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Co-workers' notes
Dear Clement,
We met for the first time in September 201 0. We worked on the pieces ONON, The Emergency Artist, Eternal Return, Title, Dreamed Apparatus, Things That Surround Us, To Allege and Allege.
What comes to mind? Grammar. What I like about your work is that you build a kind of syntax – a system of relations between objects, conventions and material. This system does not necessarily stop with the premiere of a piece, but it continues to exist for as long as you need to explore it. I work with a similar kind of grammar in the lighting, or a similar continuity – the line does not necessarily stop when the piece is done. I follow it until it ends. Or transforms into something else. Or returns elsewhere.
When I first started with Allege, I did not design the lighting, rather I took over your existing design and system of running the lights. It is not possible for me to disconnect the lights from the way they come to life on stage, in other words, how we work together. Materiality. Time. Conditions. Money. We share a curiosity for different approaches and an enthusiasm for changing them according to our respective needs. And we share an interest in machinery. In To Allege we introduced a persona, the moving light: one of those motorized theatre spotlights, which can tilt, pan, focus, change colour and turn into a strobe. We placed it upside down on wheels and pulled it through the space. Its light beam examined the space as the audience watched it do so. Apparatus.
Movement.
Interaction.
An at-the-time-high-tech device on a wooden trolley with a rope.
With Things that surround us we came closer to finding a direct communication between the lighting and the performers. We delved deeper into exploring low tech moving lights. Or to be precise: lights moving and introducing circles. I was already wondering, when I first started working as a lighting designer, why something as round as a light beam is compressed into something as square as a stage. I learned how to work the lights in theatres from friends, colleagues and technicians I met on tour and never again. (Somebody once whispered into my ear that almost everybody starts out like that). We dropped the square for a couple of years and concentrated on circles. In this piece: three concentric rings of lights producing a circle. During this process I realized that you can't produce a circle out of circles. What emerges is something more like a flower. But thanks to diffusion it blurs into a circle. This circle shrinks and expands and spirals. The light follows the performer, or the shadow. We operated the lights with an analogue joystick taken from old-school computer-game gadgets, later with a touch screen, open source software and an interface. Pure data, VVVV, Lanbox. I remember trying to catch the big movements on stage and translate them into tiny thumb and finger movements up there in the tech booth. Those tiny movements were then magnified on stage. Not always at the right time or hitting the right spot. It´s a game.
Dreamed apparatus – a digression from the circle. Colours. We worked on the reflection of light on sand, and continued investigating direct interactions between light, sound and performer. This time with Uli Ertl as sound designer and partner in crime in the interactive machinery. We made switches on the floor which, when stepped on, would trigger a light and a sound jukebox on stage. Lights and sounds could in this way be operated from on stage. This helped me understand the advantage of the position all the way at the back, behind the audience: you actually get to see wht you create.
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