Hey! I’m Aaron, and I have the honor to be the Lighting Designer for our production of Lifelong by Linda Radley! It’s been such a great week since we got to Edinburgh and opened the show.
So far, the Fringe has been both incredibly rewarding and incredibly exhausting, in the best way! Our first few days here I was totally devoted to getting our show up and running from a lighting standpoint. Back home at Pepperdine, we typically have about 3 days of tech rehearsals for our shows, and then several days of dress rehearsals before we open. Here, we had 4 hours total to get into the space for the first time, load in, and tech our entire show. It was an experience that I felt completely unprepared for, and yet was incredibly fun by the time we were all said and done! We all put in a remarkable amount of work during the final push towards our first preview and opening, and I think it really shows! The photo to the right is a snapshot of what our final set and lighting looks like for the show, I couldn’t be more excited about what we’ve been able to create in our time here.
Aside from our own show, the rest of the Fringe has been insane as well! Since we opened on Friday, I’ve had a lot more time to explore the city and experience the Fringe Festival as a whole. As a company, we’ve had several “theatre-gazing” opportunities to experience as a group. One of my favorites so far has been A Trial: After an Enemy of the People, a show we saw at the Lyceum theatre, presented as a part of the Edinburgh International Festival. It was one of the most unique and thought-provoking formats for a theatre show I’ve ever seen. It was mostly performed in Portuguese with subtitles, though some portions of the show were improvised in English. They also randomly selected 11 audience members at the beginning of the performance to sit on stage and act as the jury in the court case, occasionally interrupting to ask the characters questions pertaining to the plot, completely improvised. One of my favorite parts though, was the fact that the board operators for the show were all onstage, and would break the fourth wall several times throughout the show as they turned out to be characters and witnesses in the trial. Overall, it was an innovative and exciting piece to watch, and It got me thinking about ways that we can innovate in out own shows at Pepperdine.
Another incredibly unique experience I went to this week was called Flight. It was a shipping container converted to look like half an airplane on the inside, complete with overhead bin compartments, tray tables, etc. When you step inside you’re given a boarding pass with your seat number, and asked to put on the provided noise cancelling headphones. Then, the lights dim…and you’re plunged into complete darkness for the duration of the experience. The sound design makes it feel like you’re really in the airplane, along with various special effects in the cabin that I won’t give away. It was wildly impressive from a production standpoint, and also incredibly realistic…My palms were sweating the entire time.
Of course, for every thought-provoking and well presented piece we’ve gotten to see here, I’ve also seen an equally ridiculous show. Some of the highlights have been Steak-Out, a show about robbing a butcher shop of it’s meats the night before Christmas, and Police Cops, a spoof of 80’s buddy cop movies that involved slow motion dance fighting and more nudity than I was prepared for. I’m currently waiting for a night when the sequel, Police Cops in Space, isn’t sold out so I can continue the Police Cops saga. It’s been wonderful.
Overall, the Fringe has been an amazing, eye opening experience. We still have a full week’s worth of performances and shows until we leave, and I can’t wait for all the art I’ve yet to see here!
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