1st Edition
The Art of Light on Stage Lighting in Contemporary Theatre
The Art of Light on Stage is the first history of theatre lighting design to bring the story right up to date. In this extraordinary volume, award-winning designer Yaron Abulafia explores the poetics of light, charting the evolution of lighting design against the background of contemporary performance. The book looks at the material and the conceptual; the technological and the transcendental. Never before has theatre design been so vividly and excitingly illuminated.
The book examines the evolution of lighting design in contemporary theatre through an exploration of two fundamental issues:
1. What gave rise to the new directions in lighting design in contemporary theatre?
2. How can these new directions be viewed within the context of lighting design history?
The study then focuses on the phenomenological and semiotic aspects of the medium for light – the role of light as a performer, as the medium of visual perception and as a stimulus for imaginative representations – in selected contemporary theatre productions by Robert Wilson, Romeo Castellucci, Heiner Goebbels, Jossi Wieler and David Zinder.
This ground-breaking book will be required reading for anyone concerned with the future of performance.
List of Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Towering Figures in the History of Theatre Lighting Design
2. Light Art – the Rising Autonomy of Artificial Light
3. Theoretical Framework
4. A New Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Light
Introduction to the Performance Analyses
5. Madama Butterfly
6. On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God
7. Stifters Dinge
8. Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)
9. Peer Gynt
Epilogue
Appendix: Glossary
Index
Biography
Yaron Abulafia is an internationally respected and critically acclaimed artist-in-light, whose stirring work has appeared in some of the most familiar European and North American dance and theatre companies including Nederlands Dans Theater, the English National Ballet, Rambert, Staatsballett Berlin, Ballet BC (Vancouver) and the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj (Romania) – to mention but a few. This book is based upon his PhD research at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
