Q&A - Revision history

BrunoPocheron at 20:17, 14 December 2023

2023-12-14T20:17:13Z

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	and, when possible, co-designing lights and escaping loneliness and compartimentation in the tech booth.		and, when possible, co-designing lights and escaping loneliness and compartimentation in the tech booth.

	== '''What is your most meaningful experience of darkness in a theater? -Ezra''' '''Veldhuis'''==		== '''What is your most meaningful experience of darkness in a theater? - Ezra''' '''Veldhuis'''==

BrunoPocheron at 20:15, 14 December 2023

2023-12-14T20:15:38Z

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	'''Tomi Humalisto'''		'''Tomi Humalisto'''
			[[File:The Dark Project.jpg\|thumb\|The Dark Project - Tomi Humalisto]]

	The most significant experience for me happened when I was working on The Dark Project (Pimeä Projekti), which was performed in 2006 and 2007. I was the initiator and facilitator of the work, for which I also created an infra-red lighting design. Originally conceived as an installation performance in the gallery space of the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA in Helsinki, it required a lot of experimentation on the part of me and the team, where we placed ourselves in the same position as the spectators of the work. Viewing is a broad concept in this context, as the performance made use of multiple senses, but also of real-time video camera footage. It was more about experiencing in a dark and dim environment. The performance consisted of four sequentially repeating lighting scenes, dawn, day, dusk, and night. The durations of these lighting scenes followed the durations of daylight, twilight, and darkness per year, shortened and related to the three-hour duration of the performance.		The most significant experience for me happened when I was working on The Dark Project (Pimeä Projekti), which was performed in 2006 and 2007. I was the initiator and facilitator of the work, for which I also created an infra-red lighting design. Originally conceived as an installation performance in the gallery space of the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA in Helsinki, it required a lot of experimentation on the part of me and the team, where we placed ourselves in the same position as the spectators of the work. Viewing is a broad concept in this context, as the performance made use of multiple senses, but also of real-time video camera footage. It was more about experiencing in a dark and dim environment. The performance consisted of four sequentially repeating lighting scenes, dawn, day, dusk, and night. The durations of these lighting scenes followed the durations of daylight, twilight, and darkness per year, shortened and related to the three-hour duration of the performance.

	For me, the significance of the performance was largely built on the rhythm of the various shifts in darkness, but also on experiencing almost total darkness and navigating the performance space, bumping into other audience members, naked performers, indulging in improvised play with strangers or sensing air currents, sounds, textures of materials and cold ice under your feet. Underlying all this imagined anonymity was an awareness of total visibility, made possible by infrared lights and surveillance cameras. I liked the sheer beauty of this idea: I was able to implement a lighting design and lighting scene that did not destroy the darkness, the two could live simultaneously at the same time and place.		For me, the significance of the performance was largely built on the rhythm of the various shifts in darkness, but also on experiencing almost total darkness and navigating the performance space, bumping into other audience members, naked performers, indulging in improvised play with strangers or sensing air currents, sounds, textures of materials and cold ice under your feet. Underlying all this imagined anonymity was an awareness of total visibility, made possible by infrared lights and surveillance cameras. I liked the sheer beauty of this idea: I was able to implement a lighting design and lighting scene that did not destroy the darkness, the two could live simultaneously at the same time and place.

BrunoPocheron: /* What is your most meaningful experience of darkness in a theater? */

2023-12-14T20:11:14Z

What is your most meaningful experience of darkness in a theater?

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:11, 14 December 2023
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	and, when possible, co-designing lights and escaping loneliness and compartimentation in the tech booth.		and, when possible, co-designing lights and escaping loneliness and compartimentation in the tech booth.

