning them on stage from interesting angles. This contrasts quite some artists from the past who did not disturb anybody, who just gave the audience a pleasant moment. But on the other hand theater is in a marginal position in society at large (definitely so when compared to its position of society 30 years ago) and these uncompromised artists he fondly summons, are playing for 200 people while pop culture reaches millions, so the polarization of society shows itself ever stronger in our time, which gives the best face of the phenomena a double edge.

What makes this situation even more confusing, is that due to different developmental factors of western societies and the individuals they are comprised of, under constant technological stimuli and productional pressure, the functioning of pop culture may also be at a hinge moment. Progressive political concepts are quoted by its icons but not contextualized, even at times misinterpreted. The stars of pop culture and media personalities will be judged based on their prompt statements in a pass or burn (thumb up and thumb down) manner, seldom using their media coverage to exploring a thought- possibly because it is not needed, or in the fear of being misinterpreted and being virally torn down. A risk nobody can afford in the realm of likes. We could pretend the functioning of theater and pop culture largely differ, and I would like to keep this question open to our guarding gaze. Exploring at depth how controversies are handled in theater today in small and large can show us an accurate picture about how wide that gap is, and if it is shrinking (which I here propose without offering a ground to it) what is the speed of that shrinking.

On the top of all of this as laid out from some facades in the chapter stage rules, and on the link of eco-crisis: theater is held both captive by and responsible for wrongly understood consumption of values, that further complicates the collaborative styles, the norms of touring, production, and material use, which all creates a hinge moment what compelled me to make this article based on interviews and likely will be the reason of a sequence of actions, discussions and reads to come.

'''Luxury: 'The only shared language we have is what happens on the stage' (Geert Belpaeme)'''

The notion of luxury around lighting design work (again I am aching to have a better wording describing the work) mostly comes up related to time.

The most efficient time to work on lighting design is in a studio or on a stage that is with a rig and there is a possibility (with electricity and decent dimmers) to make at least a sketch if not a full setup of the lighting one is considering related to the other media on stage. The distance of the rig from the floor, the color of the floor, the quality of the walls and the distance of them from one another, the flexibility of the rig, the quality of the equipment in use, the possibility of darkening the space, not to mention a full black-out, are all important factors in understanding what is it actually we are working with.

The closer these parameters are to the ones of the performance, the more representative the work will be to its physical manifestation in front of audiences. Inherent to working with lights is setting up, striking down and making changes. That also means that if the room is free but the rig needs to be rearranged in-between rehearsals for another purpose, one will lose significant time by setting up the same plot repeatedly. The amount of time and its conditions is an agreement of the working group, and it is based on concepts of working together, and the producing institutes resources and ideas of support.

A small theater for example can come up as a possible luxury too, as one may get permission to work from an inventory by oneself, or being allowed to make changes without a technician being present. In this way one can have a freer schedule and an easier handling of non- pre-amped changes.

What I am writing here so far are trivialities related to lighting, but I felt the necessity to put that down, as from all people I interviewed, Geert Belpaeme was the only one to elaborately discuss the topic of choosing the right space to rehearse. The work has to define, and find its own methodology, emerging from the making. The communication around and within the work is not to be tamed with external moderation, he points out.

These are values I assume we all would gladly agree with, nonetheless on the long run we lighting designers fail limiting ourselves to the rare chances these are the conditions of a work.

Geert in this statement thinks primarily from the maker’s point of view. It is not that my lighting designer colleagues do not initiate creative processes or would avoid putting on the hat of the makers. We eventually give up on some discussions and surrender to the more sensful or more threatening ones when we are devoid of the luxury of time.

Establishing continuous artistic relations as a method of creating favorable working conditions, and deepening multimedia collaborations and defining methods and strategies over time is a popular choice of many of us, to provide continuity for our creative processes and develop common values, upon which future working conditions can be based.

Another luxury is well working fixtures with good optics. That requires maintenance from the venue, and a sincere listing of instruments- some fixtures sharing parameters are never going to function in the same way. Tomi Humalisto likened old Niethammer profiles to old mercedes-benzes: they are bulky, heavy and reliable. Here time for and transparency and trust of the communication between lighting designer and technical team is essential. The little examples I have been bringing up here are evocative to the non-generic nature of technical communication.

Enough time seeing rehearsals and understanding the movement language is a necessity that is at times considered luxury. Time to negotiate both with technicians and in rehearsal, making try-outs, time for starts-stops and making precision work is the ideal set of circumstances defined by Tomi Humalisto.

Participating in warm-ups and not always looking from the back of the rehearsal room was another frequent mention, or in any ways using the focus point of but not reducing activity to light and its prerequisite to be a quality work, which is the technique.

In another form Jan Maertens talks about this phenomena in an autobiographical context.

Doing technical work, he recalls, growing in it created a vision that lighting design could be his artistic language. He learned to express himself in a non-rational, creative way, and from that angle of his research to add to a broader artistic discourse.

I needed to learn this, Jan says, and that learning process is still going on. It comes with the necessity of being rational and non rational at the same time.

Expressing yourself with lighting should be the main form of expression as opposed to verbally elaborating on it to represent the work to collaborators, he continues. That is (the possibility to express oneself with light) limited in time, and that suppression makes one communicate rationally he concludes his worry about not well formed working circumstances.

There is a big chance to be misinterpreted and misread, as the content of lighting is non-rational. That can mean freedom in the void of understanding…

Too much rational lighting design is too much one on one of what needs to be expressed and what is expressed. Finding a voice in that non rational communication was a big event, says Jan Maertens. Lighting as a medium was giving me an opportunity, he says. It was a means to getting out of a forced monocultural approach.

