Q&A

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.

INTRO: four questions in four days - Ezra Veldhuis

Q&A 21/12/2

For you personally, how does the light outside (in "the world") relate to designed light inside (in the theatre)?

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.

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.

Bruno Pocheron

I often see natural light - and natural obscurity -  as the golden measure, the unattainable goal and the ultimate reason for me doing stage lighting.

As it has been previously in my life for studying arts, practicing painting and photography.

The fact of never being able to attain such a strength, a versatility, a definition in trying to control artificial light is still a good reason for me to keep trying.

Very often, stepping out of a theater for a cigarette break, quite happy about some light programming I did, I have been totally blown out by changes in natural light, just occurring and changing the world around me: Nature, you win. So I keep trying.

On the other end of the spectrum, artificial lighting in the open / public space is harder and harder on me. I can still stare at the sun for a good while, but I feel more and more aggressed by the inflation of increasingly powerful LEDs in shop windows, on the roofs of emergency or police vehicles, on the facades of buildings etc.

I wonder often how far my perceptions are conditioned by growing up in a LED free time. I would be interested in hearing what the younger amongst us perceive.

I guess that in nature, on a macro scale, there are only two kinds of lights: incandescent as in the sun or the stars, or reflected as in the moon.

On a smaller scale there is more diversity, see fireflies, phosphorescent beings or minerals for instance.

A simple set of questions always present to mind when starting doing lighting for a piece is:

- how far do we want to create an illusion (of naturalism, of realism)?

- how far do we want to put the artificiality of what we do in the foreground?

- Does a specific piece need the revelation, or the masking of the theatrical apparatus, or a dynamic combination of both?

These questions are for me directly related to the relations between the lights we control, in the theater, and the lights that are, outside of the theater.

Jan Fedinger

the light outside, in the world, both natural as artificial is the main source of inspiration for me.

basically the light that I experience, the atmospheres and the emotional states towards which this leads me are what I’m trying to replicate in my work. These experiences are not only limited to what I experience in person, out in the nature, at a misty sunset or with the play of shadows on the street when the wind chases clouds over my head on a sunny day or the neon reflections when I walk through a rainy city centre at night. These experiences are also informed by what could be called second hand experiences. Atmospheres about which I read that I see in films that I hear in stories of other people. Together these experiences are what form informs us of our common cultural visual vocabulary, that we can tap into, that we can rearrange that we can sample into visual stories of our own, that we add to tis very global visual reference base.

So far this answer is of relative general nature. The reproduction and reassembly of experiences. Something that could be described as almost documentary. However there is a second strategy that I like to employ. When i look at my light inside the theatre, where i have reassembled that what i knew into something new, i tend to make new experiences my self. The artificiality gives rise to this new experiences. This happens especially in moments when I start to look at the stage in 2 different ways at the same time. I look at the performers, let their action be what keeps my attention active but I focus on the periphery of my vision. In this blurry field I see rather shapes, movements then clear images.

Now when I go back into nature when I stare out of a window, when I walk down a street I try to look at my surrounding the same way that I look at a performance. I try to have the environment provide the activity from where I can tune out to observe what is happening at the same time around. When I'm sitting in a train the shaking movement of the train can create a vibration in this interplay of formless movement. Arrivals of tunnels become new physical experiences of blackouts.On a boat, staring at the horizon the slow shaking of the waves make the world turn, make me move without moving my body.

What I’m trying to achieve here is, to create a feedback loop. That I’m not only consuming images, but that I’m also actively search for different ways of seeing inside everyday live. Ways that I can articulate again inside the theatre, where they provide new sensations in turn.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier

For me, there is a strong link between Outside and inside light.

I spend a lot of time observing naturalistic light, and phenomenon like reflexion of the light on the water on a lake, how water spiders makes light shining like a diamond…

Or the mouvement of the shadows of a branches of a tree moved by the wind, or simply the quality of the light in storm or the fog, or the density of the sunlight at different hours.

It gives me plenty of ideas of visual installations that I’ll never do. But it stays in my toolbox and many times, I go there to pick up an idea when I feel that it could work in a piece.

For the shows of the collective I worked with, there had many time moments of only performativity of the light with sound.

So, I was many time searching in my toolbox natural light phenomenon like a storm and a rainbow, light reflections on a swimming pool, a cloud on stage and borealis; or others things where light is involved like a car crash, or the light produced by a fire works on an audience.

The thing is that I’ll never be able to compete with naturals elements, but I love to find the ideas to transpose it on stage. Just to give the idea, something close to the yellow quality of the light after the storm, or the green light in a forest through the leaves of the trees.

Jan Maertens

For me as a spectator, I try to forget about the “outside light world” in order to fully embrace the "inside light world”, fully reset from scratch.

