Lighting Designs and Plans

During the beginning of the rehearsals process we hadn’t really decided how we wanted to have the lighting on the performance night. A lot of different ideas had been thrown around and then finally we had a meeting with the stage manager and technical director which helped us set how we were going to have the lighting.

Our original idea was to use different coloured lights which portrayed the different characters in there sections of the stage, during rehearsals we had spoken about how we wanted the set to be a visually stimulating as possible and so therefore we thought that coloured lights would be the most successful to bring this look to the stage.  We decided that the best colours to use would be the colours that our costume designer had chosen for each of the characters.

The colours for each character where as follows;

The Wild One – Light Blue

Thump – Orange

Gloom –  Purple

Gossip – Red

Twitting – Yellow

Guzzle – Teal

and

Gazer – Royal Blue

We wanted to create a system that would be used throughout the play, which would be that when each character spoke their individual coloured light would come up on to the stage to create a wash of colour over the stage which was positioned in a way that the light would make the base of the cage. Considering the set which created the cage, the lights made it just that little bit more recognisable. Lighting aided to create the look of the small cage on the big stage. Deliberately the cage was a lot smaller than the capacity the stage could allow it to be, and this was meant to highlight the fact that the ‘cagebirds’ where trapped within their tiny cage. Each of the characters had their own personal space within the cage, and although all of the birds are in the cage together they are still very much individuals within the cage. The different coloured lights for each of the characters helped to create another visual aspect to the performance, whilst also making it a little bit clearer to the audience the intention of the birds within the cage.

During the development process some of our original plans where changed slightly and the death scene had some added elements to it. However the original aspect of our lighting plan stayed the same and was still carried on throughout the performance.

Due to the fact that one of our focuses as a theatre company is that we want to create visual theatre, lighting was one of the points for our performance which would be seen as important for the visual aspects. We wanted it to aid the set, and to highlight the choices that the set designers had made with their tech role. Considering the set was full of props, detailed and sectioned off for different characters we felt that the lighting would be best in a simple design, in order to not complicate the rest of the set too much.

I think that although there were some problems on the day with the lighting, they were not ones which couldn’t be changed and on the night of the performance the lighting designs assisted the performance in a complementary way.