Side light only, for fifty minutes. No front, no down, no cyc. Six booms and a great deal of argument.
The brief was one sentence: nothing from the front. Fifty minutes of dance lit entirely from the sides, at three heights, with no downlight and no cyclorama.
Side light is what makes a body legible in three dimensions — it puts an edge on a shoulder and a shadow under a ribcage. Front light flattens all of that out, which is why dance uses so little of it. Taking it to the extreme was the choreographer’s idea and it was correct.
Touring nine venues with a rig that lives entirely on booms means the get-in is the whole problem. Six booms of eight, each one focused individually, in houses with wildly different wing space. We built a focus chart that specified angles from the dancer rather than from the building, and it survived all nine.
A staging that puts the underworld above rather than below, so every descent in the text is a physical ascent into the flies.
A single amber special and eleven minutes of near-total darkness. The hardest thing we have been asked to light.
Nine hours, no performers, no cues. A room that changes so slowly nobody sees it happen.
That is genuinely enough to start a conversation. Dates and budget help, but they are not the first question — the first question is what the room is being asked to do.