Designer Perspective

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Tech Behind the Scenes > Designer Perspective

Andrew Hungerford a stage director and lighting designer, and often designed lights for Know’s productions during his tenure as the company's artistic director. During in-person work/travel restrictions in 2020 and 2021, Hungerford attempted to design lights in Know’s space in Cincinnati, Ohio from his home in Los Angeles, California (about 2,000 miles apart) where he was isolating with his partner: ‘we set it up so that I could access the lighting console from my iPad in my office. It was essentially screen-shared, so I could type on the keys on my iPad and watch the lights change on the screen. And the first time that happened during the pandemic, I wept’. Upgrades to the lighting console in 2019 fortuitously made this work-around possible. To properly design and direct productions, Hungerford ‘became a telepresence robot – which was a laptop on top of a barrel’.

This makeshift combination of technologies to view a physical space was hampered by slower internet speeds in his LA home, but Hungerford told me that working over distance gave him greater insight into how the online audience would experience the show’s lighting because he constantly watched his designs through a computer screen: ‘what I saw on my screen didn't necessarily look exactly like it looked in-person in the space, because of colour. But I was seeing what the audience would see’. For post-pandemic theatre makers interested in integrating or filming technologies (see also: Televisual Theatre and Cinematic Theatre), it might be worth having designers test their concepts remotely, so they can integrate the visual experience of their remote audiences.

Clemence Debaig noted in our interview that digital theatre’s new creations might need specialist crew in the future. For instance, she described difficulty with a show performed through Rich Mix in London in-person, and hosted virtually by Open Online Theatre, a group dedicated to supporting and training artists in new technologies over a 12-week residency. In 2022, Debaig performed Discordance, a show in which one dancer performs before an in-person audience, and one performs remotely and is livestreamed in:

… that means having people in the theatre that are handling the remote parts that are not integrating nicely with the theatre tech – having the right architecture for that is actually really complex. There’s the practicalities of running the show we need to have, like your cues that might be a lighting cue that is in sync with your livestream cue, and all of that [technology] actually does not talk to each other at the moment. You have to build a of bit custom tech to make this happen. That also means way more people handling it.

At the moment, Debaig noted, not only do shows like this require new types of designers and crew, but the technology needs to link up in a simplified, streamlined way. Some tools, like the ETC brand lighting boards used by Know Theatre, offer apps that can support this integration of remote and in-person work, but this is a rare example.