Initial Research

_Initial Brief

Light is Origin.

Light allows us to progress and endeavour through our lives, as a consequence we can perceive through sight everything around us.

A performance that involves light as a vital element to life. Light in relation to our bodies - through our conscious minds we are aware of light, it enables us to perceive and is perceivable by us.  Light originates through the mind and touches the heart, it flows through to our limbs giving us the power to explore and create.  With this power we can build up mighty structure around us.

The performance presents a story, starting with the glow of light woven into the garments beginning at the head and spreading down to the heart and then to the limbs.  This then encompasses the floor projecting light wherever the dancers move.  They then build up the walls from the ground, and the light illuminates and emphasises the structure of St Annes.  The participants have a liitle light that is given to them before the start.  A piece of jewellery that can be worn as a necklace, belt or wrapped around to be a ring or bracelet, this progressively glows brighter as the performance goes on, awakening their perception on light.

Theory Precedent

Fabrizio Crisafulli investigates light as a natural element not a technique - 

"..to entrust light with a role similar to that which it occupies the natural world.  Not by imitating it, but by considering light at a vital substance - an essential. primal and emergent element.."

"I believe that light does not belong only to the technical or visual domain.  Its fundamental functions are to shape time and space, to become a dramatic structure, and serve as a means of unfolding or producing 'actions'."

"..light is not a technical element 'projected' onto the production, but becomes a component of the relational place itself: woven into the actions, time, spaces, forms, sounds and words that define themselves through their relationship with each other. In relation to these elements, light is both origin and consequence. From the beginning it is considered an active and formative factor."

"Light also acknowledges the pre-existing physicality of the site.  It does therefore not intervene purely as 'illumination' but seeks an exploration of the site's essence in order to both adhere to the original identity of the site while transforming it.  Light is born from the objects, form the architecture and from the landscape - shaping itself from these." 

What are the various spaces for -

_The public (front of house)

_The audience (performance space/s)

_The technicians (back of house: technical zones

_The performers (stage/s: dressing rooms etc.)

How do the various zones separate or intersect?

Visual Precedent

Kyeok Kim

Investigates Jewellery as a second skin - 

"Drawing Light illustrates the emotional process of discovering light as interacting with body movement of finding, wearing, and touching light.  It creates the sensorial space and visualizes immaterial space to material space relationship between body's emotional movement worn by light and place.  It follows the spatial movement and extends to emotional space."

For video visit www.kyeokkim.com - Performance _Second Skin by Lighting.

Performance genre - 

Dance 

_has the ability to tell stories and present concepts over time.

Relationship between performers and audience/spectators/participants -

_Performers transfix their observers, what happens when the participants are suddenly aware that they have been slowly involved in the performance?

What are the spatial dynamics and how do they inform structure, materiality and the immaterial -

_Light

Light is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength that is visible to the human eye.  Five primary properties of light are intensity, frequency or wavelength, polarization, phase and orbital angular momentum. Light, which exists in tiny "packets" called photons, exhibits properties of both waves and particles. This property is referred to as the wave–particle duality.

References_

http://www.merzbau.it/artisti/fabrizio_crisafulli/index.htm

http://www.kyeokkim.com/

http://blog.paran.com/blog/detail/postBoard.kthpmcId=blue5191&blogDataId=34880060&hrefMark=

http://mocoloco.com/fresh2/2010/02/09/led-curtain-by-barbara-bona.php

http://www.techchee.com/2008/07/08/led-dress-makes-you-brightly-lit-in-the-dark/

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2006/09/philips-design.php

http://www.adhoc-design.fr/beauetbien/site_eng/site.html

D. Hannah & O. Harslof (Eds.).(2008), Performance Design. Copenhagen: Museum Tuschulanum Press.

Project Brief

To produce an entry for the 8th OISTAT (International Organisation of Scenographers, Technicians and Theatre Architects)Theatre Architecture Competition 2011. Refer to http://www.oistat.org and http://stream.massey.ac.nz for further information.

Project Requirements

_Evidence of research and of making in respon se to this; evidence of a process, a body of work developed from week 1 to final week is to be displayed at your desk during the project.

_Images + plans, sections or sectional perspectives, and details [parti plans, sections/ scaled drawings @ 1:500,200,100,50,20,5,1] of your intervention in Prague Crossroads, formerly St Anna’s Church, Prague.

_Establishing how the intervention structures the building in relation to the spatial idea and program; inhabitation, intention, how bodies engage with the space.