Jan’s thought process is continuing towards the theater of today, as a continuation of the history of theater, politics, stage rules and experts. It allows us to gaze at the reality we are dealing with, and on what grounds do essentials become luxury. Let me follow through the thought here as an extracted quote:

Reproducing a piece of only the human stage performance is denying the nonhuman performative factor, the human interface of the non humanistic elements.

Non-human theory is present on a discursive level but practically denied.

In the free scene this phenomena is most often understood, but not dealt with because of the lack of the tools and the lack of time. There is an air of survival, creativity is invested to implement only that.

Institutionalized world of staged arts is in a dire need of fresh blood, not capable of implementing, because there is a border between creation and touring, and it is not possible to overcome. Live arts in this way become dead arts.

Staged arts and lighting design needs to stay useless otherwise it loses its point.

In this section of luxury I must blink back at the idea of experts. In this ideology lighting design is an isolated service almost, not mixing in with other media. Although lighting design dressing up a work before the public sees it is a non-contemporary concept, it haunts us in collaboration agreements, financial plans, and at times post-education ideas of young makers. It is interesting to witness different collaboration models in performances as an audience and compare for oneself what outcome is based on what system of collaborations. In most mid-career and senior artworks touring Europe, the one media beyond the rest and hermetic artforms are not to be seen. It seems what is a tougher format to support being a bigger investment is more desired as an artistic work to show. On the other hand there are completely different social norms and place for individualism in society and career paths in the arts compared to 30 years ago, that makes the basis and shape of collaborations a loaded topic.

I have started with time in an equipped space that is determined by the common decision of the group and resources available, and this is where I am returning. Tomi Humalisto recalls the time he started working in Finland, it was not so common that touring groups would come technically prepared. He remembered a strict looking technical director turning to him, saying: give me your lighting plot! He used the plot as an example to another group, that this is how prepared they should have arrived.

Today there is a culture of devised and process working in which the participants may be scared of pre-planning, thinking that could ruin the principle. In that way there is a return of a form in time, but resulting from a different set of circumstances.

This plan may change, it is a basis of discussion, a matter of use- this is Tomi’s advice for agreement to have the initial plan not a final choice one could not adhere from.

As a conclusion on luxury, the language and words of lighting design need to be carefully differentiated from each other. If something is technically defined, it means it is capable of providing the words but not yet or not consequently the thoughts explained through words. The wording can change. The hard wired reflex of searching needs to happen in a non-technical space is an economic conditioning which does not do its justice to lighting design in relation to the rest of the media, and makes lighting look like a luxurious commodity, pushing it back into a cliche role of making things look good.

Real luxury is working with artists who understand and accept the different growth curves of the different media at play in the work they bring to life, artists who are willing to shape the making of the work according to a common vision. In such an environment different artforms can generously cross-pollinate each other and inevitably something new emerges just by generous interaction over time.
[[Category:Discursive Practices]]

Hauntology inteviews / Emese Csornai

2023-04-03T13:32:18Z

EmeseCsornai:

Wikipedia: Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.

In 2022 I made a series of interviews with my colleagues involved in this research. I was looking for answers to my questions regarding the evolution of lighting design. From colleagues’ previous anecdotes of their professional history, an intricately non-linear development of this particular work started to outline in front of my mind’s eye.

In order to understand the future of lighting design in performing arts, the variables defining its past and presence, and the visions shaping it need to be summoned.

This is the first written publication that builds mainly upon and around the overlays of the interviews I have made so far. I am planning on further interviews and texts following this one, hopefully giving a complex picture of lighting design and performing arts relating to one another.

'''‘…It was light itself. Whatever comes with it, I take it.’ (Tomi Humalisto)'''

Lighting designers come from the widest array of backgrounds, many of us educated in theater itself. The versatility of lighting design as a field allows various approaches. We all found something captivating there. Tomi Humalisto for example has been studying in art education, which at the time was less compartmentalized than it is now. He followed a course mentored by a scenographer and a costume designer. They made a theater piece that today would be called ‘devised’, back then the term was not used. Later on on an exchange year in the fine arts course he took a workshop of lighting installation, led by the lighting designer Tarja Ervasti in a fortress on an island outside of Helsinki, with endless caves and rooms and cellars. They rented equipment and built a light installation. He was blown away by the tool and its impact, and learned that there is a school for studying lighting. For him it wasn’t so much about theater, it was light itself he was impressed with, and he decided, whatever comes with it, he takes it. Bruno Pocheron and his friends from art school were hired by their professor to assist an audiovisual installation of dia projections and moving screens, in the palace of festivals in Cannes for the launch of the perfume Egoist by Chanel, making it his first encounter with stage. Jan Maertens entered Stück Leuwen as an extracurricular activity, taking responsibilities as a volunteer and getting entry tickets for performances in return. For him the change of mind has been remembered as a decisive factor: in an engineer‘s curriculum things are taken seriously in their functioning. The artworld represents another set of values, being not very output driven, its added value is not through usefulness.

In the rarest cases it is obvious that someone will work in theater, like in the case of Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, who himself comes from a theater family. He entered with the ambition to be a musician, nonetheless involving himself in performing and stage work from the young age of eight.

