Playability: A Reinvention of Contemporary Lighting Practice Drawing on Fred Bentham’s 1930s Light Console

In London in the mid nineteen-thirties Fred Bentham invented a theatre lighting control system that was in several key respects a radical departure from the controls of the time. In a pre-digital age, the Light Console made use of cinema organ technology to create a lighting control that for the first time gave full, finger-tip control to a single seated operator, and was compact enough to be placed front-of-house so the operator could see the stage. Bentham saw the lighting operator’s role as essentially artistic, not merely technical, and created a console to allow him to fulfil this vision. However, in the English-speaking theatre world at least, the role of the theatre lighting operator has remained a procedural one with minimal creative input into the performance. In this essay, I describe a research project that has investigated what might be learnt from Bentham’s ideas – embodied in the Light Console – and how these ideas could be applied in contemporary theatre-making practices. I describe both the initial stage of the research, restoring to working order of one of Bentham’s original Light Consoles, and the second stage in which a new lighting control system was created, based on principles derived from the radical innovations of the Light Console. This new console was used to light a devised performance in order to test how it might support a reinvention of the theatre lighting process in which the lighting operator becomes the lighting artist. In the essay I argue that to arrive at an embodied, lived understanding of the past – the kind of understanding of the practitioners of the time – the artefacts of the past must be used, not merely examined and documented. Furthermore, the value of examining the artefacts of the past is not only to understand earlier times, but also to inform, and perhaps to radically reshape, present and future practices

Modelling Light: The transformative role of the model and the miniature studio in the development of lighting design practices in the UK

As a plastic, immaterial medium, the use of light on stage is challenging: how to experiment, test, develop and communicate lighting intentions in advance of the performance? How, in other words, to model light? And for lighting practitioners, how to acquire, hone and reinvent techniques and a design sensibility? Lit models have been used for these purposes since at least the start of the twentieth century, working at various scales from the traditional 1:24 or 1:25 of the scenic designer’s model up to room-sized, quarter-scale model studios. In this article, I trace the crucial role of model-scale lighting and miniature lighting rigs in the development of lighting practice in the UK at key historical moments: in the 1950s when the named role of lighting designer first appeared; in the 1990s when dedicated degree-level lighting design education began and when the model studio concept initiated the practice of pre-visualisation and pre-programming of lighting for the concert stage, before the advent of 3D software visualisation. I argue these developments were vital to the establishment of performance lighting in the UK as an artistic practice in its own right, and propose the model-scale lighting studio has a continuing role for lighting designers’ development

The Virtual Opera House: hybrid realities in lighting design processes for large scale opera

Digital visualisation tools – virtual models – are increasingly used as part of the creative and production processes of large-scale theatre and opera. These technologies not only enable the modelling of the performance space with its scenic and lighting scenographies, but also facilitate the modelling of production processes and human relationships. Focusing on lighting at the Royal Opera House, London, I examine the role of digital visualisation in the production process of large-scale opera. Digital models allow designers and production teams to manipulate not only virtual space, but also virtual time, and I show how the ‘Virtual Opera House’ allows multiple possible futures to be modelled, reviewed and selected. Further, the limited time available on the opera stage for lighting and technical rehearsals can be supplemented with additional, virtual stage rehearsals inserted between the physical ones: interstitial time. Effective working relationships between members of the lighting team are critical to the successful realisation of design intentions – relationships that take considerable labour to develop and maintain. The Virtual Opera House creates a space and time where professional relationships can be modelled; away from the pressures of stage rehearsals, the lighting designer, lighting programmer and others spend time to develop and nurture the working relationships they rely on later. Using primary evidence from practitioners, I demonstrate how the Virtual Opera House is not only a virtual model of the stage and physical production, but is also an environment where processes and relationships can be modelled and remodelled: a hybrid-reality collaborative environment

The Canon Project: promoting a cross-European understanding of the history of technical theatre

