Making of "Phi" - Transitions, Intricate Patterns, Lighting #2
Ale (visual and lighting designer):
Keywords for the lighting work are
The lighting transforms the stage during the entire performance into an architectural machine . Four stage lights are positioned at the 4 highest corners of the stage, while two projectors are on the ground along two opposite sides of that same square. Playing with the different nature of PAR cans lights and projection, we aim to find interesting ways to reveal the bodies and tell their movement .
From the very beginning of our work on Phi, lighting sound and movement have been developed in parallel. This kind of workflow has been very satisfying in the way every small progress in one of the fields inspires unexpected approaches to the other two.
One of the very first ideas was using quick flashes to highlight small portions of the bodies. This way we could reconstruct the choreography by showing/hiding, putting together small chunks of the original movement and giving it another shape. We could easily notice, during these tests, how the body transformed into a composition of many other bodies while being sculpted and dissolved.
The flashing, coming from different directions, was particularly disorienting when seen from the static point of view of the audience and these body chunks, once immersed into that specific space/time environment, were opening up to new possibilities and interpretations.
When we met again at Cultivamos Cultura (Sao Luis, Portugal) for the first residency, watching an updated version of the choreography where the different materials were coming together in the shape of real sections inspired me to push this flashing idea further. As the simple body movements were chasing each other in repetition and variation, the lighting score could lose its spatial randomness and start following a circular path ( the one of a loop ). This way the stage became a rotating reference frame in which the perception of said repetitiveness could be distorted by speeding up and down this visual looping reference clock.
4 lights at the 4 edges, fading in and out one after the other, as to give a key to read the inner repetition happening in the movement. As your perception of the motion of a train changes if you are you sitting on another train moving in parallel to the first one.
The idea of having an audience on two sides came when we were brainstorming about lighting positions in relationship to choreographic pathways. As we noticed it could be interesting offering two simultaneous points of view, the movement was redistributed in the space according to that, and we added to the set-up two projectors pointing towards the center of the stage from opposite sides .
The use of projectors makes it possible to work at higher speeds, and the character of their light beam, combined with a fog machine, is able to fill the space with solid dense physical light. The space surrounding the stage disappears in the dark. While the dancers move through it, they pierce that material and phase in and out with a backlight - frontlight repetition game .This particular lighting suddenly brings the audience way closer to the performers, creating a much more intimate environment.
For this piece we decided to win some time using already-assembled sensors systems by x-io technologies, rather than starting from scratch and design our own as we did in the past.
The two sensing units, one for each dancer, are equipped with accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. We are currently experimenting with calculations between these data to be able to extract interesting values to be used to control properties of light and sound. An interesting approach could be calculating difference values between the two body movements, to be able to highlight the phasing out that gradually happens after a unison.