There is a complex toolbox that shows itself in its functioning and in its effect we catch glimpse of and get driven by. Through a complex hands-on study, we understand the basic toolbox and we gain knowledge enough to be innovative. Unsurprisingly our path to get to theater contextualizes our ambition in it, informing our development in it and always leaves a trace of legibility on our further body of work. There is always a little window of time and space where our younger self shows themselves, just getting mesmerized by what they see, upon first peek into theater and lighting.

'''Choosing methods of working- 'The Yes-attitude' (Bram Coeman)'''

Bram Coeman remembers from the beginning of his work trajectory hacking the Buda Fabriek, creating their own there and then while making Dans in Kortrijk from 2002, that ‘here and now’ of there and then that described the festival as a whole. He continues in those footsteps with Buda, making a variety of things possible. How to make things possible is the central question. This is now the establishment of the still prevailing yes-attitude at Buda on the technical and curatorial level.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier, early in his career reaching the boundaries of the classical theater scene in which there was a steep hierarchy, joined the Superamas and started working together as a collective. They showed work at Dans in Kortrijk, where, opposing his previous history, it felt everything was possible, and chaotic. He also appreciated the different way of organizing technical work in Belgium, where with less technical staff more is possible, because of the involvement instead of the professionalization, the counterpart he often came across in France.

Sharing work has been an issue of overlay. When not in a collective, but sharing the oftentimes lonesome work of a lighting designer has been something both Tomi Humalisto and Bruno Pocheron have practiced that has been a healthy exchange creating more agency and resulting in uncomplicated tour schedules or normalized workloads.

Geert Belpaeme has been talking about the foundation of his presence in his work which is a result of him participating in different functions, as a performer, director, teacher, dramaturg, writer, and this different involvements and perspectives help him take him to a place of practicing theater, as opposed to producing. This practice of changing roles, perhaps in other ways than in his clear example, has been accompanying most of us participating in the research project, and keeps us running to be not codified by roles. If one is limited to a singular role, work gets codified in a way that is not reflective to the potentiality of theater, it leads to the notion of professionalization, a both socially, and weirdly professionally limiting phenomena. The idea of being reduced to one’s potentiality of producing comes up as an issue in each single interview.

In all interviews the intertwined development of the media involved has been mentioned.

Stage arts as a multiplicity, as a collection of visions, with a lot of personal engagement as opposed to professionalization is praised as a nourishing mental space to grow together in theater. Bruno Pocheron has been talking about experiencing the physicality in theater that plays out in a different way as it did in fine arts in his experience: in fine arts a projection of the results define the meanings while in theater the means are many and they also generate the vision.

Fine arts from another testimony, Tomi Humalisto mentioned the Russian avant-garde as an aesthetic reference close to which his experimentation in theater-making has taken off. In the late 19th early 20th century a number of strong-minded artists created experimental theater works, some of which proved to be a complete failure in front of the critics of the time and at the same time paved the way to future experimental lighting design and stage works in theater and film. One better known artist to mention is Vasilij Kandinskij. Tomi has been talking about an early collaboration where he has been working with a slow and dreamy set designer with a very strong vision, who persistently found out how to make a huge piece of canvas move in space. Strong colors in geometric shapes were hitting the scenography, projecting dancers’ shadows on the vast backdrop. The media developed in respectful cooperation. Those reflections both have to be noted down for us to look into the eye of the complexity that is understanding theater in the larger loops of time and space.

A common wish and attempt that has been coming up in the interviews of the freelance lighting designers is creating continuity in work, through long committed artistic collaborations in which all parties involved can develop. Another way of creating continuity that has been mentioned was through transmission, knowledge-sharing in different formats and contexts.

This mentality of personal involvement and making things possible, risk-taking and skillful collaborations (and likely favorable micro-climates) marked an era of placing experimental theater and dance performances on the map from the ‘90-s on. Contemporary dance scene was emerging, that is how Jan Maertens understood it, fighting for its position. The lighting design aspect of it played a big role there, or it was emerging intertwined with contemporary dance.

It was an era of extreme engagement, dedication, of exciting works that are sometimes dangerous, group defining their own terms. Artists cared way more for their art than for their careers, says Bruno Pocheron. The work was more untamed, he continues, with less safety rules, technical common sense was the agency called for.

The downside: self-exploitation, doing things at all costs. One lets oneself go within the drive, this leads to burnout. Saying no is healthy, it is good to know where one’s capacities lay.

Never saying no makes you feel indispensable. The graveyard is filled with people who cannot be missed. The trap, we all might have stepped in it once, says Jan Maertens.

'''Stage rules- 'Theater is forgetting its skills' (Bruno Pocheron)'''

The theater nearly all of my interviewed colleagues and myself entered, was much less specialized compared to how it is now. Knowledge-base acquired through hands-on practice, instead of formal training in a study institute (remote from the theater and collaborating art forms) was the base of the engagement. Personal engagement in each case, (whether coming from, leading to or bypassing school) at the theater, was a strong choice, out of genuine interest.

This relates to the origin of the yes-saying of Bram Coeman and the greater organizing principle at Buda: figuring out how to make something possible, working towards what is possible, following a technical common sense rather than safety guidelines. In this layout professional respect and a sense of working together towards the best outcome clearly exceeds the importance of a generic system of rules external to the site of the theater and current potentialities within a space and a group.

Knowledge sharing is the nature of this hands-on way of working, and negotiating, actualizing rules according to the situation is the trajectory of the work. Thinking efficiency, from down to up considering the right investment is essential in this way of working.To quote Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, if the head is good, the whole team goes good. In this practice of collaborating between theater technical crew and lighting designer among others, being omnivolent is a key character of the motivation and practice of the work, as opposed to specialization.

