The performance of If An Orchid Was All You Had featured two key components that made the show what it was. It was very Tech heavy and feature a lot of aspects of movement be it physical theatre, dance or mime. Therefor it was in our best interests to try to link the themes between lighting and choreography. Working as assistant choreographer as well as a technician enabled me to have an inside scope into how all the movement was choreographed and how I might be able to link that with the aspects of the lighting. Most of the lights within the scenes where designed around the choreography and simply required organisation and communication. The final dance that concluded our show was choreographed by Kerrie Crockford and I was used as a stand in for the man character whilst kerrie experimented with some movement techniques. Being able to suggest idea’s and approach’s towards the dance and having Kerrie direct me in the way that she need, I was able to begin to understand the themes and narrative of the dance and how it aimed to make the audience feel as well as the character of the man.

We experimented with many different songs, each time using the same movements but creating a completely different atmosphere and narrative. The character of the woman, during the dance needed to appear manipulative, beautiful, mesmerising and yet rather malicious. The song that was chosen in the end had,rather than a soft and calming melody, had a more dub-step and technical melody which suited the theme of madness and chaos; yet it also had a rather beautiful violin and strings accompaniment to the dub-step which checked the criteria we needed for the final dance.

Final Dance (#1)

When it came to lighting the dance I was aware that the dance was supposed to manipulative and malevolent but in a beautiful way, so the the design for the dance, in terms of lighting, was similar to the scenes with the creatures, where the darkness and light bleed into each other. This creates the shadow effect on the actors faces making them seem more ominous. Mixing the light with colours of dark pink and purple created a nice juxtaposition between what is meant to be beautiful surrounded by the darkness in which the creature loom within.

References:

Final Dance, Image #1: Lincoln School of Fine & Performing Arts (2017) IAOWAYH photos [image]. Available from https://www.flickr.com/photos/61839232@N02/with/34016768033/ [accessed 27 May 2017].