Gyandev Singh

Gyandev Singh is a Chandigarh-based lighting designer and visual artist. After completing his Masters in Stage Design from the National School of Drama, for over 10 years, Gyandev has worked as a lighting designer with various senior dancers including Akram Khan, Aditi Mangaldas, Malavika Sarukkai, and Kumudini Lakhia. He has also designed lights for theatre productions and worked with directors like M K Raina, Dadi Pudumjee, Anuradha Kapur, Abhilash Pillai and Roysten Abel. Recipient of the Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar, Gyandev has toured across the world, as lighting designer for theatre and dance productions. 

 

For some time now, Gyandev has been looking for newer elements in lighting that can bring a fresh aesthetic sensibility to dance performances. This search led him to use video projectors as lighting sources. He discovered how two and three-dimensional projection mapping can be used not just to propel immersive and dynamic sceneries, but to also light the dancer in creative ways. The pixel technology in projectors gave him more precision and freedom than the DMX technology of intelligent lights. Therefore projectors helped him create unique stage settings for dance performances, which were not possible earlier using just lights. 

 

Despite the freedom that came with projection, Gyandev felt that it still lacked a sense of ‘liveliness’. With pre-recorded video, there was no live interaction between the energies of the dancer and projections. With lighting, Gyandev has always preferred ‘live’ lights instead of pre-programmed ones. He believes that when lighting is more spontaneous, it becomes a ‘co-player’ in the performance. This creates a playful interaction between the performers and the lights. He sought to achieve this spontaneity with projection. 

 

‘At the moment, economics is dictating the aesthetics in the lighting designers’ community’, Gyandev says in his proposal. Stage performances mostly depend on rented lights; and light hiring companies only keep equipment which is in more expensive and in high demand catering to the commercial industry like weddings, parties and Bollywood events. Therefore, creative professionals are often forced to change their light designs according to the availability with these companies. 

 

Enabled with this grant, Gyandev proposes to experiment with projection and lighting using interactive technology, towards creating a new language of scenography for dance and theatre performances. This technology will be intuitive, interactive and responsive to the movements of the dancer. This unpredictability and live-ness would thereby open possibilities of co-creating a performance differently every single time.  The medium would also interact with the audience, making the experience of the performance more inclusive and participatory. Currently, the technology for this is available with western performance companies. However, they are patented and very expensive. With this grant, Gyandev aims to create an apparatus that is simple, robust, cost-effective and has the flexibility to be programmed for a variety of performances, styles and spaces in India. Of course, this digital technology will have a larger pre-determined program that will control the projections. But the manner in which the dancer’s movements will affect the timing, duration and intensity of the projection will be completely spontaneous and in situ. The larger objective of the project will be to formulate a new aesthetics which compliments a dance performance without overpowering it. 

 

The project involves an eight month research and development phase that will be followed by the creation of a dance performance employing this technology. This performance will either be classical or contemporary dance. The exercise will give an opportunity to the dancer, programmers/coders and the lighting designer to conceptualise a thematic piece using the interactive technology. This performance is expected to take place in Ahmedabad since the logistical and technical team is based there. 

 

The outcomes of this project will be the interactive technology apparatus and the performance. Deliverables to IFA from this project will be video documentation of the performance, rough and final technical drawings of the process, detailed documentation of the process flow and research, names of softwares used and codes written specifically for this project, information about the components of the hardware used in the project, technical and circuit drawings which could be used as a guide for anyone to assemble their own hardware. 

 

This is the first grant of the Arts Practice programme that is being made to a light designer. We hope that this project will be able to push the boundaries of light design as a creative practice, open new possibilities of dialogue between the space and the performer and bring a new visual aesthetic into the field of performance in India.