The Theatre Times: With a background in theatrical lighting, Chris Medvitz is a current Partner and Principal at Lightswitch, a lighting and visual design company whose focus is to offer artistic solutions to their clients’ requests from concerts to immersive light installations. Thus, his works have not been limited to traditional theatre spaces. Some of Medvitz’s best-known works are Enchanted: Forest of Light at Descanso Gardens and the Nintendo E3 Exhibit, both immersive experiences meant to engage the client’s audience.
2 comments:
Many times I feel like there is an attitude about “selling yourself out” by going into more corporate design projects. But there is an opportunity to bring one’s artistic training into a less traditionally theatrical job setting, as shown in this article. And as the article points out, many times non-theatrical design jobs will have a bigger budget, scope, or more resources in general available. Medvitz focuses on a recent job for Descanso Gardens, where his team was asked to treat the gardens “not as a venue,” but instead design an experience that could not be replicated elsewhere and that was site-specific in its design and implementation. Also interesting to me was the point made that the gardens “wanted to have the biggest impact on the audience with the smallest impact on the site,” which makes complete and obvious sense since the point of the project is to highlight and accentuate the existing landscape of the gardens, but it is a good way to look at any environmental piece of theatre or installation.
I am always so interested to see how different designers go about their individual design processes. It really can vary between every artist and it is cool because there is no right way to do anything in the design realm as long as you meet your end goal. I like how this article uses Chris Medvitz as an example because he is very classically trained in theatrical lighting design in the San Diego area in regional theatres, however he was able to apply this same skill set to multiple different areas of lighting like installations and experiential lighting design. Once he learned his creative process, he was able to apply this same routine across a multitude of different types of projects. This idea that theatre is moving more and more outside of the physical theatre is really interesting and it is a very cool time to see how designers handle this shift in traditions and how they go about doing the same job in a completely new way.
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