Digital Scenography and Digital Performance

I have lead several investigations into the use of digital technologies in performance, centering on the relationships between light, space, image and performer:

Pygmalion, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, direction and music by Stephen Baystead. Music Theatre Symposium, Rose Bruford College, May 2003.

Rousseau’s 1770 work was arguably the first melodrama, alternating spoken text that moved the action forward with musical interludes that established the emotional tone of the next scene. I designed lighting and video projection, together with a show control system to synchronise the lighting and video with pre-recorded music and monologues.

Pygmalion

Her Superior Exterior, based on a song from Sondheim’s musical Follies. Many Voices Symposium, Rose Bruford College, May 2004.

This project brought together under- and post-graduate lighting design students with a range of digital technologies (video, LED lighting, computerised show control) to explore how a character might be primarily expressed through visual media. The project also engaged modernist and postmodernist theories to inform the practice. I devised and tutored the project.

Her Superior Exterior 1Her Superior Exterior 2Her Superior Exterior 3

Her Superior Exterior 4Her Superior Exterior 5Her Superior Exterior 6

Her Superior Exterior 7Her Superior Exterior 8

[I presented this project as part of my paper “Pasteboard Temples and Liminal Spaces“]

Patterns of Chaos, a contemporary dance piece directed and designed by Rachel Nicholson, Studio Theatre, Rose Bruford College, June 2005.

This MA final project sought to develop video projection techniques that would place the dancers within, rather than in front of, the projected images. I tutored the project.

Patterns of Chaos

[I presented this project as part of my paper “Pasteboard Temples and Liminal Spaces“]