Description of the Passages Performance Project

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The performance project, entitled Passages, was designed to give opportunities to test and refine the Theolux control interface in use, as well as to investigate the strategic interventions developed in chapters II.1 and II.2, with myself in the role of Lighting Artist. The performance was both rehearsed and presented in a black-box studio space at Rose Bruford College during July and early August 2009. The three actors and the Design Associate were students on the MA Theatre Practices programme at Rose Bruford College, while the director was a professional employed for the project. (I am using the term ‘actor’ here to refer to the three on-stage performers. I use the term ‘performer’ as an inclusive term, covering both the actors and myself as the lighting artist.) The Associate Director was an undergraduate Directing student, and technical and organisational roles were filled by Rose Bruford staff and students. The director also created and operated the music and sound score. Further details of the company can be found in appendix B15.

Passages took as its theme and source material the work, ideas and – particularly – the death-story of the German-Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, who died in a hotel room on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 while fleeing from the Gestapo. I took an early decision in planning the performance project that it should be developed through a devising process rather than based on an extant dramatic text, in order to maximise the potential input of the lighting artist in the creative development of the work. Specifically, the performance would be developed through a devising process involving the director, actors, myself as lighting artist, and other members of the company, and this process would lead to the making of a performance ‘text’ that was fixed at the macro scale, while allowing for small, local variations of timing or expression from performance to performance. Such fixing of the performance was important in research terms, since my thetic project concerns the rehearsal and live performance of lighting, not its improvisation (a matter I return to in chapter III.2). My concern here is with the subtleties of expression that can take place as audience, performers and light interact and respond to each other: a focus in the moment of performance not on ‘what happens’ (which has been pre-agreed) but on ‘how it happens’.

It was also in my view important that the material chosen as a starting point was sufficiently rich in the kind of dramatic possibilities that would lead towards a performance style not determined by an adherence to what we might loosely call ‘realism’. This avoidance of a purely representational style was intended to ensure scope for light to take on a full role as a major expressive element of the performance. Benjamin’s death story in my view offers dramatic potential, not least because the exact circumstances are unclear and contested. In addition, his writings and ideas contain metaphors and allegories that are theatrically suggestive as well as offering significant challenges when attempting to use them as the basis for a theatre performance. An influential book for the director Chris Goode and myself during the early development of the project (prior to the other company members becoming involved) was Walter Benjamin's Archive (Marx 2007), which contains facsimile pages of Benjamin’s writings. What I judged to be the potent visual qualities of the paper, along with Benjamin’s handwriting and use of page space, gave me confidence that we could together find ways of communicating aspects of Benjamin’s cerebral life and work through the material substance of a theatre performance (see image below). Some of the paper and writing textures were used very directly in the scenic design for Passages, as well as fuelling the devising process.

Facsimile page from a Benjamin notebook

Having identified the source material and an overall way of working, the Director and I established a structure and schedule for the process. An initial meeting of the company introduced the source material, and was followed by a two-week period for reflection and further research, as well as technical preparation of the studio space. Fourteen days of rehearsals were spread over four and a half weeks, allowing company members time for various other commitments, as well as reflection and independent work on the project. As lighting artist, I was present in the rehearsal room throughout every rehearsal day with Theolux and a lighting rig set up, in line with my Strategic Intervention that the lighting artist should rehearse with the other performers. Because we were rehearsing and performing in the same space, we did not have the conventional theatre distinction between ‘rehearsal’ (rehearsal in a rehearsal room without technical and scenographic apparatuses) and ‘production’ (rehearsal in the performance space with technical and scenographic apparatuses). Thus we did not distinguish technical or dress rehearsals as such, but moved incrementally from relatively unstructured development of performance material to the rehearsal of an emergent performance script in increasingly structured and formalised ways. This structuring was shaped particularly by the Director, who organised the material into a series of sections that could be rehearsed as freestanding sequences.

Some sections foregrounded lighting or sound, and each section gradually acquired its own aesthetic and dramatic tone. As with the lighting, the scenic, costume and sonic elements were introduced, experimented with, developed and refined gradually throughout the rehearsal period, and with the involvement of all of the members of the company. The time between the rehearsal days allowed technical work in the studio space to be undertaken. On the final day of rehearsals we ran the piece several times in a simulation of performance conditions, including one run with a small invited audience. On the performance day, we ran through the piece in the morning, with the performance for examiners and invited academics and professionals (selected for their ability to offer feedback from diverse perspectives through the post-performance discussion and individual correspondence) in the afternoon. An evening performance accommodated Rose Bruford staff and students, as well as guests of the company, and gave an additional opportunity for feedback through a second post-performance discussion.