For me as a light designer, I often relate to the “real light world” but mostly in a pretty abstract way. Since I found out that my personal interpretation of "nature” or even “civil” phenomena - when installing references of it within the light design on a stage - do not necessarily match with how other peers in the creation (or the audience) imagine/interpret similar phenomena done artificially with “inside light”, I tend to keep it abstract, often non-referential at all or merely on very personal level. And what interest me the most here is the organicity of “nature” phenomena in a time based referential frame rather than a more “frozen” pictorial approach… the chaoticly dancing aurora borealis while watching with a frozen ass:-)… or simply the wind making the wheat move in a filed.

Emese Csornai

Outside is vast, in its own pace it is an infinity of possibilities to observe it from, in space and time, inside it is a little pinhole on time and space on what our eyes could comprehend and in a time-frame to contain something still to understand as behavior.

Q&A 22/12/21

What is a recent optical illusion/effect you have found? What does it do, how did you use it in the performance, and how is it technically done?  

Tomi Humalisto

This is easy one to answer, because I don't remember using any optical illusion purpously.

Perhaps playing with sensitivity of an eye and the threshold of barely seeing and partly imagining what you see. E.g. having so much haze combined with low intensities and introduction scene lasting 10min slow fade in of light until you detect perforners….

Jan Fedinger

There is not one particular effect that i recently discovered. But there are many directions that i often find myself researching within designs. One strong direction here is the use of constant flashing lights. At certain frequencies they start to produce interesting images, that could be compared to ‘overtones’ in music. Tones that are not directly played that come into existence through the combination of other tones. Another direction is movement of light. Where lights are lit in succesion to mimic movement. Basically a similar princiep as the working film. In a certain way the possibilities of film and animation are a great source of inspiration for me. To try to create gradient effects for example. both of colour or of shapes and textures of light. There is a lot of craftsmanship involved in order to tweak standart lighting equipment, like combining filters [scroller-tape can get you a long way] in order to create this kind of effects. For example the projection of an 80’s style sunset [in Rule of 3 by Jan Martens] with only 2 lamps, with different gobos and filters that were assembled to create a colour gradient in one lamp and the image of a circles interrupted by horizontal lines that was sharp in some parts and diffuse in others in a second lamp.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier

The last recent optical illusion was in October. I was working with a Mexican choreographer who was working with ice on stage.

I decided to make some filters for my light in ice and to project it on a white screen. No effect, just the timing of the ice melting and decomposing making the time dramaturgie of the show.

I used the lens of the PC to retroject the ice filter in sharp, so we can enter deeply into the Christal natural composition of the ice. I used also some painting to color them.

(image)

Jan Maertens

In the last scene of the recent creation with Lenio Kaklea (Sonates&Interludes), the dancer left the stage while the pianist continued playing the last, intimate Sonate. Rather than making things small and focussing on the piano only or leading towards a formal end, it was an idea to keep the overall lit stage fully present while installing a gentle movement in the lights in order to replace the presence of the dancer and accompanying the piano. All this in a discrete and abstract way without any apparent effect-fullness. Doing so, I was mapping video footage of a moving cloudy sky on top of chaotic 33par stage wash and found out that exactly the absence of the performer (otherwise the focal presence) in combination with the presence of the music (overall the basis of the performance structure and a promise towards an ongoing performance) made place for the possibility of an illusionary effect. The subtle complex but organic chaser on the stage wash - the result of the video mapping- was leading to the potentiality for a gaze into the indefinite void of an empty but openly lit stage. When letting go all further performative expectation while staring into the void and being accompanied by the musical performance, the light gave the illusionary effect of the stage itself gently moving on the music. Sure, only when informed one could factually recognise this effect as such, but I’m convinced that the presenting of this kind of subtle situations does play a role unconsciously in how this scene is being experienced.

At the very end of the Sonata, a drone was launched on stage, flying over like a noisy and hectic bee. The spell got broken. Even though the light effect simply continued, the illusionary effect was gone… no more possibility for a gaze into the void while enforced focussing onto the drone and its pathway….

Emese Csornai

I recently made a loop of 4 different colours that individually pass as white, meaning our eyes can set its white balance on it as base value. The loop itself is very didactically showing the relation of hues, with prompt transition, matched luminosity. Once the loop gets predictable and understood, even boring, I started inserting blackouts, anchoring them on the meeting of two colours. I extended the duration of blackouts from there, in each loop, until the eye and brain couldn't coordinate their references and all colours blinking out of the blackouts looked the same. This was a very nice de-mystification point in the piece.

