Wearable Art 2012
Juneau, AK
Scenic Design: Bauer Clifton Interiors
Photography: Seanna O'Sullivan

Wardrobe Design: David Walker
Model: Anna Gonwa Ramonde
Title of Piece: The Beast in the Beauty

In the third act dream ballet, the director wanted the brightness and tone of the lights to keep pace with the hysteria and the movement-it's definitely an unsettling dream ballet. The upstage panels were placed at the downstage edge of the Act I layout, and as the audience was constantly shifting it was important that the color chosen for the overall piece be able to be used from different angles for each act.

As the characters progressed in the dance and began to interact with each other, I opened up the space and focused the light on their whole bodies, using the R362 in the mids and the R360 in the shins more than the heads and blue backlights. The feel of their environment went from a deeper blue, through a cooler, less saturate blue and then transitioned toward a warmer white to enhance the idea of leaving 'where they had been' and progressing to 'where they were going,' a major theme for the characters that each of the dancers portrayed.

The dance 'Naked City' follows the arc of six women who come to the city as strangers looking for a better life and then interact with each other, incidentally or intentionally, on its streets. I highlighted the isolation of the dancers in the beginning of the dance by lighting them primarily from the waist up, which enhanced the focus on the emotional expressiveness of their faces and upper bodies and reduced it on their surrounding environment. Their costumes were evening dresses made of black and silver sequins with a touch of blue fabric as an accent.

"Primus choreographed this section of the piece, 'Hard Time Blues,' so I wanted to distinguish it from the rest of the dance. It's the only time that the palette has cool/blue colors in it. For this sequence, the blue surround separates it in spirit from the parched landscape of the rest of the dance. R83 is a wonderfully saturated blue that works well in both warm and cool environments. Here the sidelight on the bodies maintains the same warm feel from the rest of the dance, connecting the stories aesthetically to one another."

I wanted the lighting to reflect memories of Pearl Primus' stories, but in a less 'romantic' way. The palette I was working with, for most of the dance, consisted of amber and dusty rose colors. I loved using R321 because it can make everything feel as though you are looking at a sepia photograph. Using R09 and R03 as the key lights on the body with accents of R50 helped recreate the environment we wanted - the dry, dusty feel of parched cotton fields.

The Set for 'Spalding Gray' was a very simple deck and a backdrop of white crumpled notebook paper that acted as a cyc. The paper cyc had 2 layers and was porous exposing the brick back wall of the theater. The piece had five actors performing different excerpts of Spalding's text as monologues. For most of the piece I was able to focus on one actor while toning the playing space and creating broad strokes of color and texture on the paper backdrop and the brick wall.

Color is often used to help provide a sense of the play's location. That's what lighting designer Thom Weaver did for a production of "Villa American." He also has some important things to say about how to use Roscolux and gobos effectively on a cyc. Here are Thom Weaver's comments on what he was trying to accomplish and how he did it:

Al Crawford, Lighting Director for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater creates the lighting for many of the famed company's modern dances. But he also designs the lighting for one of the company's most important fund-raising events, a gala for approximately 700 people to benefit the Ailey School.This event is housed each year in a 50' x 200' tent erected for the occasion in Harlem in New York City.

The initial color choices for the 'Adding Machine A Musical' came from a painted elevation of the scenery. It consists of a wall that rolls into several different locations and it has a sickly green hue. We knew that we were going to be using light and haze as architectural elements, and I found that R87 was the perfect color to do this. Almost the entire show became sourced from a down light system using R87. It has this effect of creating an uncomfortable atmosphere, and leeches the color from the actors giving them a somewhat sickly hue.