The Light Trolley and Transporting Theatres

 “Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” 
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

 “The poetic image […] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.” 
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

In Sounding Bodies: Light, Image, and Empty Spaces—as part of an intermedial study on the power of light—the light trolley serves as the mechanism for moving light as it travels into, across, and beyond the scenography.

As part of a shifting performative space, the light trolley as it moves between the spaces has the power to light the same space that it also helps form. As it turns us toward the magnificent, light like the moving spaces between the trees acts in such a way “as though with their growth [of what can be seen] it too increased.”

 In Sounding Bodies, as we investigate the dynamisms of ordinary and earth living, we become poetic images, poised along the fractures of an earth that turns on itself across the half-lit stage. 

Over the years, I have increasingly focused on the potential of portable/traveling theatres for generating new possibilities oriented toward a theatre of accessible ecologies. This research spans several arenas, such as traveling architectures; folk theatres (daveli); and Oskar Schlemmer and his influence on performative architectonics.

Portable light structures are a part of our evolving aesthetics, part of the folding and unfolding of theatres—cross-arts, cross-abilities, and cross-cultures. 

Credits:

Design/Build Light Trolley: TzeYu LAI

Design/Build Earth Chest: To Wun

Photos (1 & 2): TzeYu LAI

Photos (3 & 4): Leonardo Leung

Courtesy: Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited

Sounding Bodies is supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Cooperating organizations include HKU’s Common Core+; JTIA (with Venue Support); SLCO-CR; Accessibility Partner: Arts with the Disabled Association Hong Kong; HKSKH Lady MacLehose Centre Services for Ethnic Minorities; Yarnda; Buddhist Fat Ho Memorial College; MakerBay; Sense 99; and Panlab as well as generous friends of Folded Paper.