Chauvet enables colour changes on Vietgone
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An Emmy Award-winning writer, Qui recounts the story of his Vietnamese parents, who met in an Arkansas refugee camp following the end of the war in 1975. His play is a delightful mashup of hip-hop, romance, road trip, Kung Fu and myriad other elements that make up the mosaic of life. Scenes morph radically during the telling of this story, and Fok’s lighting never fails to keep pace, thanks in part to its evocative colour changes, made with help from Chauvet Professional COLORdash Par-Hex 12 fixtures, supplied by High Output.
Positioned on the third Unistrut position, the RGBAW+UV LED wash fixtures were instrumental in creating some fast colour changes. “I used the COLORdash units primarily as a backlight system for the deck,” she says. “They also really shined during the play’s Asian hip-hop numbers with quick colour changing and nice colour fades. The UV was also really great for some isolated moments. I haven’t used the effect of UV a lot in my previous work. However, in this play it gave a really cold and ghostly feeling when paired with other systems.”
In a multi-dimensional story that jumps quickly from Saigon, to a refugee camp at the Fort Chaffee military base in Arkansas, the lighting served as a thread that ran through the play and helped inform the audience’s sense of time, place and style.
“So much about this play involves time of day, and colour was crucial to communicating this time of day,” says Fok. “There are a lot of scenes that take place on the road, on motorbikes, near the ocean and in a refugee camp cafeteria. Trying to establish location and inside versus outside was a huge part of my design.”
Along with creating vivid colours, Fok underscored scenes through the evocative use of dark space. “A lot of the dark space in this show came from trying to thread end of scenes into transitions,” she says. “I relied on darkness to move through the ins and outs of scenes. So there would a lighting gesture that related to the scene, whether it be long amber shadows to suggest time of day, or angular templates to suggest light through windows.”
Fok concludes, “There was a great group of people involved in this production, like Meghan Young (High Output rep), Kevin Fulton (master electrician), Mads Massey (asst. production manager), Karthik Subramanian (production manager), plus all the other Asian artists,” she said. “This was just a very fun project that meant a lot to everyone involved.”
(Jim Evans)