Bruno Pocheron

In the last solo work of Philipp Gehmacher, In Its Entirety, I use a juxtaposition of 4 light matrices controlled by one touchscreen interface.  Each matrix of lamps is focused as a wash with a specific direction (diagonal front left, diagonal front right, diagonal back left and diagonal back right) and a different color filter. The focus is very precise, and each position of the 4 matrices are overlapping. The touchscreen interface allows me to travel simultaneously though the 4 matrices, and 4 master faders allow me to define how much each matrix appears (or, how the matrices are mixed) at a given moment.

I also have manual controls on transfer time between the lamps, inversion of the image (working in negative), the size and xy deformation of the objects generated by the touch screen, a blur and saturation effect.

All this allows for controlling in real time some sort of traveling and ever shifting pictural image that morphs between flemish classical painting, clair-obscur, fleshy Baconian images or the illusion of natural lighting for instance.

Q&A 23/12/21

Is there work you would like to make without starting from a question from someone else?

Emese Csornai

Yes and I’m trying to make it.

To research more what it does to perception to adapt cinema tools to stage.

It is a longer term research, the first piece I have made using some of the cinema tools was On being ill, then Stranger in 2017, it is being continued. On Being ill was very abstract, dealing with the idea of presence and absence, questioning how to trespass this binary in the life of chronic diseased persons. Talking off from the essay of Virginia Woolf, it was zooming into how the perception shift of illness can be a source of insight at work rather than the indicator of sufficiency or the lack of it.

I am implementing the imagery of edited film, such as zoom, camera angle change, cuts in a dialogue always showing one face at a time. It has been a more superficial research for 'Stranger' because of my productional circumstances, and now I am really looking deep into this rabbit hole with my new research project. What is very interesting for me in that is not its formal innovation in theater. (it may become that but it is not the goal). It is the fact that displacing some gestures that are so accepted in cinema became so normal for us that we do not even question them, but if we place them in theater, our normal spinal acceptance becomes questionable, and we get to look at it.

Tomi Humalisto

I assume now this does mean own and individual starting point relating to how visual artist create ideas for their works solo. Saying this, I do realise that, I rarely believe "originality". Everything is basically already made, used and re-used, it is just digested again through one individual .ind which leaves flavours, combinations and perspectives to material, method and the result.

I have every now and then ideas for solo works, some might use light or some optical phenomena is important for making it or to achieve certain aesthetics.

Now I am in the middle of a process for performance piece, where I have been creating the concept with anothet artist. In this work I am inspired of scifi and acheology and non-visible waveleghts of light/radiation.

I have also another wishes to operate with bioluminance and phosphorous minerals. I am also interested in diamonds.

Jan Maertens

Yes, as i feel it could be interesting/challenging to use light(design) as the initiator for making a performance… even more, it is since a while that I keep this idea in the back of my mind to invite some of the choreographers I’ve been working with in the past and ask them to make a choreography for a light design … turning around the role of the initiator.

But No, as I don’t really feel the urge to have to communicate something explicitly through making a performance… nesting myself maybe too comfortably behind the scenes?

Henri Emmanuel Doublier

Yes, I have many ideas of installation, but I’m lazy to find productions. Many are already taken by olafus or anne Veronica now…and at the end, I prefer to renovate my house and make my garden when I have free time. I think I like collective creation more than to be alone. I love theaters. I consider myself like a technician more than an artist.

By working on papers ghost, I had an idea of installation: I’d like to make a mirror where we can see everything reflected except people.

The idea would be to reproduce exactly the same room separated by a window which would look like a mirror.

The lighting of the 2 rooms should not create reflections on the window,

If not, what I like a lot is the humanization of the old theater light fixture.

It means: putting an umbrella on a lamp when it’s raining. Making a lamp of a par64 falling and attached by an electric cable, like a falling eye.

I like also to use theater light in another way: create transposition for the light it can create, by breaking the Lenz, changing places of mirrors, …

An exemple with the following picture for an installation I did in Z33 with artists Sarah and Charles.

Jan Fedinger

I am making work that does not start by the commission of someone else.

When i work with other artists i always try to be a tangible or experiancable presence on stage together with the human bodies of the dances. In my own [non-comissioned] work i try to work with light as performative body. One could call them solos for those performers that now don t need to share the space with human performers. These non-human performers, [one could call them post-human performers, since they are an extension of my performative body], are mainly light, but can not be reduced to only light. A better way would be maybe to call them experienceable environments wherein light might be the driving expression.

Bruno Pocheron

Since beginning 2020, I am carrying a tricky electrical experiment, together with lighting, sound and musician colleagues, in which we directly power low voltage episcope halogen bulbs (24V 500w) with sound signals (sound amplifiers). The sound signals make the bulbs flare, and the bulbs themselves act like tiny loudspeakers. I find a great beauty in that paradoxical convergence of light and sound in bulbs, that creates some sort of synaesthetic experience.

