In this post, we will introduce you to Work Package 2 – Lighting Design, highlighting its role in the CANON II project and sharing what we have been working on over the past few months. Written by Isabel Nielen.

What will work package 2 achieve? 

The task of the Lighting Design Working Group is to investigate lighting design as a new area in the documentation of technical theatre, the possible ways of documenting design and designers and how can we represent the designs and their results in the online CANON data base. At the end of the project, we will also provide guidelines about the archiving process for designers, professionals, students and researchers to use. 

What do we need to know about the light design and the designer?  

The Lighting Design Working Group initially focused on researching the characteristics of a lighting designer’s artistic and working process, asking what are the phases a lighting designer goes through when working on a design, and which moments are important to document? At the same time, we realized that we also needed to know more about the context of a production – for example, large venue, small venue, for children or for adults? What was the budget? Which company is producing it? Who is the director? Will the production go on tour? Is it an indoor or outdoor performance? 

With this first step, the Database working group set to work adapting the existing Canonbase so that, in the future, lighting designs and lighting designers can also be archived with all the necessary detail included. 

Interviewing for context   

In January, during the workshop in Amsterdam, we examined various designs of the Dutch lighting designer Henk van der Geest. Henk van der Geest passed away in 2019 and his total paper archive has recently been added to the Allard Pierson Archive.  When we saw some projects from the paper archive it became clear that paper alone is not always very helpful for understand a lighting design. Photos could help a great deal and interviewing the designer would be valuable to give a better understanding of the designer’s artistic choices and the look and feel he or she wanted to achieve on stage. In the case of Henk van der Geest interviewing is of course not possible anymore, but you could interview people who worked with him. 

We are now developing guidelines for interviewing and example interview questions. We have tested the guidelines with four test cases, interviewing Floriaan Ganzevoort, Caroline Mathieu, Isabel Nielen and Harry Cole. From these test cases,we are fine-tuning our guidelines further. When finished, they will be part of the help pages in the Canon database.  

Documenting 4 cases    

Part of the Canon project is the requirement to document 4 cases. The cases should be diverse, so we can use and test out different archive methods. The working group selected the following designers, chosen to represent a variety of time periods, nationalities, working methods, and so on: 

1- British director who worked with gas and early electric lighting, Sir Henry Irving (1838 -1905) https://canonbase.eu/wiki/Item:Q259 
2- Swedish Lighting designer Hans-Åke Sjökvist (1943-2023) / Torkel Blomkvist 
3- Dutch Lighting designer Henk van de Geest (1952-2019) 
4- German / Czech lighting designer Pavla Béranova 
5- Belgium Lighting designers Peter van Praet / Mark Van Denesse (set designer Annette Kurz) 

With this list we can research various ways of archiving. 

Upcoming progress     

During the coming months we will continue with researching and documenting our archive processes based on the selected cases. And besides that, we will continue with smaller testcases. We also have to start to add the lighting designs and designers into the Canon database.  

The Lighting design group members from the start      

The members of the lighting design group are Nick Hunt (Rose Bruford College, UK), Isabel Nielen (lighting designer, Institute Lighting Design, NL)  Bastiaan Schoof (teacher AHK Amsterdam, Institute Lighting Design, NL)  Anders Larsson ( Stockholm University of the Arts Sweden), Caroline Mathieu (lighting designer, researcher VUB/RITCS BE). 

At the moment we are reorganising the lighting design working group as Anders Larsson sadly passed away in May 2026. Anders was the head of the Lighting Design Workgroup.