Squeeze a generic breakup gobo wash into all that and you can busk whatever is thrown at you.

I returned to lighting, mainly rock, a few years ago having been active in the late sixties (mainly rock) and seventies (mainly dance and CCTV studio).

I was sad to see the level of automation and programming in common use. (Although in the sixties we’d have given our eye teeth for some of the features and capabilities now available on pretty basic control desks).

Every performance is unique, be it theatre, show, dance, rock, other music, etc. Audience, performers’ mood, atmosphere etc all play a part. Who would want to go on stage and deliver exactly the same performance time after time.

The bottom line is there are people onstage putting their hearts and souls into it, don’t they deserve the same from lighting, with empathy, spontaneity and similar terms coming into play. It requires a massive commitment of faith by the performers and some shows will be much better than others, but the average is likely to be higher with more mood.

For me, a decent manual desk is an instrument to play along with the band. I prefer to use my old wet liquid lightshow as a main feature and that is totally unprogrammable and pretty unpredictable in terms of the final projection. You can affect colour, pace and mood, after that the ‘chemistry’ takes over.

I’d love to hear more from Nick on his system which sounds like a light organ, something we dreamed of in ’68!

You were kind enough to link to my paper from Showlight 2001, so I thought I would fill in a little background.

My work in this area is all to do with my PhD thesis, which is nearing completion (planned for submission around Christmas/New Year). The Showlight paper was a very early essay on my thinking, right at the start of my research process.

My research is centred on the notion of the lighting artist as performer rather than designer, so deferring some creative decisions to the moment of performance in exactly the way you describe in your article. Because I am doing this in a theatre context, part of my proposal is that lighting is an integral part of rehearsal, so for the performance I created last August, we had lighting in the rehearsal room from from day one, so that the actors, director and myself could work with light throughout.

I built my own lighting control system to test out various ideas I had for performing theatre lighting live, very much influenced by Fred Bentham’s 1935 Light Console and his ideas on ‘playability’.

Certainly, an element of freedom is necessary in some situations. Blindly designing using a regimented “stand-by/go” cueing system could be detrimental not just to music and live events, but any lighting design.

Apologies for the wankey language.