Held at QPAC during the Brisbane Festival, Circa’s production of Leviathan was sold out every night.
Leviathan was born out of CIRCA’s artistic director Yaron Lifschitz’s desire to “make a really big group show”. The title, Leviathan, comes from the Thomas Hobbes book where the famous frontispiece is a monster king rising out of the sea, his torso and arms composed of three hundred little people. This image is central to the ideas explored in the show and has many visual echoes throughout.
Leviathan features CIRCA’s entire ensemble on stage at once and brings them together with a large local cast of circus performers, dancers and young acrobats. The show’s premiere at Perth Festival saw the ensemble collaborating with Perth artists and community groups, and now in the latest Brisbane season, with a new cast of local artists.
The production features 36 performers onstage – a “mass of humanity”. The piece explored notions around freedom and collective responsibility, how “structure and groups contain, confine and liberates us”, and exposes the tensions between the mass and the individual.
The brief from Yaron for lighting designer Amelia Lever-Davidson was that the lighting design could afford big visual ideas and that they could embrace the 36 bodies on stage in a sculptural way, not shying away from contrast and shadow.
“What was clear was that we needed to find moments of humanity within the mob; the lighting needed to draw out moments of intimacy between the audience and individual performers, not just always perceiving them as a faceless mass,” said Amelia.
The visual centrepiece of the show is a large flown aerial grid and a taped floor grid of 36 squares. Both of these set elements are concealed at the top of the show. The aerial gird descends and ascends; the white floor grid is revealed, and eventually peeled away to leave a blank stage. The space is masked with three black drapes made of a fine string. The curtain appeared solid or permeable depending on how it is lit, and allowed the performers multiple entries and exits points. It could also create the illusion that performers could seemingly appear out nowhere.
“The big challenge for the lighting design was finding space in a busy hanging plot filled with aerial apparatus, motors and rigging,” commented Amelia. “I also needed to find ways to light the performers in sculptural ways without a classic sidelight position being available.
“I wanted to work mostly with single, powerful sources to create a direct and austere aesthetic. Moving head placement was key to providing shape and dynamics in the design, and I needed to be rigorous in limiting the variety of fixture types being used. I designed the lighting systems in a way that was very geometric and linear and built systems of light that could hold their own aesthetically without any other systems being used.”
Amelia chose 36 x Fusion Bars placed above each square of the floor grid to create a large and oppressive push of light from overhead. A fixture per square created a visual echo of the grid and was pixel mapped to mirror the choreography. This system was very much designed in response to the movement created for a particular section to establish a connection between light and choreography.
“I wanted to find ways to undo the expectations around the ways the floor grid should be lit,” added Amelia. “One of my favourite systems ended up being 16 x ETC Source 4s lighting the floor grid in open white from a high side position from both Stage Left and Stage Right. While the lights appeared visually on the floor as a grid, the focus sculpted the performers in unexpected ways. The Martin MAC Encores were also specifically selected to create images using sharp shuttered light that could track through the space.”
As a touring festival show, Leviathan had to be designed with a lighting package in mind to ensure the design could transfer to other venues. Amelia wanted the lighting rig to be able to create some bold looks, but also be a “rig of opportunity”, not just ideas. Careful fixture selection and decisions around positions allowed the lighting rig to worked hard to provide as much variety as possible.
The biggest challenge of Leviathan was the logistics of bringing the show together for its premiere season in Perth Festival. Being a Melbourne based designer, with the exception of a one week rehearsal period in Brisbane, Amelia collaborated remotely with the CIRCA team and designed for an interstate venue she had only seen in plan, photos, and in Whatsapp video walk-throughs. A third of the CIRCA ensemble were touring a different CIRCA show up until the technical rehearsals in Perth, and they were only able to see what 36 bodies onstage looked like only a few days before opening.
“The technical period was very tight for a new 90-minute work,” Amelia said. “A large part of the lighting design had to be pre-visualised using WYSIWYG to ensure we could work as fast as possible in the available timeframes. With nine sections over the 90-minute running time, the other challenge was ensuring the lighting design didn’t run out of puff halfway through the show.”
Acrobat safety is a key consideration when designing for a circus. The direction of the lighting, limiting abrupt lighting changes and the programming of effects and dynamics are all considerations while plotting. Often in musical theatre, theatrical moments coincide with a big lighting finish, which is often not possible in Circus. Many of the most challenging tricks require a steady and consistent lighting state to ensure it can be performed safely. CIRCA’s ensemble was incredibly generous with what they allowed for in the lighting design, and all states were checked and approved by the acrobats during the safety walkthrough.
“My favourite lighting moment was in a movement phrase called “crumples”,” remarked Amelia. “The moment comes at the end of the act where the performers have been restricted within the geometry of the white floor grid. The section was predominantly lit using the large bank of Fusion Bars overhead. The Fusion Bars acted as an overhead mirror of the images of rolling waves of people, and the other choreographed structures. The section was defined by an intensity and relentlessness in the quality of light.
“I had originally intended for “crumples” to be lit similarly, the lighting systematically decaying in diagonal linear waves with the performers. However, in one of those serendipitous moments that occur during plotting, the director suggested that the moment could have a visual and conceptual reprieve from the overhead lighting. Instead, the performers were just lit with a single warm ¾ backlight and low floor lighting from behind. The movement phrase was transformed into one of my favourite visual moments of the show, the lighting creating a more poignant moment between performers and audience, and a welcome reprieve from the lighting that had preceded it.”
2 x Ayrton WildSuns K25
4 x Martin Mac Encores (COLD)
8 x Martin Mac Quantum Washes
9 x GLP Impression X4 Bar 20 (on flown ladder truss)
36 x Ergehiez Fusion Bars
6 x ETC S4 Lustr 2 Profiles
5 x Custom built LED Linear Footlights
12 x 2ks
50 x Profiles
50 x Par 64
2 x Hazers
1 x Smoke Machine
http://amelialeverdavidson.com/
