Justin Townsend
Lighting Designer
New York City/Boston
I was the lighting designer for four shows in the U.S. exhibition: Nancy Keystone's The America Play and Apollo (at California's Theatre @ Boston Court and Oregon's Critical Mass Performance Group, respectively); Milk-N-Honey, by LightBox in NYC; and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson by Les Freres Corbusier at New York's Public Theater. In my work, I converse with the performers and the play, using light to link image to action. When making devised company work, we don't always know where the play will take us, so I try simultaneously to listen to the event being made and to respond with surprising choices. I try to make my design work exist in a state where the audience wonders which came first, the design idea or the performance; they are inextricably linked. In Apollo, director Nancy Keystone and I created architectures of light that moved with the performers. One of our early workshop ideas involved boxes of lights on the ground, echoing the scenery of cardboard boxes. The light boxes flexed like muscles around the performers, chasing them onstage and snapping the audience into scenes. I've made countless workshops with Keystone, and even with previously produced scripts like The America Play, we believe that incorporating design as a foundational element to the playmaking creates singular modern experiences that allow imagery to spring from the action.
The Prague Quadrennial overran the city with theatremakers from around the world. The walks between displays and performances allowed attendees to think about design and discuss photographs and installations. The unique graphic design of our PQ bags and lanyards helped identify fellow explorers. The festival felt borderless and expansive—a great parallel to the ideas at hand. Hungarian theatre Krétakör's Trilogy Crisis Part 1 led us to the old Právo newspaper building, located in the outskirts of the city. We marched down alleys next to the rumbling trolley cars and rode up the aging paternoster. This was the newspaper that famously first reported Jan Palach's self-immolation—a protest to the demoralization, the giving-in of the Czechoslovakians to the Soviet occupation. This show inhabited the entire building. We began in the upstairs lobby, looking at modern photographs against the Soviet-era wood paneling. Then we saw a movie and performance lecture in the aging screening room. After that, we descended into the basement, the printing press, where our 11 student experimenters had been living and creating the last section of the work for two weeks. The project was made even more necessary, knowing that the entire building would be razed shortly after the closing of the piece. Here we were, international spectators, grounded in a historical place, watching the future being made. Such offsite performances transferred a spark of energy from the daily dose of model boxes and photographs and furthered our explorations into something new and exciting.