Contemporary Dance Lighting: The Poetry and the Nitty-Gritty dynamically guides students toward aesthetically, creatively, and skillfully becoming lighting designers for dance in the 21st century. The book is organized in three parts, covering everything from the aesthetic considerations of lighting for dance to the tools and technology designers use to create compelling artistry. Part I, "Beginnings" establishes context, explaining the structure of the book and illuminating the history of contemporary dance and lighting. Part II, "The Poetry" elaborates on the key artistic and aesthetic elements of contemporary dance lighting: visual narrative; controllable functions and qualities of light; use of space, color, and time; importance and intricacies of collaboration; and continual effects and evolution of technology. Part III, "The Nitty-Gritty" steers students through the technical knowledge and skills necessary to design lighting, including understanding your tools and positioning instruments; creating layered light plots; organizing extensive paperwork; and archiving. The dance Artifice, choreographed by Jerry Pearson, is sequentially explored throughout the book to convey key concepts. "Further Reflections" conclude each chapter, written by a diverse group of renowned professionals, inviting young designers directly into the world of lighting design. This textbook is for use in Lighting Design and Design for Dance Lighting courses at the university level, along with professional training programs.

Dance and Light examines the interconnected relationship between movement and design, the fluid partnership that exists between the two disciplines, and the approaches that designers can take to enhance dance performances through lighting design. The book demystifies lighting for the dancer and helps designers understand how the dancer/choreographer thinks about their art form, providing insight into the choreographer’s process and exploring how designers can make the most of their resources. The author shares anecdotes and ideas from an almost 50-year career as a lighting designer, along with practical examples and insights from colleagues, and stresses the importance of clear communication between designers, choreographers, and dancers. Attention is also given to the choreographer who wants to learn what light can do to help enhance their work on stage. Written in short, stand-alone chapters that allow readers to quickly navigate to areas of interest, Dance and Light is a valuable resource for lighting design classes wishing to add a section on dance lighting, as well as for choreography classes who want to better equip young artists for a significant collaborative partnership.

The Art of Light on Stage is the first history of theatre lighting design to bring the story right up to date. In this extraordinary volume, award-winning designer Yaron Abulafia explores the poetics of light, charting the evolution of lighting design against the background of contemporary performance. The book looks at the material and the conceptual; the technological and the transcendental. Never before has theatre design been so vividly and excitingly illuminated. The book examines the evolution of lighting design in contemporary theatre through an exploration of two fundamental issues: 1. What gave rise to the new directions in lighting design in contemporary theatre? 2. How can these new directions be viewed within the context of lighting design history? The study then focuses on the phenomenological and semiotic aspects of the medium for light – the role of light as a performer, as the medium of visual perception and as a stimulus for imaginative representations – in selected contemporary theatre productions by Robert Wilson, Romeo Castellucci, Heiner Goebbels, Jossi Wieler and David Zinder. This ground-breaking book will be required reading for anyone concerned with the future of performance.

This is the first major collection of critical responses to performance lighting and includes contributions from award-winning lighting designers, researchers and artists. Showcasing recent examples of work – with case studies of lighting practices in Britain, Europe, the US and China – ­­combined with theoretical and analytical approaches to practice, this will enrich your understanding of the role and potential of light in performance and related creative practices. This volume explores three core themes and provides a framework for thinking through the role of light in performance: 1. Experience - considers both the audience's experience of light and the ways in which light influences the experience of performers 2. Creativity - examines both the creative, performative capacities of light in performance, as well as the creative practices of lighting designers 3. Meaning - offers an expanded view of performance aesthetics by examining the capacity of light to influence and generate meaning within performance. The case studies are drawn from a wide-array of lighting practice, including: Jennifer Tipton on the role of light as a structural language in performance; Jesper Kongshaug on the lighting of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens; Lucy Carter on her work in installation and dance; Psyche Chui on the productive fusion of Western lighting techniques with contemporary Chinese opera; Katharine Williams on the role of light in feminist political theatre made by RashDash; and Paule Constable on storytelling with light in a range of productions, including War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Angels in America.

Lighting Dance pioneers the discussion of the ability of lighting design to foreground shadow in dance performances. Through a series of experiments integrating light, shadow, and improvised dance movement, it highlights and analyses what it advances as an innovative expression of shadow in dance as an alternative to more conventional approaches to lighting design. Different art forms, such as painting, film, and dance pieces from Loie Fuller, the Russell Maliphant Dance Company, Elevenplay, Pilobolus, and the Tao Dance Theater served to inspire and contextualise the study. From lighting to psychology, from reviews to academic books, shadows are examined as a symbolic and manipulative entity. The book also presents the dance solo Sombreiro, which was created to echo the experiments with light, shadow, and movement aligned to an interpretation of cultural shadow (Jung 1954, in Samuels, Shorter, and Plaut 1986; Casement 2006; Ramos 2004; Stein 2004; and others). The historical development of lighting within dance practices is also outlined, providing a valuable resource for lighting designers, dance practitioners, and theatre goers interested in the visuality of dance performances.

This book argues that contemporary dance, imagined to have a global belonging, is vitiated by euro-white constructions of risk and currency that remain at its core. Differently, the book reimagines contemporary dance along a “South-South” axis, as a poly-centric, justice-oriented, aesthetic-temporal category, with intersectional understandings of difference as a central organizing principle. Placing alterity and heat, generated via multiple pathways, at its center, it foregrounds the work of South-South artists, who push against constructions of “tradition” and white-centered aesthetic imperatives, to reinvent their choreographic toolkit and respond to urgent questions of their times. In recasting the grounds for a different “global stage,” the argument widens its scope to indicate how dance-making both indexes current contextual inequities and broader relations of social, economic, political, and cultural power, and inaugurates future dimensions of justice. Winner of the 2022 Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research

The Art of Light on Stage is the first history of theatre lighting design to bring the story right up to date. In this extraordinary volume, award-winning designer Yaron Abulafia explores the poetics of light, charting the evolution of lighting design against the background of contemporary performance. The book looks at the material and the conceptual; the technological and the transcendental. Never before has theatre design been so vividly and excitingly illuminated. The book examines the evolution of lighting design in contemporary theatre through an exploration of two fundamental issues: 1. What gave rise to the new directions in lighting design in contemporary theatre? 2. How can these new directions be viewed within the context of lighting design history? The study then focuses on the phenomenological and semiotic aspects of the medium for light – the role of light as a performer, as the medium of visual perception and as a stimulus for imaginative representations – in selected contemporary theatre productions by Robert Wilson, Romeo Castellucci, Heiner Goebbels, Jossi Wieler and David Zinder. This ground-breaking book will be required reading for anyone concerned with the future of performance.

Dance Production: Design and Technology introduces you to the skills you need to plan, design, and execute the technical aspects of a dance production. While it may not seem that staging a dance production is that different from a play or musical, in reality a dance performance offers up unique intricacies and challenges all its own, from scenery that accommodates choreography, to lighting design that sculpts the body, and costumes that complement movement. This unique book approaches the process of staging a dance production from a balanced perspective, making it an essential resource for dancers and designers alike. Covering a broad range of topics, author Jeromy Hopgood takes the reader through the process of producing dance from start to finish – including pre-production planning (collaboration, production process, personnel, performance spaces), design disciplines (lighting, sound, scenery, costumes, projections), stage management, and more. Bridging the gap between theatrical and dance design, the book includes a quick reference guide for theatrical and dance terminology, useful in giving dancers and designers a common working vocabulary that will ensure productive communication across the different fields.