Twelfth Night

KCACTF Region 5 National Lighting Design Recognition.

My design for this show, after my initial read throughs, started with palette work for spaces and characters. The primary influences and spaces were Olivia and her palace (a thorny green on the edges nurturing hidden love, tonally similar to Marriage of Arnolfini), Orsino and his court (reds and golds for passion, wealth, and lion-like behavior), and the twins and the sea (a haunting coldness and tinge of blue that follows them like a shroud of grief until they are reunited). These would then be modified for the changing tonalities of the scenes, the emotions, the other involved characters, and the time of day. Overall, I wanted the design to convey the drama and textures of an oil painting, with the cheery coloring of a rom-com. I took inspiration from painters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt.

I prepared for programming by attending rehearsal and taking notation of each scene’s blocking. I programmed the lighting with an empty space to include all used space for each scene, with regard to the aforementioned palettes and settings, and came to the next rehearsal with full lighting to make minor tweaks for actor height and more exact positioning.

One of the technical challenges of this show was moving the theatre into the round. The playing space went past the lighting grid in the direction the seating was added, and we had a very limited number of source-4s available. I redistributed and angled two of our source-4s to provide the maximum amount of coverage, added several fresnels on dimmer packs to reinforce washes, reconfigured all lighting to avoid the new seats, and find the right angles to get front light under the hat brims but not hitting the audience. I also had to angle lighting so that the acting space could be extended into the audience seating without blinding anyone.