In theaters some old pulley systems for hoisting individual pipes, sliders for adjustable hanging, motors, drop-boxes, scrims, and dimmer cities communicating via Ethernet bundles and so much more can co-exist. Traditionally theater is not a place like the market, where one system wipes out another, here an accumulation of witty and practical solutions takes place, where the relevance of a technical solution is indicated by its simplicity, precision, ease of operation and installation, its capacity to be developed. This is also a ground for inventions as there are some archetypes of solutions that can be developed and customized infinitely.

Situations that would be evaluated case-to-case on a common sense ground by knowledgeable and devoted technicians operating day by day in that versatile knowledge-base have gradually shifted to a regionally uniform safety regulation system that compliments the idea of specialized experts and not risking the holistic knowledge base. Of course in the framework of the holistic knowledge base, the technician is personally responsible for the potential tragedy taking place, in the reality of the specialized experts in a generic regulation, it comes down to regional insurance systems and this is how risk-taking and responsibility are dissociated from one another, in a place where everyone goes because no generic events take place.

I feel the urge to mention that most young technicians I meet still go to theater to learn in such a holistic way on both ends of computing and phenomena of physics, from the older colleagues who are a living archive of this versatile knowledge, coming from all different backgrounds.

Another, with the safety regulations comparably strong example of the generic is the repertory plot. The phenomena comes from, but is not exclusive to the United States (and in all fairness it is not an absolute rule but a likely risk).

I think it originates from the idea that lighting is a more sober and functional service, and it inevitably will contain side-lights, back lights and front lights. Taking in consideration what the generic best use of each fixture is imagined, and how many fixtures are needed for a wash without a dip, an optimized rig is serving as a base of the production entering the theater. In this way less manpower is needed to set up, and it all can happen in a shorter time. A contemporary version of a repertory plot is exactly the same, but comprised of moving head LEDs.

In this layout the idea of the generic is taken a step further, as each fixture can produce a variation of colors or even shapes, nothing needs to be added to the repertory plot.

In this ideology of practicality the angle of light, one main parameter defining the use of a light source, is already disappearing, if we do not count color and the quality of light. These moving heads of course are a lot heavier and non-modular, compared to traditional theater fixtures, so diverging from a repertory plot is even less possible for practical reasons. One example of Jan Maertens, where a lower rig has been placed with the fixtures placed in accordance to his plan, right under a repertory plot that was not to be touched is perfectly symbolizing the ideology of efficiency overgrowing common sense. Here a theater is built within the theater in order not to touch the supportive generic plot that was supposed to save time and manpower.

The myth of efficiency is echoing back in the thinking about LED in theaters, which is a topic worth its own chapter and author (here we could link Tomi’s text on LED)

'''Politics- 'Quality beyond attempt' (Henri-Emmanuel Doublier)'''

In Bram Coeman’s experience, theater he encounters now has never been as diverse as today, and as closely connected to the world. A lot of activism is happening on the research level. Artists want to question decision makers' doings, and decision makers want nice arts to be presented, and there is a friction, he says. The friction lies between the expectation towards artists to produce, and on the other hand securing a time and space to reflect on topics.

Artists are to be recognized according to their presence and not according to their production, but it is a laborious process to put that concept into an ongoing practice.

An ethical layer that hasn't been so visible before, a new kind of awareness is unraveling before our eyes, joins Tomi Humalisto. There is a tangible relation shift of staged arts and arts at large towards politics. This by itself is a phenomena of a revolving non-linear expression of arts in history, referencing the phenomena of Hauntology from a very tangible perspective.It reminds Tomi of the 70-s in Finland, which was a decade of political theater.

In the current layout of elements, the artist appears as a politician, within the leftist global layer. At times these politicians are merely orators, and the ethics unreflected in the fiber of the work. As Bruno Pocheron points out, under the flag of political correctness, many possibilities of examining a thought gets lost. When an artistic voice is changed to an artistic language, or a lack of a certain language used as an artist (and a game of taboos), no repositioning is yet, or any longer made possible.

Now ethical concerns around racism, gender, equality, ecology is the zeitgeist of the makers, continues Tomi Humalisto. Something they cannot go by.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier encounters better and better works, being aware of problems of society and summoning them on stage from interesting angles. This contrasts quite some artists from the past who did not disturb anybody, who just gave the audience a pleasant moment. But on the other hand theater is in a marginal position in society at large (definitely so when compared to its position of society 30 years ago) and these uncompromised artists he fondly summons, are playing for 200 people while pop culture reaches millions, so the polarization of society shows itself ever stronger in our time, which gives the best face of the phenomena a double edge.

What makes this situation even more confusing, is that due to different developmental factors of western societies and the individuals they are comprised of, under constant technological stimuli and productional pressure, the functioning of pop culture may also be at a hinge moment. Progressive political concepts are quoted by its icons but not contextualized, even at times misinterpreted. The stars of pop culture and media personalities will be judged based on their prompt statements in a pass or burn (thumb up and thumb down) manner, seldom using their media coverage to exploring a thought- possibly because it is not needed, or in the fear of being misinterpreted and being virally torn down. A risk nobody can afford in the realm of likes. We could pretend the functioning of theater and pop culture largely differ, and I would like to keep this question open to our guarding gaze. Exploring at depth how controversies are handled in theater today in small and large can show us an accurate picture about how wide that gap is, and if it is shrinking (which I here propose without offering a ground to it) what is the speed of that shrinking.

