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Company: University of Calgary

Producer: Bruce Barton

Director: Brittany Pack

Set/Props Designer: Virginia Maxfield

Costume Designer: Nicole McIntyre

Festival Plot Designer: Tauran Wood

Photographer: Citrus Photography

Venue

Reeve Theatre, Calgary AB

Concept

The director chose to have the role of A and the role of Chorus be flexible, so that different actors would represent different characters at different times. I chose to help differentiate between the different roles by using different colors to light A vs the Chorus, with A being represented by a cold greenish-blue and Chorus by a magenta. Within this framework, I varied the saturation of the colors based on the violence being expressed by the characters, so that, for example, when A is fighting hardest agains the will of the Chorus the blue-green is at it’s most saturated, and when A has resigned themself to death, their light is completely desaturated, and likewise for the Chorus and their light.
Interspersed within the play were three devised scenes that were related to the emotion of the play as a whole, but not the plot. I treaded these as being isolated from the rest of the play, essentially lighting them as isolated scenes. For these I worked closely with the sound designer because the sound was a very important part of these scenes. For example for one of the scenes, the actors and the sound start off calm, but build over the course of the scene to chaos and shouting before snapping back to calm at the end. I mirrored this journey in lighting by starting the scene in a warm white, without anything funky in terms of angle, then shifting over the course of the scene into a patchwork of color from the back and side, then snapping back to white with sound.