Designing the lighting for one of the dance pieces, in Dance Concert 2017, was such a great learning experience. I learned how to use and focus shin busters, head highs, and Viper moving lights, build a step-based effect on an Ion light board, focus conventional and LED lights, work with a team to build a lighting plot, create various types of lighting design paperwork using Lightwright, Vectorworks, Excel, and Word, and work with an experienced choreographer to create the looks that we both envisioned. This was my first time designing the lighting for a main-stage production and working with a team of two other people, who designed the lighting for separate pieces, to create a light plot that attended to our various needs.

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The Cocktail Party, the piece I designed the lighting for, was challenging because the piece had about nine different sections within it and they were all extremely different. I had to find a way to make all of the sections similar enough to be easily perceived as the same piece but different enough to highlight all of the various sections separately, within the piece. To do this, I lit the performers in a sculptural way but the audience could see more details of the face and body in the foreground dancers than the background dancers. I used color to reflect the moods and differentiate each of the sections.