On the top of all of this as laid out from some facades in the chapter stage rules, and on the link of eco-crisis: theater is held both captive by and responsible for wrongly understood consumption of values, that further complicates the collaborative styles, the norms of touring, production, and material use, which all creates a hinge moment what compelled me to make this article based on interviews and likely will be the reason of a sequence of actions, discussions and reads to come.

'''Luxury: 'The only shared language we have is what happens on the stage' (Geert Belpaeme)'''

The notion of luxury around lighting design work (again I am aching to have a better wording describing the work) mostly comes up related to time.

The most efficient time to work on lighting design is in a studio or on a stage that is with a rig and there is a possibility (with electricity and decent dimmers) to make at least a sketch if not a full setup of the lighting one is considering related to the other media on stage. The distance of the rig from the floor, the color of the floor, the quality of the walls and the distance of them from one another, the flexibility of the rig, the quality of the equipment in use, the possibility of darkening the space, not to mention a full black-out, are all important factors in understanding what is it actually we are working with.

The closer these parameters are to the ones of the performance, the more representative the work will be to its physical manifestation in front of audiences. Inherent to working with lights is setting up, striking down and making changes. That also means that if the room is free but the rig needs to be rearranged in-between rehearsals for another purpose, one will lose significant time by setting up the same plot repeatedly. The amount of time and its conditions is an agreement of the working group, and it is based on concepts of working together, and the producing institutes resources and ideas of support.

A small theater for example can come up as a possible luxury too, as one may get permission to work from an inventory by oneself, or being allowed to make changes without a technician being present. In this way one can have a freer schedule and an easier handling of non- pre-amped changes.

What I am writing here so far are trivialities related to lighting, but I felt the necessity to put that down, as from all people I interviewed, Geert Belpaeme was the only one to elaborately discuss the topic of choosing the right space to rehearse. The work has to define, and find its own methodology, emerging from the making. The communication around and within the work is not to be tamed with external moderation, he points out.

These are values I assume we all would gladly agree with, nonetheless on the long run we lighting designers fail limiting ourselves to the rare chances these are the conditions of a work.

Geert in this statement thinks primarily from the maker’s point of view. It is not that my lighting designer colleagues do not initiate creative processes or would avoid putting on the hat of the makers. We eventually give up on some discussions and surrender to the more sensful or more threatening ones when we are devoid of the luxury of time.

Establishing continuous artistic relations as a method of creating favorable working conditions, and deepening multimedia collaborations and defining methods and strategies over time is a popular choice of many of us, to provide continuity for our creative processes and develop common values, upon which future working conditions can be based.

Another luxury is well working fixtures with good optics. That requires maintenance from the venue, and a sincere listing of instruments- some fixtures sharing parameters are never going to function in the same way. Tomi Humalisto likened old Niethammer profiles to old mercedes-benzes: they are bulky, heavy and reliable. Here time for and transparency and trust of the communication between lighting designer and technical team is essential. The little examples I have been bringing up here are evocative to the non-generic nature of technical communication.

Enough time seeing rehearsals and understanding the movement language is a necessity that is at times considered luxury. Time to negotiate both with technicians and in rehearsal, making try-outs, time for starts-stops and making precision work is the ideal set of circumstances defined by Tomi Humalisto.

Participating in warm-ups and not always looking from the back of the rehearsal room was another frequent mention, or in any ways using the focus point of but not reducing activity to light and its prerequisite to be a quality work, which is the technique.

In another form Jan Maertens talks about this phenomena in an autobiographical context.

Doing technical work, he recalls, growing in it created a vision that lighting design could be his artistic language. He learned to express himself in a non-rational, creative way, and from that angle of his research to add to a broader artistic discourse.

I needed to learn this, Jan says, and that learning process is still going on. It comes with the necessity of being rational and non rational at the same time.

Expressing yourself with lighting should be the main form of expression as opposed to verbally elaborating on it to represent the work to collaborators, he continues. That is (the possibility to express oneself with light) limited in time, and that suppression makes one communicate rationally he concludes his worry about not well formed working circumstances.

There is a big chance to be misinterpreted and misread, as the content of lighting is non-rational. That can mean freedom in the void of understanding…

Too much rational lighting design is too much one on one of what needs to be expressed and what is expressed. Finding a voice in that non rational communication was a big event, says Jan Maertens. Lighting as a medium was giving me an opportunity, he says. It was a means to getting out of a forced monocultural approach.

Jan’s thought process is continuing towards the theater of today, as a continuation of the history of theater, politics, stage rules and experts. It allows us to gaze at the reality we are dealing with, and on what grounds do essentials become luxury. Let me follow through the thought here as an extracted quote:

Reproducing a piece of only the human stage performance is denying the nonhuman performative factor, the human interface of the non humanistic elements.

Non-human theory is present on a discursive level but practically denied.

In the free scene this phenomena is most often understood, but not dealt with because of the lack of the tools and the lack of time. There is an air of survival, creativity is invested to implement only that.

Institutionalized world of staged arts is in a dire need of fresh blood, not capable of implementing, because there is a border between creation and touring, and it is not possible to overcome. Live arts in this way become dead arts.

Staged arts and lighting design needs to stay useless otherwise it loses its point.

