Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Rose Bruford College
Lighting Designer for Fevered Sleep Company: On Ageing and Stilled
A research-led approach is key to the development of work by performance company Fevered Sleep. For On Ageing, the eighteen-month period of R&D was conducted in collaboration with Professor Maria Evandrou at the Centre for Research on Ageing, University of Southampton. Schmidt worked closely with Evandrou and the company throughout this process, developing a lighting design that used light to communicate abstract notions of time and change in a piece of verbatim theatre performed by children to adult audiences at the Young Vic Theatre, London. The performances were accompanied by a series of research-led seminars and talks.
A similarly rigorous approach was used for Stilled, a durational performance piece combining dance and pin-hole photography. Stilled was funded by, and initially developed in response to, an exhibition on x-ray crystallography at the Wellcome Trust, and from the beginning the sciences of light and photography were integral components of the research process. Key participators in this research phase were Dr Kersten Hall, University of Leeds, and Nicola Triscott, Arts Catalyst. The project is ongoing and has toured a wide range of non-theatre venues, connecting with audiences from across the arts and sciences. The work with Fevered Sleep has allowed Schmidt to develop his research interest in how light can shape narrative and the built environment. All of Fevered Sleep’s work is strongly defined by a very carefully constructed performance space, often in non-theatre spaces and sometimes in spaces that only exist digitally. Schmidt described the research outcomes in “The Use of Narrative Space and Daylight”, TaPRA National Conference, Kingston University, 2012. The paper proposed a new way of reading scenograpy and built spaces: by establishing the notion of pure and impure lighting within a space, and by arguing for a re-appraisal of Genette’s structuralist theories within the context of scenography.