	== What is your most meaningful experience of darkness in a theater? ==		== '''What is your most meaningful experience of darkness in a theater? -Ezra''' '''Veldhuis'''==


			'''Henri Emmanuel Doublier'''

			My best experience of darkness was the show MUA from Emmanuelle Huynh. It was a show in total darkness, a trio of Emmanuelle, composer and cello player Kasper T. Toeplitz, and Yves Godin, the lighting designer. In the beginning, the audience was immersed in total darkness for quite a long time (5 minutes or more), listening to the cello playing. Even after this long time in the dark, your eyes couldn’t see anything. Then, as a very subtle light came slowly, I could perceive the softest, blurred, spectral body that I saw in my life. (Emmanuelle was naked or just dressed in a transparent fabric). I remember a lot of alternation of moments in total darkness and moments in little, little, light on the body of the dancer. I could feel some visual distortion tricks, when she moved, the body was decomposed like in a cubist painting of Picasso. She could even become double, because the eyes in such little light don’t have time to adapt. I still have images in my mind more than 25 years later. I was assisting Yves at that time, and I do hope that he won’t be upset if I give you his trick. He used very deep strong filters and a lot of grey neutral density into regular 1kw halogen lamp. Thanks to that, he could have a wide amplitude on its faders and still have a low intensity of light, to get such incredible quality.

			'''Tomi Humalisto'''

			The most significant experience for me happened when I was working on The Dark Project (Pimeä Projekti), which was performed in 2006 and 2007. I was the initiator and facilitator of the work, for which I also created an infra-red lighting design. Originally conceived as an installation performance in the gallery space of the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA in Helsinki, it required a lot of experimentation on the part of me and the team, where we placed ourselves in the same position as the spectators of the work. Viewing is a broad concept in this context, as the performance made use of multiple senses, but also of real-time video camera footage. It was more about experiencing in a dark and dim environment. The performance consisted of four sequentially repeating lighting scenes, dawn, day, dusk, and night. The durations of these lighting scenes followed the durations of daylight, twilight, and darkness per year, shortened and related to the three-hour duration of the performance.

			For me, the significance of the performance was largely built on the rhythm of the various shifts in darkness, but also on experiencing almost total darkness and navigating the performance space, bumping into other audience members, naked performers, indulging in improvised play with strangers or sensing air currents, sounds, textures of materials and cold ice under your feet. Underlying all this imagined anonymity was an awareness of total visibility, made possible by infrared lights and surveillance cameras. I liked the sheer beauty of this idea: I was able to implement a lighting design and lighting scene that did not destroy the darkness, the two could live simultaneously at the same time and place.


			'''Bruno Pocheron'''

			One of the most meaningful experiences of darkness in a theatre is for me an often recurring one: the classical final blackout that marks the end of many stage works. A timeless suspension, a respiration, shared by audience and performers alike, a transitional event where all involved in the ephemerous theatrical contract come back to themselves, find back their bodies in the dark, deprived of visual input for long enough to acknowledge the end of the shared, real time experience: the suspension of the suspension of disbelief. I project myself back from the stage to wherever I am physically in the theatre, while the shared experience reforms itself into individual memories, and the magically activated theatrical apparatus resumes the shape of an architectural space occupied by people.

			'''Emese Csornai'''

			Darkness really got me in Juan Dominguez’ My only memory. The audience was first facing a frame of lights very similar to a filmscreen, blinding us. After, it was pitch black. An actor was live performing the text (in a light isolated booth). Darkness changed its quality due to the shifts in the text, its spatial rendering and one's anticipations. I don't want to kill the fun and I hope plenty of people will go and witness this work, but in the very end of the piece in very dim lighting perception and sense of distance were summoned after we have long given up on seeing anything at all. In this performance there was a great dramaturgy of darkness where I felt the piece was sliding directly in my nervous system and I was potentially in another person's head.

