Lighting Design
Choreographer Melinda Ring’s “Forgetful Snow” at The Kitchen, New York City.
A triptych composed of two durational performances and an evening-length dance, Forgetful Snow investigates the transcendent possibilities of body and mind. By day, performers in the installations labor at searching for landscapes, retrieving lost moments of time and archiving the accumulating results. These simple tasks involving the body, video, and language are quietly focused and mysterious. In the evening, the dance is performed without clothing and accompaniment to strip it of layered-on meaning and emotion. Presented instead is an intimate and formally complex choreography with elusive performative demands and textures. Ring’s main collaborators for this project are performers Talya Epstein, Maggie Jones, and Molly Lieber. Additional performers include Lorene Bouboushian, Luke George, and Federico Hewson. Lighting design by Paul Clay.
The Lighting Design involves three distinct lighting states. The first is designed to evoke the cold exterior light of a winter’s day, in the late afternoon. The second state suggests the deep soft blue light of winter, at the beginning of twilight. The third state mimics the cold interior light in institutional spaces. We worked hard to create the single shadow look of sunlight, and the near shadowless look just after sunset, and to evoke the color and quality of light in winter.
