To celebrate the achievements of 2019 and to welcome all the prospects of 2020, Live Design is conducting 31 Days Of Plots. Every day during the month of December 2019, we will highlight a different lighting design, from across theatre, concert tours, corporate events, and more.
Day Two brings us the plots from Clifton Taylor's lighting design for You Took a Part of Me, which is a nod to Noh, an ancient form of Japanese dance, and choreographed by the always provocative Karole Armitage. The piece was revived in late October 2019 at New York Live Arts with music by Reiko Yamada.
"In the Noh theater, lighting is not tasked with telling a realistic story like time-of-day or place," Taylor notes. "Freed of those more western ideas of stage lighting, I set out rather to create a space that referenced a Noh theater architecture but not through scenery but rather through light. I created a space where Karole's unique response to Noh could take place, so it was a hybrid architecture that was scaled exactly to a traditional Noh stage, but described through lines of luminescence." Read more of his thoughts on the design here.
Click through the slideshow to check out the lighting plots, and stay tuned for more plots over the next 29 days.