			'''Jan Fedinger'''

			''the noise of darkness''

			One of my first memories of working in the theatre has to do with the moment of turning off the lights after a day at work with the multitude of fixtures. Back then this theatre felt as such an immense space as I had not experienced on a daily basis before. Especially often being alone in this large volume felt as being in a silent void. With all the lights on, I could see every corner and every part of the room but often would not hear a single sound. At the end of the day I had to go up the tribune, arriving somewhat in the middle of the space, between the floor and the ceiling to the light desk. Here, after some simple commands, sudden darkness would fall onto the space as I turned off the fixtures that had been shining through the day. A darkness so absolute and immersive as I had not experienced before. Every time again I was struck with a moment of uncertainty, of slight unease but mostly great awe. Time and again it felt like I had entered into a void. However this void of darkness was far from silent as the day working with the lights had been. Instead there was a cacophony of sounds that suddenly erupted. Of clicks and cracks. Of high pitched banging. The lamps that had been heating for hours, expending the metal would now cool down rapidly creating a multitude of sounds as the material retracted. All the light fixtures turned into musical instruments of an overwhelming composition moving through the dark void. In this darkness as the boundaries of space had disappeared around me, I was immersed in the middle of that orchestra of noise. No less frightened at first but even more with a feeling of astonishment and excitement.

			Even bigger was my surprise when I told my supervisor of this experience. He answered with a story. A local myth of sorts. Some time ago heavy rains had flooded the basement of the theatre. Once the water had gone, they discovered a squirrel among the debris that had drowned in the darkness with no one around. Now every night once the living would turn off the lights, the ghost of that squirrel could finally roam free, bound only to the darkness as it jumped from lamp to lamp through the lightgrid.

			'''Ezra Veldhuis'''

			I really love darkness in the theatre and have had many meaningful experiences while working and watching performances with darkness. I was for example amazed by Waldeinsamkeit by Benjamin Verdonck and Lucas Van Haesbroeck. In this performance, you look at a viewing box, in which various shutters open and close in dim shining grey light. Shadows, sliding panels and shutters change the dimly shining light in an inexplicable way. It is a magical, minimalist light show that remains elusive and wondrous even after they explained their technique to me and I was allowed to look inside the cabinet.

			Personally, I really enjoy working at night in an almost deserted dark theatre where only the light you are working with is still on. Time sometimes seems to almost stand still in these evening hours and you often find yourself in a kind of mental and physical in-between space in which another reality can sprout. From working in this zone usually arise the light-scenes of my performances.

BrunoPocheron at 20:06, 14 December 2023

2023-12-14T20:06:01Z

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	and, when possible, co-designing lights and escaping loneliness and compartimentation in the tech booth.		and, when possible, co-designing lights and escaping loneliness and compartimentation in the tech booth.

			== What is your most meaningful experience of darkness in a theater? ==

Rlg at 15:25, 5 December 2023

2023-12-05T15:25:09Z

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	And then as a fourth aspect or asset I mention that I have been studying architecture for the shortest while. It is the best for both me and the rest of the world I did not pursue that career, but there is a sense for space and animating space (I cannot elaborate upon but clearly notice when I rely on it,) I do have a touch for, even though I can only experience what that sense is when I can make enough space to work deeply, for which I do not always get the circumstances provided.		And then as a fourth aspect or asset I mention that I have been studying architecture for the shortest while. It is the best for both me and the rest of the world I did not pursue that career, but there is a sense for space and animating space (I cannot elaborate upon but clearly notice when I rely on it,) I do have a touch for, even though I can only experience what that sense is when I can make enough space to work deeply, for which I do not always get the circumstances provided.



	'''Bruno Pocheron'''		'''Bruno Pocheron'''

Rlg at 15:50, 21 December 2022

2022-12-21T15:50:09Z

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	[[Category:Reflecting Light]]		[[Category:Reflecting Light]]

			__FORCETOC__

	== '''Haunted questions - Jan Fedinger''' ==		== '''Haunted questions - Jan Fedinger''' ==

Rlg at 15:44, 21 December 2022

2022-12-21T15:44:55Z

Show changes

Rlg: /* Haunted questions - Jan Fedinger */

2022-12-21T15:40:38Z

Haunted questions - Jan Fedinger

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	Bruno		Bruno
	No ghosts and no haunting as such, really. Naturally, more and more departed colleagues, who were dear friends too, are accompanying me on my path. I take this opportunity to remember them. In memoriam Michel Yang, Laurent Dailleau, Miljenko Bengez, Miš, Benjamin Grieve, Barbara Loreck, Eric Vermeulen, Amandine Denain, Eric Colliard.		No ghosts and no haunting as such, really. Naturally, more and more departed colleagues, who were dear friends too, are accompanying me on my path. I take this opportunity to remember them. In memoriam Michel Yang, Laurent Dailleau, Miljenko Bengez, Miš, Benjamin Grieve, Barbara Loreck, Eric Vermeulen, Amandine Denain, Eric Colliard.