The black-box studio space used for the performance has no fixed seating arrangement or technical control area; it consists of a space approximately thirteen metres by nine, with a height of nearly four metres to the lighting grid, and entrance doors and doors to a technical service and storage area at either end of one of the long walls (see appendix B10 for images of the studio space). No decision was made to begin with about the size or orientation of the performance area within the overall space, or its relationship with the audience seating, although we were aware that my Strategic Intervention regarding the geometry of the performance space would be an important factor when deciding on the room’s spatial configuration. I wanted to begin the rehearsal process without pre-conceived ideas about the use of space other than the Strategic Intervention, or rather, given that even an empty room cannot be neutral, I wanted initially to resist making such decisions until the nature of the performance we were making had begun to emerge. (The non-neutrality of an empty room is perhaps analogous to the non-neutrality of an empty canvas. In Deleuze’s terms, which I introduce in chapter II.1, an empty room can be seen as being ‘already invested virtually with all kinds of clichés’ (Deleuze 2005, 8). That the studio space used for Passages has a major and a minor axis of symmetry, and has an entrance door near one corner, is enough to begin to shape how people occupy and use the space, according to socially and culturally conditioned habits.)

Two early decisions began to shape our use of the studio space – one directly related to the material we were working on and the other more pragmatic. Firstly, the Director Chris Goode proposed that the stage space should represent the hotel room in which Benjamin died (though this mimetic location would not be taken literally during all of the performance). Secondly, the Theolux console had to be set up in the space, and since it is designed to be moveable rather than portable, we had to choose a single location for at least the first phase of rehearsals. I chose to set it up toward one corner of the studio, diagonally opposite the entrance door, so as not to be in the way of people and equipment entering the room, while having a good view of activities anywhere in the space.

Prior to the first rehearsal day, an initial lighting configuration was set up in the studio, intended to offer the ‘randomised palette’ of my first Strategic Intervention. Strictly, this initial set up was not random (as might be achieved through some stochastic process to determine the type, position, focus and colour of each light), but it was disconnected from the specifics of the yet-to-be-determined performance. Thus in choosing a series of lighting elements with the potential to create certain affects, I was motivated by a sense of what might be interesting or useful, rather than designing with a specific need and a specific performance moment in mind. For example, the colour palette comprised a wide range of colours, including some quite saturated ones, but all the colours I selected had a quality in common: they were all impure, ‘unclean’ tones. This general choice was a response to the strong feeling I had from the source material of the past brought into the present, of something distant brought close, as an old photograph can sometimes do. The impure colours have – at least for me – a comparable effect. However, I made no decisions (and indeed was careful to avoid, at least consciously, making decisions) about how and when in the performance the colour palette would be used. Thus the initial lighting set-up offered us in the first few days of rehearsal a palette of lighting gestures with the potential to produce a range of lighting affects, to ‘seed’ the process of lighting through rehearsals and into performance.

 One of the difficulties of lighting through the rehearsal process is that, whilst Theolux was designed to allow lighting to be performed, with the lighting artist responding in the moment, the lighting rig itself does not offer that flexibility. (The use of automated lights would to some extent solve this problem, since they can be refocused and coloured remotely from the lighting console. However, the large number of controllable parameters involved brings its own difficulties, both technically in designing the console, and in creating a control interface with the kind of immediacy of action that I was seeking. Early on in my research, I decided not to work with automated lights for these reasons.) In planning the rehearsal schedule and process, we made several decisions to help ameliorate this difficulty. Firstly, we set a deadline of the end of the fourth day of rehearsal to decide on the spatial configuration of the performance area and the audience within the overall studio space. Once this decision was made, future rigging, focusing and colouring of lights would be undertaken in the knowledge of the spatial layout that would be used in the final performance, so that no wholesale re-rigging would be required after that point. Secondly, having the rehearsal days spaced out with technical time in-between meant that the Lighting Manager and her team could make any changes I requested before the next day of rehearsal. Thirdly, one of the lighting team was present throughout most of each of the rehearsal days, so I could request small changes (refocusing a light, or changing a colour) immediately, with minimal disruption of the rehearsal. Working in a studio space with easy ladder access to the lighting grid was helpful in this respect.

