Passages is a performance and presentation of practice-as-research undertaken by staff and students of Rose Bruford College.
The project’s main questions are drawn from Nick Hunt’s doctoral research, which is investigating the role of the lighting artist as performer rather than designer. Taking as inspiration and starting point the ideas of Fred Bentham, a (perhaps the) leading figure in stage lighting technology in the UK between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, Nick’s research seeks to reposition the role of the lighting artist by making changes to the design and rehearsal processes, to the spatial relationship between lighting artist, performers and audience, and to the control interface used to operate the lighting.
In Passages, Nick will be putting into practice and testing these ideas, performing a lighting ‘score’ that he will have developed during the rehearsal period with the other performers and Chris Goode, the director. Nick will be performing the lighting on a custom-made lighting control system designed and built specifically for this performance.
Passages will be performed and produced by students of the MA Theatre Practices programme at Rose Bruford College, with the support of staff and undergraduate students. We can’t say too much about the nature of the performance itself, as we have yet to develop it. However, fans of German critics and philosophers from the first half of the Twentieth Century with curious and apocryphal death-legends (and which of us is not such a fan?) will find Passages unmissable.
Follow the project at http://www.passages-project.org.uk/.