	== '''When light hits the fan - Ezra Veldhuis''' ==		== '''When light hits the fan - Ezra Veldhuis''' ==

Rlg at 15:39, 21 December 2022

2022-12-21T15:39:31Z

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	[[Category:Reflecting Light]]		[[Category:Reflecting Light]]

			== '''Haunted questions - Jan Fedinger''' ==

			'''Haunted questions - Jan Fedinger'''

			We started a practice of interviewing each other. For this issue, Jan Fedinger is asking the questions. Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, Emese Csornai, Bruno Pocheron, Ezra Veldhuis and Jan Maertens are answering. This haunted issue of the fanzine had prompted questions on the presence of light.

			'''How are you present on stage? [as someone working with light]'''

			Henri
			I’m not physically present on stage, but the lights I balance are! The lights are a part of me, of my sensitivity, which can be perceived on stage.
			I can recognize the signature of a lighting designer when I see a show: their touch, their feeling, their quality, their way to deal with timing. Lighting designers are like conductors of an abstract orchestra. light and music resemble each other: both are waves and both have a language and a particular presence in a show. *

			Emese
			I am implimenting my abstract ideas in material, so they can respond to me, and start a dialogue. I imagine i am lending a shorter-term dynamic to spaces I work in. It lends a dynamic to space similar to spoken word.I imagine a space gets animated by each work.
			I notice colors and angles of light can lend sensuality, sense of behavior to a space. Temporality can be very emotional, and this is how I communicate on stage.


			Bruno
			In rehearsals, out of my work boots, stockinged feet, sitting in a circle exchanging with performers, choreographers, musicians and other colleagues involved. Before that in my work boots, on ladders, scaffolds, lifts, hanging and focusing light fixtures together with local technicians.. Alternatively, having a little nap on stage when performers are warming up – what a lovely (and too rare) feeling. In my mind, I am very often on stage, revisiting stages and performances from the past, experiencing them as they successively fill up with technical apparatus, come alive with performers, audience, sound and light, then return to that particular beautiful state of stasis filled with potential, after the show is done and packed away. Else I am projecting and planning stages in the future.

			'''How is your light present on stage?'''

			Henri
			If I had one word to qualify it, I would say that my light is generous. It means that my light can have a présence, that it can be seen and noticed by the audience. I often create visual moments in performances where the writing is based on light, close to visual art. So you can feel and see the light. *

			Emese
			In questions, in adapting retinas, in directions. Light can and will re-contextualize everything seen and the gaze of the viewers of it and anything made visible by it. It is mostly appealing to other organs than the brains of the viewers (that of course does not mean that it is pointless to analyze or elaborate).

			Ezra
			Light is always an active player and signifier in my performances and lighting designs. Although light has a supporting role in many works and is an elusive performer, I strive to embed light in the language and dramaturgy of a performance in such a way that it becomes a fully-fledged co-performer, and occasionally shamelessly steals the show.

			Jan M
			There are two ways: a “scenographic” and a “performing” one. In contemporary performances the light infrastructure does not longer need to be hidden, but can become integrated with the overall visual outline of the performance or can even become, more profoundly, a (set of) genuine scenographic light object(s) on stage. This concrete presence is an important point of attention in my work, though still is rather an attribute to a more ephemeral on-stage presence of the light design(er). It is by creating content emitted by this infrastructure that the performing presence of the lighting design(er) is truly happening: as ghostly company for the bodily performers, a dramaturgical co-organiser in constant dialogue with the various media being used or sometimes even directly addressing the audience with bold and alive light states / lightscapes, trying to exchange common effect-fulness for visual poetry.

