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Medea was a site specific work produced by Agora Teatro at Castillo de San Felipe del Morro. This adaptation of Medea took a very poetic approach to the piece. The lighting design had to respond to this
poetic mode of storytelling while at the same time light a very large space that is not equipped as a performance venue.
We were interested in exploring the themes of public and private spaces in the play. Medea is on one level a family
drama, a very personal story of a husband, a wife and two children. Yet at the same time it exists within a larger social
context. Medea's confidantes are the women of Corinth. Jason leaves her more for political reasons than reasons of love
and emotion. The drama is very personal but the action all takes place in a public setting. We wanted to reflect these ideas
in the production and lighting design.
The location that was chosen for the piece was the lower patio of the fortress. While it is a military space it also has
domestic qualities. The gun batteries are on one side, while the kitchen and the forge are on the other. Much of the action
of the play took place in what was the kitchen. The space itself is a crossroads and a juxtaposition between the public and
the private.
The lighting too wanted to reflect these notions of public and private space. The majority of the lighting came from non-traditional
lighting instruments. Industrial floodlights and so forth. We combined these broad gestures with very specifically controlled
spotlights to contain and control the action of the space.
The production included elements of dance and song to the text and took the visual storytelling as seriously as the textual
story telling. The lighting then had to shift between these various currents of song and text and dance in both the public
and the private realms. We kept a very tightly controlled color palette in order to allow the shifting modes of storytelling
to do their work as effectively as possible.
The space itself provided such a beautiful and mystical backdrop for the action of the play that a lot of work could be done
with very simple gestures. We could utterly transform the space by simple changes to the angle of the light and thus rearrange
the shadows on the walls, or eliminate shadows entirely. A very simple and minimal approach to this highly dense and complex
text ultimately served the storytelling most effectively.
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