I took a while to reflect on many aspects of the last production I produced, partly because, the project meant so much to me and also because, this time round, there were so many things to unpack. Previously I talked about the writing process. This time, allow me to talk about the process of lighting and set design.
When I got the grant result for the production in March, I knew straight away that I will not have the capacity to hire any set or lighting designer. This could only mean one thing – I’d have to assume both the roles of set and lights designers.
Let’s talk about set designing first. When I first wrote the script, I intended for the play to have gaming elements. I wanted to gamify certain segments. In the original idea, Daniel, the protagonist is first seen with his grandmother in the middle of the stage. A map design or a maze was supposed to be on the stage floor. As Daniel leads his grandmother out of the maze towards home, he will be facing different challenges which will require the audience to vote to determine his next action. And if they were to vote wrongly, Daniel and his grandmother will end up getting stuck within the maze.
While I thought that this idea was creative and refreshing, I did feel that it would take the students’ attention away from the seriousness of this illness and what is required of them should their grandparents were to be diagnosed with Alzheimer. As such, I decided to scrap away the idea and move on to something that I thought was simpler, and yet not so simple to execute. I wanted to turn the whole stage into something that reflects Daniel’s grandmother’ s state of mind. For starter, I thought of draping LED lights all over the stage to parallel the concept of neurons and nerves in our brains, and as the grandmother progresses into the late stage of Alzheimer, the LED lights will be dimmed right to the last row of LED lights. I have also decided to use three panels of black cloths to hide switches and other lights that I might want to use in the performance.
Side note: Because of the limited budget, I ended up staying up late on many nights sewing up black cloths together till the wee hours to make this plan work.
On these panels of black cloths, I wanted to drape colourful cloths that will be removed slowly, one piece at a time as the play progresses, with the intention of leaving the whole stage fully black once the play ends. However, when we were testing this plan out, the stage looks messy and the coloured cloths seemed to serve no purpose apart from revealing the black panels at the end of the scene. This was also scrapped at the last minute. This is the drawback of trying to put up a theatre performance when you have no space to test out your ideas and the only time you can try out to see if things work is when you finally have the performance space during bump-in period which, in my case, was two days before we open to the audience.
After removing the additional cloths, I found the stage to be too barren. This was when I knew that designing the lights were going to be tricky. I needed to design the lights to be specific, that is I needed to minimise using general washes or lighting up the stage fully with bright lights. I used the lights mostly to illuminate the characters’ faces and part of the floor, in which the characters will be standing. The team had to spent hours trying to focus the lights and really get them to be super accurate in terms of the area that is being lit up as well as the timing they needed to be lit up. Despite the long hours, I was really glad that we really took our time to understand how the lights worked and affected the blockings of the characters on stage, and I was truly blown away by the results. Mind you, when I was designing the lights, I had little to no background in both lights and set designs.
After going through the whole process, I began to think—Maybe this is all pre-destined. I am meant to go through this process to discover what I could and could not do. This year, more than ever, I felt more confident in directing and producing my own plays. Despite working on budget deficit, my team and I managed to bring a piece of theatre to live. A piece that I have spent years dreaming of. A piece that reinforced my believe that children, when we allow them to, are actually way more matured than we chose to believe. Presenting Si Penjaga Memori to them and looking at how they have reacted to the piece, made me even more excited to present more plays to them!
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