Dance

At the time that I was at Central School of Art, Rambert Dance Co (then Ballet Rambert) used the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre ( attached to the Art School) as their primary London Venue and began an annual season called ‘Collaborations’ where young choreographers worked with young designers to create new contemporary dance works. My very first design ‘project’ was for a dance design (non realised) led by the then artistic director of Rambert, choreographer Norman Morrice. Also during that first year I watched the American choreographer Anna Sokolow creating a new work (‘Deserts’) on the stage of the Cochrane. Working as a student on both the Collaborations seasons meant being a small part of, and a witness to, the beginnings of contemporary dance in the UK and became a major influence on me for the future. I first met Geoff Moore choreographing one of the pieces in the second Collaborations season( ‘Remembered Motions’), and that was to become a very long term working relationship through the formation of Moving Being in 1969. This ‘mixed media’ company was formed on the back of a commission from the newly created Institute of Contemporary Art (I.C.A.) and was a company that combined dancers actors and what were referred to as ‘non-dancers’ with the use of film/projected images/text and music. I worked with Geoff as designer and lighting designer with Moving Being permanently until 1978 and then beyond that into the late Eighties on many other individual projects. Moving Being was very much a part of the contemporary dance world, although always in an area of work that critics and the establishment found hard to define.

When I left Moving Being on a permanent basis in 1978, I naturally moved into contemporary dance and became established as both a lighting and set designer with choreographers such as Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies,Ian Spink , Jonathan Lunn and many others. When Second Stride was formed in the early Eighties I became a part of that company as a lighting designer and throughout the next decade worked on a large number of dance works with Second Stride, London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Rambert Dance Co.

Because dance especially in the early days often worked in a space with no set, lighting became a major design element in these works, defining the space in terms of colour, shape and form and it was through this period of working with dance that my work as a lighting designer developed and established my reputation.

Pieces like Richard Alston’s ‘Strong Language’ and Siobhan Davies ‘Sounding’ and ‘White Bird Featherless’ are good examples of light becoming the spacial design, as well as illuminating the performance.The ‘visual language’ of the use of light that I learnt and evolved then is still an influence on my work now, working with other areas of theatre.

P.M.