Tracing the Light. A performance essay on space, light and the process of looking. (original) (raw)
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Spatial function of light in staging of contemporary choreography
Nexo Revista Científica
The principles of using light in choreographic performances are the basis of image perception integrity. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that the illumination as a component of the performance can be based not only on the physical laws of light, but also on its imitation. To look into the matter of illumination, the authors consider it necessary to use a polygonal model, which can also form a spatial picture if necessary. The paper defines the general illumination model, which uses ray tracing technology and allows to determine the structure of lighting in the hall and to distribute the light to understand the director's intention among the entire visual sector. The practical significance of the study is determined by the structure of using lighting as part of staging choreography in the postmodern genre.
Educational Action Research, 2001
ABSTRACT The authors conducted action research by developing workshops that involved teacher-participants in their own exploratory learning. The authors facilitated participants in researching of what they noticed, and wanted to understand about light and shadows by structuring the environment, and the questions that wereasked of them, in ways that integrated practices of teaching into those of researching. During the workshops, transitions evolved in how participants used materials to make light and dark effects and interacted with each other. Transactions also occurred in how the authors intervened to teach and research what participants did, and to encourage their reflective observations. It is proposed that such explorations offer new beginnings for extending understandings of physical phenomena and of the world, as made through our actions and thoughts.
Nordic Theatre Studies, 2014
In this article, I discuss the influence of stage lighting on the processes of scenic design and the functioning of performance space. There has been a huge advance in lighting technology with regard to their accessibility, usability, luminosity and costs during the past decades. Light can no longer be thought of as a necessity that can just be added to the performance. It has become one of its basic visual elements, directing and focusing the spectators gaze. The rhythm of changing lighting cues create a visual dramaturgy, which has turned visual design from solid constructrions to a score of temporal events. Today you seldom see a performance without any use of projections or digital videos. I begin with a quick historical survey on the adaptation of electric light in order to exemplify the artistic significance of technological innovations. I move on to a more philosophical conversation about the metaphorical connotations of light as a basic component of the visual mise-en-scène....
Drawing light: Gesture and suspense in the weave
2019
Drawing Light was a research-creation workshop on procedural thinking held in the early evening of a wintery Saturday (10 February 2018) in Montreal, Canada. The workshop was facilitated by Nicole De Brabandere, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, and Alanna Thain, director of the Moving Image Research Lab at McGill, which is devoted to the study of the body in moving image media. Drawing Light emerged from our shared research into gesture as a way to expand on and NECSUS-EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES 190 VOL 8 (2), 2019 explore the encounter between human and nonhuman embodiment in media arts, and in gesture's ability to activate an encounter between abstraction and animation (as technique and as the feeling of aliveness and agency). Through the workshop design, we built a propositional installation ecology that invited twenty participants (largely artists and scholars) to explore gesture at the threshold when actor and spectator, skin and cinematic screen, light and bodily presence coincide and become indistinguishable. Our call for participation invited people to 'join us for an event of reading, drawing, screening and fabulating with light at the edge of visibility and corporeal dimension'. They were asked to prepare in advance by reading short excerpts from key texts on light in media ecologies, to come prepared with a lightemitting device that could also capture moving images and sounds, and to think about how to respond to our prompt asking them to imagine practices where 'illumination is no longer reducible to the invisible and the visible, but an affectively charged relation between transparency and opacity, inside and outside, reflection and absorption, capture and dispersal'. We anticipated that all participants would bring their corporeal and conceptual memories of inhabiting the light gestures of cinema and electronic screens, from the careful negotiations of not blocking the projector's beam while moving around a darkened cinema, to the repopulating of darkened spaces of attention with the small glows of mobile phones, to feeling the collapse and chasm between projection and the landing site of the screen in the cinema versus the flat spaces of laptop, television, and phone surfaces. Through a free play with materials and several directed exercises, participants both engaged, activated, and were moved by a light ecology that drew on and exceeded memory, material, and mediums. The workshop took place at Studio 303, a large dance studio in downtown Montreal. We chose this space for its large floor to ceiling windows on two sides. In the three hours of the workshop the space moved from being fully lit by outdoor light to only artificial light, making the temporal modulation of light gestures a natural and unnatural part of the workshop materials. We opened with a short reading session, samples of theoretical texts provided to participants in advance at the intersection of cinema, light, and embodiment. These were excerpts of texts from Édouard Glissant, Akira Lippit, Alanna Thain, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Erin Mouré, and A.H. Church.[1] Reading together, we sought to identify propositions that could be mobilised in the workshop in the procedural context of 'drawing light'. Reading Church, for instance, we considered colour as a material quality beyond the visual, such DRAWING LIGHT DE BRABANDERE & THAIN 191 as when the threshold between red and infra-red gives way to warmth or intense saturation. Similarly, Tanizaki's descriptions of shadows that fill the room with pools and rivers of 'thin, impalpable, faltering light'[2] attuned us to thinking with and perceiving the threshold of form and shadow as the light faded over the course of the event. In this essay, we expand on these propositions and identify new ones that the workshop brought into focus for us. After reading the texts, the participants discussed how to draw actionable practices from them, in order to activate the workshop ecology. This was fol
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Library of Light an Artistic Framework to Explore Light Material Culture and Social Experience
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