In this section of luxury I must blink back at the idea of experts. In this ideology lighting design is an isolated service almost, not mixing in with other media. Although lighting design dressing up a work before the public sees it is a non-contemporary concept, it haunts us in collaboration agreements, financial plans, and at times post-education ideas of young makers. It is interesting to witness different collaboration models in performances as an audience and compare for oneself what outcome is based on what system of collaborations. In most mid-career and senior artworks touring Europe, the one media beyond the rest and hermetic artforms are not to be seen. It seems what is a tougher format to support being a bigger investment is more desired as an artistic work to show. On the other hand there are completely different social norms and place for individualism in society and career paths in the arts compared to 30 years ago, that makes the basis and shape of collaborations a loaded topic.

I have started with time in an equipped space that is determined by the common decision of the group and resources available, and this is where I am returning. Tomi Humalisto recalls the time he started working in Finland, it was not so common that touring groups would come technically prepared. He remembered a strict looking technical director turning to him, saying: give me your lighting plot! He used the plot as an example to another group, that this is how prepared they should have arrived.

Today there is a culture of devised and process working in which the participants may be scared of pre-planning, thinking that could ruin the principle. In that way there is a return of a form in time, but resulting from a different set of circumstances.

This plan may change, it is a basis of discussion, a matter of use- this is Tomi’s advice for agreement to have the initial plan not a final choice one could not adhere from.

As a conclusion on luxury, the language and words of lighting design need to be carefully differentiated from each other. If something is technically defined, it means it is capable of providing the words but not yet or not consequently the thoughts explained through words. The wording can change. The hard wired reflex of searching needs to happen in a non-technical space is an economic conditioning which does not do its justice to lighting design in relation to the rest of the media, and makes lighting look like a luxurious commodity, pushing it back into a cliche role of making things look good.

Real luxury is working with artists who understand and accept the different growth curves of the different media at play in the work they bring to life, artists who are willing to shape the making of the work according to a common vision. In such an environment different artforms can generously cross-pollinate each other and inevitably something new emerges just by generous interaction over time.
[[Category:Discursive Practices]]

Hauntology inteviews / Emese Csornai

2023-04-03T13:30:55Z

EmeseCsornai: spacing

Hauntology inteviews / Emese Csornai

2023-04-03T13:30:11Z

EmeseCsornai:

Hauntology inteviews / Emese Csornai

2023-04-03T13:29:41Z

EmeseCsornai: created

Http://gangplank.group/mediawiki/index.php/Interview based texts

2023-04-03T12:54:14Z

EmeseCsornai: Created page with "Hauntology"

Hauntology

Dream Sequence research / Emese Csornai

2023-01-16T14:54:37Z

EmeseCsornai:

Texts derived from a 3 month research supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR

'''Intersection of pop culture and dreamscapes'''

''Background of the research''

Dream Sequence started itself as a Corona work- I had the chance to step out from the rushed stream of works and look into the ongoing compositional research within my work, see what was the red thread in the performances I authored and others I was set out to make.

I was actively researching how sequences of edited film can look like and make us feel in a theater environment. There are so many strategies to find here. In ‘[https://www.emesecsornai.com/stranger/ Stranger]’ for example I have explored only the most obvious paths, looking into camera-angle change in a shared physical space, zoom-in on an isolated figure and action, panning out on a diagonal of an otherwise blacked-out space. In ‘[https://www.emesecsornai.com/on-being-ill/ On being ill]’ I have been re-taking the self-confessionate format attributed to Jo Spence on a holographic screen. During the piece we have transposed it in space centering on Virginia Woolf’s essay of the same title, that was maybe less obvious but direct reference of the frame of photography and film in relation to shared space.

It is a thought-provoking fact about adapted filmic tools on stage, that when these are video-documented, the actual tools blend so well with our trained reflexes to receive and digest sequences of moving image, that they can not be recognized from a documentation any longer, and only through cortical feedback, verbal elaboration, they are spotted. In a theater space however they are more visible.

This gives a valid window of observation both on video-documentations of dance or theater performances, but also on the actual point I was circling around, and do so while researching ‘Dream Sequence’, namely how genres of representation assume ways of looking and how our way of looking will define the information allowed to reflect upon. Consequently, how this whole procedure flattens gravely the imaginable conclusions one can find in art and media.

In the first iteration, working together again with Silvia Bennett, we started with inhabiting my idea of dreams and dream sequences from movies. I have brought [https://youtu.be/WCF_mHKBH3k Falling] from Delia Derbyshire and Blue Velvet from David Lynch as a reference, and dialed in with the lighting professional in me, who created a space similar to a corridor or a cave of lights beaming down in different depths. My goal was to follow deeper and deeper dreams on stage. The work was outlining beautiful possibilities of a dark dream, but it made filmic tools disappear in a sleek way, they just felt too natural in the way we integrated them, and I did not have the concentration at the time to fish them back. Beyond that, I was sure the research had to further specify itself. Silvia has rooted the work in the language of theater, bridging the two media through characters and we found modulations of speed and direction of light and movement sequences evocative to filmic representations. This research was further invested in the latter work.

''Getting into the matter of artistic exchange''

In the actual research project of ‘Dream Sequence’ I have started a research collaboration with Janne Ebel. It became clear that there is no singular relation between theater and film, and the adaptation of each filmic form opens a number of new questions on content, to define even the genre of a singular film to sample on stage.

In film there is no autonomy of perception. The frame dictates where the spectator looks, the brightest part of the image. The difference to theater is that there is not a two dimensional representation of space, but a three dimensional one, that brought us to the first obstacles of translation. As a representative example, the dramatic effect of the frame ratio changes in the movie "Waves” would not be possible to recreate in a theater space. Other popular space rendering effects, like the anamorphic bokeh would be possible to recreate with bricolage tools and light.

