Introduction to the practice

Emese Csornai: My observation about lighting design is that it is seldom talked or written about. Part of the problem lays in the lack of any shared language between lighting designers and the ones elaborating on their work.

I do think light can be talked about without using too much of the technical jargon, and it would be in my point of view a quality shift for lighting design to introduce a vocabulary describing it, and its relation to dance, staged arts, stage or space, reaching far beyond the mere indicators ‘more’ and ‘less’, into the multiplicity of indicators such as texture, color, dramaturgic arch, rhythm, transformation of context, distance, flatness, dimension and so forth. Through deeper reflection the praxis of lighting design can be understood in its meaning and potential as a dramaturgic tool in space and time.

I introduced a practice among the participants of the Reflecting Light project. We go to each other’s performances and write factually about what was to be seen. The more of us write about one work, the more the work can be introduced in its complexity. We go to see and write about works made by colleagues unrelated to Reflecting Light as well.

As a first step, I would like to open up this practice to cultural journalists, dramaturge, and choreographers. The descriptions provided by this wider array of colleagues will be published here.

My hope is that the fruit of our labors help establishing a language facilitating a discourse focused on lighting in relation to performances, on lighting as a performer in its own right, a discourse as nuanced as lighting itself can be. Involving KASK students in taking part in the practice could make this process grow into an agency of its own.