The Canon Project, which ran between August 2019 and December 2022, was funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ and involved eight partner organisations: seven education institutions from six countries across Europe and the Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague (the parent organisation of the Prague Quadrennial). The project asked what the history of technical theatre (including design and architecture) can mean to us today, how we preserve it, how we teach it, and how we communicate it to various audiences. The article outlines the five project outputs: a database, a 'Canon' of 100 stories, teaching tools, teaching methods and a network. It also describes the project process and the key findings of the project

Impact of an Interprofessional Student-Led Concussion Clinic

This article describes the impact on the learners and health care institution of the OnTRACK-Concussion program, an innovative student-led clinic at a children’s rehabilitation hospital. The clinic, developed and operated by occupational therapists, serves the community full-time year-round. Interprofessional health care learners work together to provide education and intervention for youth with concussion and their families and to support research and community outreach initiatives. To determine the program’s impact on student learning, a post-placement questionnaire was used to capture feedback about their clinical education experience. To determine the program impact more broadly, the most significant change method was used to analyze data from in-depth qualitative interviews with stakeholders across and beyond the organization. Three Program Impact Pathways were identified that support the program’s success within and beyond the organization: 1) Having a clear message/vision of integration; 2) Enabling learners to work directly with patients; and 3) Enabling learners to work autonomously. Debriefing with peers and clinical supervisors was identified as an important learning experience by interprofessional learners. This student-led clinic, developed and operationalized by occupational therapists, supports the integration of patient care, research, and clinical education in pediatric concussion through clearly identified Program Impact Pathways

Gender differences in survival and the use of primary care prior to diagnosis of three cancers:an analysis of routinely collected UK general practice data

Objective To explore whether there are gender differences in the number of GP recorded cases, the probability of survival and consulting pattern prior to diagnosis amongst patients with three non-sex-specific cancers. Design Cross sectional study. Setting UK primary care. Subjects 12,189 patients aged 16 years or over diagnosed with colorectal cancer (CRC), 11,081 patients with lung cancer and 4,352 patients with malignant melanoma, with first record of cancer diagnosis during 1997–2006. Main outcome measures Cancer cases recorded in primary care; probability of survival following diagnosis; and number of GP contacts within the 24 months preceding diagnosis. Results From 1997–2006, overall rates of GP recorded CRC and lung cancer cases recorded were higher in men than in women, but rates of malignant melanoma were higher in women than in men. Gender differences in survival were small; 49% of men and 53% of women survived at least 5 years following CRC diagnosis; 9% of men and 12% of women with lung cancer, and 77% of men and 86% of women with malignant melanoma. The adjusted male to female relative hazard ratio of death in all patients was 1.20 (95%CI 1.13–1.30), 1.24 (95%CI 1.16–1.33) and 1.73 (95%CI 1.51–2.00) for CRC, lung cancer and malignant melanoma respectively. However, gender differences in the relative risk were much smaller amongst those who died during follow-up. For each cancer, there was little evidence of gender difference in the percentage who consulted and the number of GP contacts made within 24 months prior to diagnosis. Conclusions This study found that patterns of consulting prior to cancer diagnosis differed little between two genders, providing no support for the hypothesis that gender differences in survival are explained by gender differences in consultation for more serious illness, and suggests the need for a more critical view of gender and consultation

Numerical modelling of rock anchor uplift capacity for offshore applications

Mooring and anchoring represent a significant part of the cost of wave energy converter (WEC) systems. The most common offshore embedded anchor solutions are inapplicable to rocky seabeds, which are likely in zones of strong currents/waves of interest for WECs. A new type of anchor was recently proposed for hard seabeds. It is composed a self-drilling head, which leads the anchor shaft into the rocky seabed. The anchor is then mechanically locked into the rock by applying a pre-tension. This work investigates the rock failure mechanism around the anchor, while subjected to uplift (axial) loading, and for which few models exist. Limit analysis was undertaken to calculate the failure load of the anchor in different configurations (3 rock types, varying depths and anchor geometries). The results indicate that the anchor capacity increases with depth until a certain limit is reached, corresponding to the creation of a local failure mechanism around the anchor, while a wedge failure type takes place at shallower depth. The underreamed contact area must be carefully controlled to maximise the uplift capacity related to the local failure mechanism