Choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar founded the acclaimed Urban Bush Women in 1984 “to create dance and to create community.” Lighting the way for UBW since 2004 is Susan Hamburger. Below, Susan shares five stories, in her own words, about lighting techniques she has employed, using Roscolux Color Filters, to enrich her dance performance designs.
It’s interesting designing for a significantly different skin tone than my own. I’ve learned what colors might look great on the dancers' skin tones even if it doesn't work for my own, but there are no universal rules as to what works or not. I find R83, a particularly flattering deep blue gel for the dancers’ skin tones. It has become part of my repertory color that I use for UBW.
For dark swan I wanted to etch the dancers from the surrounding space so it was razor sharp on their bodies and faces. Their expressions were integral to the piece. I used R365 in the Head Highs, R3202 in the Mids, R305 in the shins. These versions of ‘white light’ gave a sense of warm to cool rising from the feet to the heads and cut through the saturate blue of R83 from the backlight position. R83 not only enhanced the rich blue tones of the costumes, but also allowed the reds to shine.”
I wanted the lighting to reflect memories of Pearl Primus’ stories, but in a ‘non-romantic’ way. The palette I was working with, for most of the dance, consisted of amber and dusty rose colors. I loved using R321 because it can make everything feel as though you are looking at a sepia photograph.
Using R09 and R03 as the key lights on the body with accents of R50 helped recreate the environment we wanted-- the dry, dusty feel of parched cotton fields. The R50 combined with the R321 also brought the sense of heat to the skin and the costumes, without looking too pretty.
Located in a fictional, Kansas City jazz club, SCAT! is a site-responsive and immersive work that invites audience participation. Some of the source material for the production includes Jawole Zollar’s family stories. She introduces us to her telling of this story as “part truth, part memory and part myth”. I liked the saturated jewel tones of R377, R26, R83 and R393. They resonated the color palette from the paintings of Archibald Motley, which was a major influence on my color palette for this concert. R54 as face light is a flattering color for every skin type and it cut through the deeply saturate colors of the surround, allowing us to see the expressions of the performers’ faces and bodies, while still referencing the colors of the jazzy, romantic palette.
Shelter is a piece about homelessness in America. With this particular version, Jawole wanted to throw the spotlight on the crisis of hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans community. I wanted to stay within the watery world, but wanted to enhance the idea of the cold and stark environment of the post-Katrina destruction. The piece is lit by the low side light to carve the dancers from the surround, while the framing space remains black.
R68 in the shins and R64 in the mids gave layers to the texture of the cool, blue, suffocating water. In the moment of the photo above, the dancers break the 4th wall and confrontationally point to the audience. I used R62 in the front, flat spot, and took out all the other stage light to emphasize the stark, bright cold of their pointing to the audience asking what their culpability in the situation was. There is nowhere to hide here. R62 and R64 are perfect for diminishing flesh tones while exposing the body as a whole.
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