Absence and Unfolding
“Absence and Unfolding: Approaching a new understanding of the lighting designer’s creative process”
Abstract of a paper given at the OISTAT Education Commission / History and Theory Commission meeting, Helsinki, June 2008
The paper has also been presented at the Theatre and Performance Research Association conference, Leeds, September 2008
In the UK, theatre lighting designers are employed under contracts that centre on the notion of intellectual property: the lighting designer is paid a fee to create a conceptual object – the design – which is the intellectual property that is then made available to the management for use in the production. Lighting textbooks generally imply a two-part process in which the design is firstly researched and imagined, and secondly realised and deployed. It is this widely-held model, which separates the creative but abstract act of imagining from the procedural and physical act of realisation, that I challenge in the paper.
Drawing on the experience of practising lighting designers, and particularly that of Rick Fisher, together with Karin Knorr Cetina’s model of research practices in the science and technology, I argue for a model of lighting design as a process of unfolding. If the design is an object, then it is characteristically a dynamic one that unfolds over time, elusive and never fully present, having many partial instantiations: sketches, plans, conversations, configurations of equipment, computer data, light on stage. Adopting aspects of Gilles Deleuze’s account of the creative process of the painter Francis Bacon, I argue that the accidental has an essential role to play in lighting designers’ processes, as they seek to avoid cliché and bring the lighting forth into the performance.
As well as offering an alternative account of the process of lighting design, my paper brings together academic theory and professional practice so that each can illuminate the other, and so that lighting designers – student and professional – can develop a richer self-understanding.