Ghostlight

Ghostlight (2022) is a contemporary dance performance outcome of the third and final practice research project that informs the thesis Light and the Choreographic: dancing with Tungsten (Man, 2023). The project was developed before, and after the hiatus of Covid_19 confinements, and premiered in June 2022 in the basement of el Molar bookshop in Madrid. The work seeks to articulate an embodied poetics of choreoluminosity, the original framework that lies at the heart of my doctoral research, which defines possible relationships of coalescing energies of light and the dancing body in choreographic decision-making. As an artistic and critical way of questioning a practice of choreoluminosity in a world of climate emergency, Ghostlight is posited as a provocation of dancing with a ‘last light’ and embraces what eco-scenographer Tanya Beer identifies as an ethic in eco-scenographic practice, where sustainability is integrated as part of the artistic vision and design, in order to work beyond simply exercising eco-efficiencies. Within a framework of choreoluminosity, sensibilities of care towards the non-human come to manifest through the vibrant dialogue of choreographing with a deconstructed purpose-built ghost light made from disused materials, and a rescued Tungsten light bulb. The practice research is posited within what I suggest is an immanent post-Tungsten era, and therefore in a necessarily politicised arena that questions not only how we create artistically with light but how we light our everyday. In doing so Ghostlight responds to Derrida’s hauntology, not so much as a melancholic maladjustment, but as an invitation to consider in the vibrant choreographic dialogue with this singular incandescence light bulb, the future ghosts of Tungsten lighting. To date Ghostlight has been performed five times at el Molar between June and November 2022, and at the College of Architects in Avila, Castilla y Leon, Spain.