And then there was light

Abstract

I grew up in Galway, a small city in the west of Ireland with a vibrant arts scene. When I was a child, the annual Galway Arts Festival (now the Galway International Arts Festival) opened my world to a wide range of performance events. I simply have no idea what the first piece of theatre I saw was, but I do know that having a tangled mix of experiences with performance and visual art very early on was certainly formative to my later development as a designer, theatre maker and researcher. Alongside performances in theatre buildings, many of my early experiences of performance will have been attending street theatre, particularly the work of Macnas, a Galway-based company specialising in street and spectacle theatre. Macnas Parades were (and continue to be) a fixture of the cultural life of the city, and by extension of my early engagement with the arts. I have a number of early memories of watching this processual street theatre from various vantage points in the city centre, and being, alternately, captivated, discombobulated, elated and sometimes frightened by the succession of fantastical puppets, creatures in streams of colourful costumes, stilt walkers and drummers on display. These parades were visually exciting, but also cultivated a particular kind of attention. The themes or narratives of these parades were often drawn from mythology or cultural history, the kinds of narratives often delivered in written or spoken word, but here you could piece these stories together through the sensory invitation of materials, movements and rhythms. In 1999 the Macnas Parade was, for the first time, performed at night. The piece, entitled Cargo de Nuit, moved through the streets of Galway in the gathering darkness of a night in July and, in so doing, completely transformed the feeling of the city and of the performance itself. The parade had a loose narrative premise, of a world plunged into darkness and populated by strange night creatures, but it is the feeling of an event rendered through light and darkness that was most captivating at the time, and that has remained with me since. It took a slightly different route to previous parades, but nonetheless took what was a familiar phenomenon of street spectacle in my home town and transformed it into something that felt new, and strange, and other worldly. Performers were mostly lit by small concealed lights that made them glow against the framing darkness, with lots of flaming torches, and performers breathing or juggling fire. The surrounding darkness seemed to form a kind of connective tissue around the whole event – suspending individual figures or groups of performers and marking their passage through both space and time. I watched Cargo de Nuit long before I turned to theatre design or started to think about light in particular, and so it took me a long time to recognise the influence of this event on