			Bruno
			Abstract. Asymmetric. Asynchrone. Attentionate. Baroque sometimes. Bleak. Bold. Bright. Brutal. Careful. Casting shadows. Chaotic. Clustered. Cold. Colorful. Coming from above. Complex. Composed. Contrasted. Dark. Diffuse. Direct. DIY. Dynamic. Ephemeral. Equal. Evocative. Fading. Filtered. Focused. Fragile. Gentle. Guiding the gaze. Hidden. Hiding in plain sight. Highlighting. Immanent. Immaterial. Improvised. Independent. Intense. Interacting. Invisible. Just there. K. Layered. Matricial. Musical. Naturalistic. Opening spaces. Organic. Organized. Ostentatious. Plain. Planned carefully. Poetic. Precise. Quantified. Quivering. Referential. Reflecting. Rhythmical. Sculptural. Sensual. Serial. Severe. Shifting. Shimmering. Soft. Static. Suggestive. Synchronized. Theatrical. Uncanny. Understated. Utilitary. Versatile. Votive. Warm. Weatherlike. X. Y. Z. *


			'''Where do you see light?'''

			Henri
			Everywhere

			Jan M
			Everywhere and always… as without light, I do not see.

			Emese
			I made a work in 2008 called Spleen with two musicians who were playing behind a black curtain for the first 2/3rd of the piece. The rest of the space was divided in 4 parts with half transparent gauze with passages, so a multi-layered object and shadow theater was made possible. Some objects were moving by themselves, some I operated following a trajectory. The audience was alnvited to move all over the place. I found out there and then, nobody wants to see shadows when they can see lights. This was my most useful failure. I figured beyond all these artistic aspirations there is a layer of evolutionary behavior. Light is unique in that way, we evoke some deep feelings just by turning on a fixture, but there is much more to be found in lighting. *

			Ezra
			In the creation process of SUN-SET (an installation-performance that I made together with Oshin Albrecht and Bosse Provoost), we asked ourselves the opposite, and therefore perhaps the same question, by looking for a 0-point. We came up with the idea that places that are completely free of visual stimuli are almost non-existent. Complete darkness has become almost impossible to find. You would have to go to a very remote nature reserve at night and then also be lucky that there are no stars or moon to be seen that night, before you can experience an approximate total darkness outside. Inside, we are kept company by all kinds of lights and machines. That is why the theatre seemed the perfect place to search for a visual zero. Surprisingly, light also appeared in this total darkness, in the form of a flowing or pulsing grey mass. After some research, we learned that at that moment our brains 'guess' what might be out there and that, in the absence of external stimuli, these hypotheses are not being contradicted. In other words, the grey is a (not too spectacular) hallucination called eigengrau or brain gray. Everyone imagines brain gray differently. I often see a kind of purple falling stars.


			'''“If the audience does not see your light, you have done a good job” alternatively “if the audience looks at your lights, your performance is probably not doing a good job”'''

			Henri
			No, that's such an old-fashioned way of thinking. That's what I learned at drama school 35 years ago... It's good for the format where the choreography or the text is the god on earth and the rest is just there hidden to serve that writing. But I worked for 10 years in a collective where everything had the same importance and resonated together, the writing, the performers, the light, the sound, the set design, to create together a new world on stage, a machine where all the elements work together in sensitivity or spectacularity.

			Emese
			I quickly disengage when such dialogues come up, for me it is a bit like the sketch ‘philosopher’s football’ by Monty Python, but without the narration. Language is so flexible that it still can contort into logical sounding nonsense without feeling its own pain.

