Previous works with light!

Reading Lee's blog, I remembered working with Rashpal Singh Bansal (who sadly passed away August 2009 at the age of 29) when I was in Surrey Youth Dance Company (SYDC). The piece was performed with other works by him at Woking Dance Festival. It wasn't the piece that I was in that I so very clearly remember the lighting, but it was another of his pieces we were able to watch during the tech rehearsal (I don't recall the name). It was a dark stage with only one dancer, lit by an oval bubble of bright purple light. The light was being projected up and back from the wings of the stage and I remember watching and thinking of how magical it looked, especially when the dancer moved. He had to change it though as the dancer couldn't see the floor and felt like she would fall over as the light was being projected into her eyes. So unfortunately, the paying public saw the purple light through the cyclorama from the flood lights instead. It really was something that truely inspired me and I was in awe of this "new" lighting! I had never seen it being used this way before.

(The Lightbox Art Gallery)

Another work I recall was one I performed in myself. Working in a community dance project with Carol Brown, I volunteered to take part in a site-specific piece - Glow (2007). The site was an empty, newly built art gallery (named "The Lightbox") and the experience of the audience was a tour of the gallery, visiting 4 different rooms with 4 different works. The work I want to focus on was called "Soul Candles". We experimented with small battery operated lights that would switch on and off everytime you depress the lens. They were placed onto still bodies, almost as if to sculpt, shape and define the positions they were already in, as the picture shows below. This is another way of using light to focus attention onto certain points on the body, as that is where the light is emitting from.