Emerging Choreographers’ Showcase opened and closed this past week at the University at Buffalo. I had the pleasure of designing the lighting for the piece that Dana Bojarski choreographed. It was an interesting experience designing for the first time at this school, as I am only a freshman. However, I felt very prepared by the time the show came around and was overall pretty happy with the way my design turned out in the end. After seeing the piece of the first time, I felt like Dana, through her dance, was trying to create an eerie and distorted organic environment. I knew I wanted to primarily manipulate color and angle of light to achieve my design concept. However, when working with a set repertory dance lighting plot, this can often be difficult to do. After watching my piece more and more, I realized I wanted low angle sidelight to cast distorted and unnatural shadows across the dancers along with haze to add to the spine-chilling environment. Due to the fact that there were not any lighting booms in the show, I had to request specials that would be placed on the deck. Thankfully, time and inventory allowed me to get what I wanted. Once technical rehearsals started, I was happy to see the progress that was coming along with my piece. However, I wasn’t satisfied with the hot “spanked pink” color that I chose to come from my specials. I experimented in the light lab after my piece was finished rehearsing one night and came up with the combination of R96, R40, and R135. Seeing the new color the next day definitely was more effective at achieving my design objective. Overall, I was very happy with the way my piece turned out for Emerging Choreographers’ Showcase and was very proud of my fellow designers. However, a note to the wise: make sure the gel in your specials gets properly swapped before the next show!