As both theater and film are abstracted spaces, I have developed a keen interest in adapting landscape sequences from films to theater, embracing the tempo and the resolution of them too. To my greatest surprise, the most abstracted form of moving landscape supported by either text or music that will hint on the speed of the sequence works as a quote of a moving landscape, in the direction of a road movie.

While exploring my possibilities for representation I stumbled across the book "Edweard Muybridge and the technological wild west” from Rebecca Solnit. This was the only book I read that was expressly dealing with the economy of perception, self-representation, the shifts of visual culture trends in evolution, the intersection I was examining in a practical way, but this book goes back to the mid 19th century and the industrial revolution.

Alongside, I specified what I mean as pop culture, beyond being a counterpart of theater, an imposed dream, a marketed space that interferes with our attention-economy,partially determining the audience of experimental theater and the relevance of topics it opens up to.

Social media shorts build on Cinema in form and content, and many content providers are using filmic tools and references to films in captions and gifs, frequently copying a form and no longer aware of the content they carry. Social media trends emerge and vanish with accelerating speed. These tidal waves of shared visual space are part of latter conversation, music and fashion, as it is processing itself and mutating through genres. The more events are limited to digital interfaces the more these impulses become a common narrative and offer themselves as a topic to discuss in the field of culture without giving too much flesh to grasp.

This was the area of interest of the research I opened up for Silvia Bennett, Yvonne Sembene and Bilawa Respati, enjoying the occasional feedback of Anni Lattunen. I wanted to create a room to share for social media, the fabricated dream, and the language of dreams, commonly shared.

There was an unexpected but logical importance of age differences appearing in the research. The places where and how we socialized did leave a mark on our coping and processing strategies about pop culture phenomena.

A very important tension formed between online attention economy and fragmentation of time, and time as a theatrical representation. Suddenly a smartphone-proportioned white canvas that was taller than a person was most obviously a smartphone, and anything in front of it would be whatever appeared on our screen. A careful reproduction on a wall, of lights emitted from a window of a subway train, in which our protagonist would appear, was not all that clear for an uninformed viewer. Making a blackout and a cutting image by flapping a scarf in a small light and fading out following that was less readable as seeing a sequence backwards. Quoting mythological figures in front of a horizon lighting, showing silhouettes was as easy read as the aforementioned giant phone screens. Subtitle text became a mundane reference but glow in the dark text was a rescue boat that brought us back to cinema with capital letters.

(Content of this picture is filmed by Janne Ebel cut into stills and made into a collage by Emese Csornai in the style of Edweard Muybridge picturing Silvia Bennett at Tanzhalle Wiesenburg)

[[File:MuybridgeSilviaBlackout 2.jpg|thumb|1314x1314px]]

''Future''

The layered nature of the material we have been working on read clearly, and music was a perfect substance to create clarity or ambiguity in this shared space. We had to learn that some of the tools we were using were not reaching our test audience, because they were too dialectic to each of our fields. We will need to spend much more time on understanding how to lead attention from extremely abstract content to more blunt and obvious references.

Another important issue we found out about is that copying in the context of pop culture gains a whole new meaning, and this attention is in the forefront of the viewers’ attention whether we want it or not. To get into that matter both in the space of dreams and the social media extracts will be a tight and specific movement research.

Time-economy has an important double-role, on one hand a dramaturgic agent and a motivator of fragmentation, on another hand hinting on what space we may be in. Here relative speed of lighting, movement and music is a key toolkit that defines the spine of the piece.

As explored in the collaborative section, the time aspect of pop culture and social media is very different compared to the one of the theater. In order to keep up with the challenging speed pop culture morphs itself in, we really need to be online present and exchange shorts related to “Dream sequence” with theater tools, and that is a necessary side-project of preparation to a piece, like Monty Python sketches in their character.

https://www.emesecsornai.com/dream-sequence-research/
[[Category:Discursive Practices]]

EmeseCsornai: document main directions discussion

[[category: Journal_of_the_meeting_August_2021 ]]
10h41 questions:

- If you could eliminate something in your current practice what would that be?

- If you scan the projects you did since we met last time, what was your favorite research(phase)?

19.8.2021

JanM: conditioned ignorance

method of working as a text previous to work process. Trust situation rather then contract

JanF: credits, conditions, author rights in contract

strategized scale-specific productional reports similar to JanM solo with less light

H: pandemics either all work or nothing at all. Working through, very technical and going even deeper. Now wants to make musc, as it is composition too, but much simplified.

Less effort then light design.

Conviction: making light design but in another way, saying no to a couple of things.

Old tools rotting- efficiency with old tools, constant re-adaptation?

Bram, Brecht Joost: everyone went into low tech research mode, not much requests

JanM:theaters specialize themselves with diverse equipment- creativity put in question as a result

Favorite work process

H: Melanie Perrier children performance cooking wine, Matisse-like color shadows, rainbow from 20 2K-s, playing on korg as a piano. Focused, brainy, interesting. Visual artist

JanM:

there is nothing before creation. Preliminary is a part of creation.

Blessed: no talk, full runs, solid dialectic process all media

JanF: work fields in bigger productions get differentiated, some things are responsibly taken care of

How do we develop our personal instruments?