			Jan M
			This is probably one of the most tedious and completely obsolete critiques one keeps on being subjected to by a reactionary population in the technical field. I often have the feeling that it’s being used to refrain us, lighting designers, from being artist-crafts(wo)men in our own right instead of just accommodating to the wishes of a sole artist-maker (as if that still would make sense in today's contemporary performing field).
			But I wouldn’t mind replacing the word ‘seeing’ or ‘looking’ in this statement by ‘perceiving’, in order to put the focus more onto the performing quality of the light design rather than its materialized infrastructure needed to perform.
			The perception of the light is, I believe, a result of an interaction between the directly visible scenographic attribute layer and the content co-creating dramaturgic structuring and added performing value but also the context created for/with all other performing activity. That is an interaction I look for in my work. And this is light being perceived, whether directly or indirectly.
			A ghostly presence of the light is always there…. and in one way or another and in many different ways, perceived by the audience.*

			Bruno
			No comment. All has been said :). Plus I have to catch up with re-re-re watching the Flying Circus.

			What ghosts do you encounter on stages?

			Henri
			I only see ghosts

			Emese
			The sound of the lamps clacking when cooling down I found sometimes scary, but mostly beautiful.
			I spent the night working on the last possibility at MDT on Chromopoem, and that house has many odd sounds. Then I thought if I were a ghost I would certainly feel invited by this work.

			Ezra
			Light in motion often evokes in me a feeling of 'presence' without apparent agency. This reminds me very much of ghosts: invisible, intangible, but present.

			What ghosts haunt your [lighting-]designs?
			Henri
			My father

			Emese
			I have no such romantic fixations. But I did, and still do, dream a lot on theatre. *

			Bruno
			No ghosts and no haunting as such, really. Naturally, more and more departed colleagues, who were dear friends too, are accompanying me on my path. I take this opportunity to remember them. In memoriam Michel Yang, Laurent Dailleau, Miljenko Bengez, Miš, Benjamin Grieve, Barbara Loreck, Eric Vermeulen, Amandine Denain, Eric Colliard.


			== '''When light hits the fan - Ezra Veldhuis''' ==


	Q&A 21/12/2		Q&A 21/12/2

Rlg at 14:01, 2 February 2022

2022-02-02T14:01:54Z

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	'''Tomi Humalisto'''		'''Tomi Humalisto'''

			Interesting question. The light outside performance influences my lighting choices in a performance but it is mostly an “ancient light”. With this I mean it is about my personal visual memories filtered by my experiences and emotions in the situation they were stored long ago. They are possibly and partially fake as well, as I don’t trust memory as an absolute data. There is a cultural filter too. I consider myself utterly influenced by my life in Nordic environment. Seasonal variations of light are extremes. I am raised in agricultural, rural and protestant community, later taking distance and embracing urban life. All these personal parameters have influenced, how light means to me and to what qualities of light I am sensitive or attracted to.
	Good question. To me light outside performace may become a mirror kind of a memory bank where my perception within performace relates to. I am born and raised to relate mysef to lighting conditions and to what does it mean, which enters into an area of culturally agreed (learnt) meanings.

			This doesn’t exclude use of representations of "natural" light, or whatever artificial light outside theatre. You may try to replicate a sunset or weird flickering light you saw in a parking lot month ago. Authenticity doesn’t interest me as an absolute aim when reproducing something on stage from outside world, it is good enough if the light engages the wanted association or interpretation. My imagination seems to be limited to operate with real world perceptions and visual memories which are just emotionally coloured or organised differently. Outside world light seems to be reflected on stage through a mindless mirror of my mind, it may distort or change the result.
	This can mean direct reprentations of "natural" light or whatever artificial light outside theatre. But there is a great amount of weird or uncanny representations, when there is something familiar and strange simultaniously. Of course you can try to replicate weird light you saw in a parking lot month ago, but then it is diffent aim compared to reaching for an authentic moonlight or sunset.

	Another question is could outside world not influence on what lighting is used on stage? Perhaps there could be a phantasy word of our dreams and strage visions, but my imagination seems to be limited to still operate with real world elements which are just colored or organised differently or there is a certain personally experienced mood or emotion attached to light. So, outside world seems to be refected on stage through that mindless mirror, it may distort or change the result. Or transform our emotional visual experience on choises we do on stage.

	'''Bruno Pocheron'''		'''Bruno Pocheron'''