Some (imperfect) video documentation is to be found here https://vimeopro.com/brunopocheron/lightworks password: brunopocheron

24/12/21

Lighting design has many sub facets, which ones do you naturally focus on?

Jan Fedinger

In the lighting designs i make i often realise that i speak more about the dramaturgy of the piece then about how to best light the piece. And although i often join very early on in processes, it takes most of the time a while until i start experimenting with real light on stage.

I consider the work i m doing with light for a large part as visual dramaturgy of the piece. As i propose how the audience is going to see what is proposed by the moving bodies on stage. The idea here is that it it more important that the whole team works towards a common goal. Not that every discipline is working on their own island of individual fascinations. Not every performance needs the most spectacular lighting design, but instead one that fits the total work. And great discoveries can always be kept for another project. Or even start a next one.

Jan Maertens

What keeps me busy especially since quite some time is the lighting control aspect of the lighting design business. I feel that I’ve been creative much more with implementing new digital media tools onto the light control universe rather than researching alternative ways of dealing with the hardware tool box of stage lighting where It was more a purification approach that kept me going.

This focus on lighting control has been resulting in new approaches of dealing with design assignments and has  in a way also been redefining my approach to stage light design much more as a (post human) performer.

Tomi Humalisto

If we are thinking of fuctions of lighting design as Richard Palmer (1985) considers it, I feel the following most natural for me:

- shaping stage and form

- composition of stage picture

- establishing ryhym.

If thinking of controllable properties along with apalmer again, intensity, direction, shape and frequency seem to ring my bell.

Outside of Palmer's framing, I have always been interested in dramaturgical structures and questions. This may be reduced into two simple questions: how light itself changes throughout performance (= dramaturgy of light) and how light participates creating multilayered dramaturgy of the whole piece? I have also been increasingly interested in materiality of light and what kinds of ontological experience does that special light quality create.

Henri Emmanuel Doublier

What I prefer in light design, is the moment when in the process, after documentation and having seen the first rehearsals, I have some ideas and I start to experiment them by making a prototype.

Many of them don’t work, but sometimes, I can find things even différent and better than what I imagine. And it’s for me the best exciting moment. I !!!

Or the moments when I make mistakes and interesting things happen.

I think that creation is for me being open to whatever can happen during the process. That’s why the place where I create is so important for me. If there is workshop, if there is a brick wall, if there is an old dusty lamp waiting for me in the cave. I always explore all the places in a theater beforeI create.

The second strong and interesting moment for me is when I can have time to program and special with sound software and midi. It’s really moment of composition.

Emese Csornai

I am quite opposed to the idea of narrowing viewpoints down, on the other hand I do understand it is not a bad conversation starter to ask where a person sees one's work from.

In my opinion light is either not talked about, or not properly, or lighting designers get narrowed down to a specificity they stick out with from the rest of the colleagues, and characterized by that continuously. I insist I am a multiplicity as a creative (and so are others), and I rather have a current research than place myself in a sub-facets of lighting design. So in terms of current research and ongoing research, as I previously mentioned, I am considered to have a specific use of colors in my work, firstly, and I say I am considered because in my point of view that research has at least as much to do with angles and timing and rhythm than with colors, nonetheless I happily agree, colors are very important for me and I explore them with much excitement.

Then secondly I come from the study field of audiovisual arts, which means I have a particularly strong connection to installation, film and animation and comic books (rediscovered recently). The influence of that can be understood in the broadest sense.

I do not have a strong relation to computer sciences, any sort of programming so far I only picked up because I was very motivated to find new tools and thoughts in lighting, and I was pretty good at mathematics always. Nonetheless I did find some breakthroughs and I hope to continue doing so in the future. Abstraction and my mind are in sympathy.

As assets, third aspect, I mention I am a female lighting designer, which fact I started to give more importance to, when I understood how long it took me to rid myself of certain social codes in theater and still I catch myself in the wrong shoes, and when I noticed that my former male former student has a higher salary then myself, unintended. It is a real ghost, this aspect, and I wish it is more sincerely addressed, I believe I know numerous persons with patriarchal reflexes.

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

I am approaching lighting from different directions. My work includes precise multi layered programming (Lanbox), mixed with an haptic control of lights allowing for instant decisions and improvisation (by ways for instance of pixel mapping and touchscreen interfaces programmed in pure data or vvvv), and direct or filtered interactions with music and sound (by ways of MIDI or OSC synchronization, by using sound frequency analysis to influence the behavior of lights for instance).

I see more and more analogies between lighting design and polyphonic musical composition. 

I enjoy closely working with my colleagues musicians and sound designers and creating together a space both visual and acoustic

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

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 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.

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.