Tools---- holistic thread (much talk about lanbox)

Goals with this project

E:Ikujiro Nonaka Dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation

happy to analyze based on this and discuss, make space for tacit knowledge and allow dialogue with explicit knowledge. Articulation commitment autonomy

Principles (like no logical fallacies), observe and write about one another's work, observe simple phenomena- lexicon. Meet each other, work together with students

JanF: terminology creation, understanding own practice

H: desire---- collective (now not believing in it but still it works)

10ys in collective, collective decisions were the right ones.

Common goals and vocabulary

meeting light designers: exchange professionally

pessimism compensated by teaching

JanM: personal research

hinge moment

light as a major signifier

G:how do we communicate externally? Writing, fanzine as not a comprehensive end presentation, articles, opinions

own way, own rhythm

Tomi: something to build upon

Meeting August 2021

2021-08-19T17:03:11Z

EmeseCsornai:

[[category: Journal_of_the_meeting_August_2021 ]]
The Abstract

“Even though the postdramatic turn in the performing arts has radically reshuffled the dramaturgical hierarchy of different signifying entities that are at stake in a work of art, light as an essential signifier and agent in performative situations and, as a consequence, the practice of lighting design has until now been underappreciated (1). Setting aside some specific practices, light is in general less recognized, analyzed and understood as a fundamental part in the dramaturgy of contemporary performing arts practices, nor does it find its way into the artistic curriculum of performing arts educational programs in general. Lighting design has been evolving greatly though, both as an autonomous and an interdependent artform, however much of that work gets lost in translation when it comes to the dialogue with directors, theatre makers, dramaturges, performers… (2) How to speak about light? How to create from the perspective of lighting (design)? '''How to make light a full and equal signifier within a contemporary dramaturgy?''' (3)"

(1) But what is causing things? Is light too much considered as a normality – something like: 'there’s always light'. Or is it because of a lack of lexicon? Are we not able to talk on light?

(2) The materialisation of light: it turns away from being a performer and becomes a something you can regulate in terms of ‘more/less’.

(3) Can we start a discourse leaving of from questiong the basic lexicon of more and less. More or less what?

Reflecting light meeting 18.08.2021

Meeting each other, talking about KASK project week, and the best possibility to grasp something about the students- earlier project week unsuitable, different structure.

JanM suggests the students get invited to our Belgian shows, Henri suggests in whatever framework but to show work to the students and make them talk about it.

Preliminary light design- where the concept/base of creation is formed (becomes a topic of discussion, also as a slippery place where unrealistic expectations are formed from the ‚piecemakers‘)

How to collect our thoughts in the research process?

Wiki, fanzine, google drive

E: to see what is the focus of the wiki and what is the evolution of the discussion not to flood the wiki with a lot of talking

additions

reactions

Tomi: what to do with documents that we do not yet know what to do with?

When is a theme becoming too limiting?

Beginning themes and resulting themes

Probably to thematize and structure we will need to find in the future

JanM: We are agreeing on an informal and a formal thread

together we decide when something becomes formal

Start wiki- and formalize in Gangplank (good distance in time)

Reading through the project description:

Geert postdramatic turn in the performing arts happened in the 80-s theater turned into performing arts, did not have to be dramatic

reshuffled the dramaturgical hierarchy, lighting design made that shift too but was not recognized.

Geert talks about new materialism (coined in the 90-s) as a school within thought, which dininishes the clear western distinction of culture and nature, a distinction that resulted in anthropocentric science, and theater (human psychological drama)

signifier: elpement having an agency of its own, a player in this meaning-making

Our goal: stepping beyond technical education, artistic practice

first infiltrate then see what/how to do

Tomi: why is illusion a threat? (the illusion making capability of light becomes a threat?)

Geert: problem- we are not working with light but we want to have lights

Henri: communication with KASK students

Light as a performer becomes materialized in the heads of people even though it cannot be materialized like that

Henri: ego of the artist – taking care of whom? Working together towards a certain goal

excercise: to start developing a lexicon from the sparse one from uninformed dialogues in our praxis; like using less and more but give depth to what different attributes can be quantified in that way

excercise: what I appreciated about it was… or give a perspective to the insight: as a dog I found the pitch hard

Tomi: Kask and Giessen differnt ways of elaborating on working multimedia

De-construction: minimalism becomes a limitation for material-use

JanM: solo is expected to use less lamps, more sparse plot- wrong angle

At Kask:

B: research for us, practice with the school

H: create sensitivity in the students, measure level of knowledge by making students talk about what they see

G: to understand light (Ezra is referred to, as in how to create discourse ability)

B: what is the smallest lexicon we cane share by? The exercises aim this direction

Preliminary light design discourse:

JanM: this might generate expectations that are not met (not matching vocabulary- mismatch of expectations)

Mutual vocabulary – lexicon is a tool and not a result

Geert: Lexicon and discourse differentiation. Lexicon is enabling a conversation

discoursive practice in itself doesnt make sense

Not only practical workshop of light

H: images are abstract, fast lost in translation

arrive to semiological

the notion of technicality, not the presence of it

t: how to learn to see?

Witnessing while doing

angle change is the change of the look

‚I didnt watch the lights‘- where to focus, pulling out focus

T: recognized areas that are blurred can be useful too

G: what are we talking about when we talk about light?

Bram: Minna Grind Jefte- light as the signifier, Jefte the agent

similarly Jan working with Mana Depauw similarly

T: it is not a competition. Mutual aim, presence with light, playing together

G:at what point lighting design can join a performance? Everything will have to adapt to the media joining earlier

Light dramaturgy- dramaturgy of the piece

Tomi: different distribution of tasks and professionalization