_To be digitally archived in a concise manner and placed in the 352studio dropbox and uploaded as a PDF or Powerpoint to stream, making sure you compile to the SD file naming standards.             

Learning Objectives

_Research and investigate theatre architecture.

_Develop a spatial language into an existing site; integrating materiality, construction, structure and theoretical concerns.

_Advance an understanding of involved and varied programs and space.

_Express and present your intervention through a variety of means and media with a high level of craft and in a way which extends the spatial language in the mode of representation itself.

           

Assessment

_Richly researches; site, program, planning, performance design and spatial typologies and translate these into spatial designs.

_Makes evident a strong and cohesive design process which shows development from an initial spatial idea to a developed scheme, and through details, materiality, construction/structure, planning and program.

_Method of expression of the project, which is related to, derived from the found text, spatial idea and program, which is convincing, evocative and well crafted.

_Evidence of research and makings at your workspace in studio.

Precedent: Lina Bo Bardi’s: Teatro Oficina (Sao Paolo)

Teatro Oficina

Oficina Theater is located at 520 Jaceguay Street in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  The site of Oficina Theater was founded in 1958 with a group students deciding to lease the Novos Comediantes Theater from a spiritualist group.  From here a restoration was carried out to make the space conform, the stage was situated between grandstand like seating.  In 1966 a fire completely destroyed the theater, a year later the reconstruction started to configure a new one in its place.  Housing great plays for several years to come.  

The Oficina theatre group in 1981 decided to purchase the property and restore it, with Lina Bo Bardi leading the design with her modernistic ideas of formal simplicity, the purity of elements, less is more, constructive rationalism and asceticism.  The concept development involved a passage running through the building like a street from Jaceguay Street to the open area at the opposite end.  The proposed design was a totally transparent environment as an “all space is scenic”, and an integration into this unified natural space an introduction of technological resources to create a “electronic yard”.  Throughout the design process cultural references were made such as openings were created in the brick walls reminding one of canon holes which Lina Bo Bardi called the “holes of the Spanish war”.  (Elito, 1999)

Edson Elito was part of the design team accountable for the abandonment of restoring and instead demolishing the existing rooms to be left with just the external shell.  Ze Celso invented the sloping stage that overcame the 3m level difference from front to back.  "Many nights, scenes are given as raw meat to small anthropophagic crowds, producing views of this collective work of art that sometimes is what happens at the Oficina Theater.  Then past signs and future keys to the recent history of Brazil are read, tattooed as a programmed cavern." (Elito, 1999)

“Transmit sensations of surprise and spatial differences to a single, transparent complex.”(Elito, 1999)  

“Actors and actresses, technicians, the public, as well as all the equipment and objects, whether scenery or not, all form part of the show, blending or making a counterpoint and there is no way to hide any of them.  All participate in the scene.”  (Elito, 1999)

Lina Bo Bardi

An architect and polymath who left a largely significant impact on the world.

Born Achillina Bo on December 5, 1914 in Rome, Italy and died March 20, 1992 in São Paulo.  She was an active member in all areas of culture, having engaged in various projects in theater, architecture, cinema and arts in Brazil and foreign countries. In addition to her work as an architect, Bo Bardi was an involved furniture and jewels designer, artist, scenery and wardrobe producer, organizer and curator of many exhibits. 

Linda Bo Bardi had a commitment to the non-hierarchical, non-linear approach to space and time in her work, she worked with "routes, transitional spaces, juxtapositions of scale, materials and found objects, and a fusion of plant life with built form,  all become very important - drawing people around a building as if in a sensual dance, engaging the whole body and all its senses". (De Oliveira, 2006)

References:

Elito, E. (1999). Lina Bo Bardi: Teatro Officina, Oficina Theater. Portugal: Lisboa.

http://www.gendersite.org/pages/a_female_role_model_from_brasil_lina_bo_bardi_architect.html

http://www.institutobardi.com

http://teatroficina.uol.com.br/posts/251

http://www.google.co.nz/imgres?imgurl=http://img.estadao.com

http://www.cooperativadeteatro.com.br/2010/?p=965

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/756179-iphan-vota-hoje-tombamento-do-teatro-oficina-em-sao-paulo.shtml

http://afinsophia.wordpress.com/category/arte/

http://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/mat/2008/09/25/em_os_bandidos_oficina_transforma_sturm_und_drang_em_estrume_und_mangue_-548405644.asp

http://www.urbipedia.org/index.php/Lina_Bo_Bardi

http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=63183_2300_42_0

http://www.dwell.com/slideshows/lina-bo-bardi-profile.html?slide=12&c=y&paused=true