The spatial configuration we decided upon had a performance area approximately four meters by three placed near the middle of the studio, offset towards one long wall. The relatively small size of the performance area was intended both to establish the hotel room at a realistically human scale, and to ensure that the lighting process did not become impeded by the need to use multiple fixtures to light a large area, thus occupying crew time and technical resources that would be better deployed in responding to the emerging needs of the piece as the rehearsals progressed. Initially, the audience was placed facing two sides of the performance area, with the Theolux console and the Lighting Artist located at one corner of the performance area, at the end of the longer block of seating and opposite the shorter block. (The following diagram shows the original (left) and final (right) seating configurations.)
Plans of studio space with seating formats

My intention with this arrangement was to ensure that I as lighting artist could see both the actors and the audience, and they could see me. The location – at the end of a block of seating, but also adjacent to an area that might be seen as ‘offstage’ or even ‘backstage’ – was intended to set up an ambivalence between the lighting artist as spectator and the lighting artist as performer/operator. This is the ambivalence identified by Iain Mackinosh, with which I begin chapter II.2 and that I intended as a way of allowing myself as lighting artist to join the ‘circuit of energy’ between actors and audience.

This initial configuration was revised following a visit to rehearsals of my Director of Studies and other guests, who provided some useful feedback on their experience of the spatial set-up. After some experimentation, led by myself but with the involvement of other company members, we arrived at a modified configuration that became the final one used for the last few days of rehearsals and into performance. This altered set-up retained the rectangular performance space representing the hotel room, but wrapped the audience around it in a single arc of seating (shown in the diagram above). The change was motivated by several perceived benefits. Firstly, it addressed one aspect of the feedback from my Director of Studies by giving slightly more distance between audience and actors, while retaining a strong sense of intimacy, promoting (in my view) the kind of balance between engagement and critical distance I identify in chapter II.2 as the interrogating gaze. Secondly, the new configuration united what had previously been two blocks of seating into a single arc of seats, eliminating the possibility of the audience perceiving itself to be in two parts, and so perhaps disrupting the ‘circuit of energy’. Thirdly, the ‘arc wrapped around a rectangle’ hinted at the kinds of theatre geometries identified by Mackintosh (1993, 161 onwards), without slavishly adopting the precise Euclidean geometries of classical architecture.

As part of this reconfiguration, the Theolux console was moved to the diagonally opposite corner of the performance space from its initial position. This placement, still at the end of the rows of seating and so retaining its ambivalence, brought the lighting artist nearer to the centre of their field of view for a greater proportion of spectators, further (I supposed) promoting the circuit of energy, and also placed the Theolux console near the door through which the audience entered and left the space, allowing them to observe it briefly and so boosting its prominence within the audience’s overall experience of the event. Arguably, in terms of my earlier observation with regard to research ‘ownership’, this shift pointed to my own intervention as being rather more determining in terms of what spectators experienced ‘in the event’.

The three actors were all dressed as Walter Benjamin, although the costumes were indicative rather than historically accurate, in accordance with our overall approach of being suggestive rather than realistic. The set design emerged during the rehearsal period, beginning with some basic furniture for the hotel room: a bed, a small drop-leaf table (used also as a writing desk), two chairs and a stool. Through the development and devising process, we decided that we wanted to introduce paper and writing in a variety of textures and qualities, together with a motif of clocks set to different times, intended to suggest travel and time-zones. By the end of the rehearsal process, various types of brown and tracing paper, printed with Benjamin’s characteristic handwriting and textures from old maps, were used on the floor in the corners of the stage space to help delineate the room boundaries, as well as providing the material for the construction of a large ‘map’ during the performance. The clock motif appeared in the form of three framed pictures of clocks, each showing a different time and suspended where the rear and side walls of the hotel room would be. We made no attempt to hide the studio space beyond the hotel room, and indeed we retained as a scenic element all of the paperwork that had been generated during the rehearsals and placed on the studio walls.

Rehearsals, performances and post-performance discussions were videoed throughout in order to capture the process for later analysis. Some of this video material is contained in appendices B2, B3, B5, B6, B7).