Theatre content from Live Design Magazine: When Doyle and Barrett first encounter a space, “We absorb the atmosphere [and see] what the building offers up to the show organically,” says Doyle. The Massachusetts school presented challenges to Punchdrunk’s traditional way of working because the designers couldn’t paint very much black, which is crucial to the lighting palette and the creation of a controllable atmosphere. Instead, the school “felt very clean and glossy.”
5 comments:
This article provided insight into a couple of interesting elements of the show. I always wondered how a show of this scale flowed via sound, lighting and actors. As far as calling the show. Considering the show cycles for so many hours, are the lighting cues copied for each cycle? I also wonder what happens to the cycle of the cues if something is off.
I'd be curious to read a segment on the stage management or "plan-b" for the show.
Ariel brings up a good point, the nature of the show is so that the audience creates the flow of the show. How do you call a show like that? Is it run by a system similar to a haunted house where performers activate different areas or do they require multiple managers to watch the different areas.
As for a "Plan B" can there be a "plan b" for a show that doesn't have a set order of events?
I never even thought about how a show like this would be called. What are they running the lights off of? Are there different controls per space? Coordinating something like a blackout every time a particular character starts a scene sounds pretty tedious if there is one person calling the technical elements throughout an entire warehouse! I think it is a cool challenge to try and adjust the show to the large space of the warehouse in NYC. That is always a challenge when on tour I suppose.
Sleep No More creates a great experience for audience members being that it breaks down the fourth wall of theatre. At first I was skeptical of the designer being so determined to use a black space. As I read further, I was intrigued by the designers lighting up the worlds and not the actors. I guess I am still skeptical about this. Sure, it is interesting to see how our bodies and minds react to certain light designs, but I think this has been experienced before. Every time I walk home, it's dark out, and I can only see figures in the shadows and streetlights. I don't think this lighting experience is particularly new. I think it is limiting itself from other possibilities. What if the entire installation was white, or glass, or mirrored? I do respect Maybank's last comment about not telling people about their secrets. After all, they created these designs after going through trials and errors, and that journey helped them discover new things. I think if people want to figure something out, they should go ahead on their own journey and learn through their own experiences.
There are two very interesting points that this article brings up about cueing and running a show like this. The first is the fact that the entire set of lighting cues is triggered at the top of every performance and any subsequent changes are taken automatically with the sound, meaning that if an actor falls behind and misses a cue, the actor just has to deal with it and figure out how to make it work. In a show that doesn't have a specific sequence of events, linking the light changes to the soundtrack is a good one, since the soundtrack, in conjunction with the action occurring in front of the audience, is what sets the emotion of the scene. The second point is that in a show without a set sequence of events, the environment is very important, and so lighting the environment rather than lighting the actors can work well.
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