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Title inspires me to reflect on our collaborative process. I always start from the workings of the lights. I hardly ever have an image in mind, of how the lights should look in the end. Our working process includes many talks about collaboration, communication, phenomena, mechanisms, interactions or processes we find interesting. We then split and start realizing our ideas. I research tools, ways of programming and devices. And what did we find for Title? Silent movie lights, for which we slowed down the speed of the moving lights until it made the objects on stage move by themselves. A moving light is a light that moves through separate lamps, so one light that follows the other. A chase. Does the expression “chase” come from the idea of lights chasing one another?
Eternal return – what comes to mind? Something every person who ever ran shows in their lives knows: that one cue in an hour is much harder than a show with a hundred cues, because you need to stay alert without doing anything for a long while. And then do the right thing at the exact right moment. It reads as a huge change on stage because nothing spectacular happened in the half hour preceding it and it’s your only chance to get something right in this one hour – it´s very emotional. Or maybe I´m a very emotional lighting designer. Here we come back to the circle of lights. Slowly opening for the eternal return. Except for the one moment in the middle when this steady machinery of lights, performers and live sounds breaks into a coloured, dreamy moment accompanied by strings.
For Emergency artist we created a moving light – again. Before we worked on the piece, we went to the theatre biennale in Venice. We showed four pieces in five days and suddenly I got bored with something very beautiful: lines and shapes in a light grid. After having put so many lamps in slightly different rows with slightly different angles and focus points, I wanted to see them arranged differently. So I built another low-tech moving light, a cluster of cans
facing in different directions, which could be pulled up by the performers and swung around. Another dreamy, though dangerously mechanical, moment in an otherwise demure light design.
ONON is full of lights and motors, and has a moving stage and moving lights. While working with you I understood that the lights should not disturb the action too much. What does that mean? They should be good. Definitely. But they should also leave space for the performance. The lighting and the performance are not glued to one another. Sometimes the lights can leave the performers and flashdance in space. Or breathe silently. I think this is one of the reasons for our recurring structure of sober, demure, bright and plain lighting. And then there's always something very big which costs a lot of work that just bursts into view for a brief moment. For ONON it’s a long moment – a seventies TV test pattern on a coloured moving panel in a moving light show. It's about defining the relationship between white panels turning up and down and sideways, and corresponding lights, fading, mixing, contrasting, wandering.
What shall we build next?
Ruth Waldeyer
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