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.
Visual designer Roma Flowers won the 2019 KOI-USA Notch Award for Projection Design for her work on A Bon Coeur, an evening length solo dance work created and performed by Helanius J. Wilkins, with lighting design by Iain Court and performed at Dance Place in Washington, DC.
"The breath of the project was commendable," says Flowers. "Drawn from inspiration through his Creole cultural ties and aspects of growing up in Lafayette, Louisiana, Helanius Wilkins envisioned the work to be performed by 'a black body in a white box,' with all the metaphoric, cultural, and political implications that that environment suggests. The projection design for A Bon Coeur employed four white walls (including a translucent front wall) and a white floor as irresistible surfaces for vibrant and diverse projections that could truly transform the space from both audience and performance perspectives.
"The extraordinary and enormous technical and creative challenges of this project allowed me to explore on a deep level the complexity and impact of visual expression," Flowers continues. "The dictate was to create a performative immersive shifting landscape to depict highly divergent scenarios including the onset of Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levees, the reconstruction of a destroyed environment, the spirited walkabouts through the neighborhoods of Lafayette, Louisiana, the dreamscape of Louisianan memories, and finally the seeker’s home.
"Moving well beyond a presentation of photo-realistic scenarios of the selected environments, the projections for A Bon Coeur aptly employed cinematic tools of motion, rhythm, timing, duration, color, focus, transitions to effectively assume an evocative addition to the storytelling. The resulting creation presented a symphonic visual poem that allowed the work to be an immersive and satisfying experience of sight, sound, and story that enraptured audiences."
The plot shows the position of the lighting fixtures and projectors. Click the plot to enlarge to PDF.
Check out other plots from the 31 Days here, and stay tuned for more over the next 11 days.