Lumen

I am sort of retroactively starting this blog to document my work process in creating Lumen. Lumen is a duet for two women and moving light source that was curated onto the 58th ODC Pilot Program.

My original statement about the piece was as follows:
Lumen, a duet for two performers and a moving light source

Lumen, a unit of luminous flux, measures the power of light perceived by a human eye. I would like to make a piece in which humans both receive and emit light, and light itself becomes a moving object, its trajectory choreographed in interaction with the performers. I envision a duet in which one of the performers wears a light source, such as a simple headlamp or bulb, illuminating the second performer and the space between them. Questions motivating my investigation include: How does light create space? How does light move, shift, and shape our experience? How do we interact with light? How does light affect how we interact with each other? How is light performed, and how does it become a third performer, a separate presence and entity? Beyond this formal investigation in moving light, I am interested in how the act of lighting one another might cause the performers to reveal interior landscapes, inner thoughts, and imagined worlds. In working with these questions I hope to move from a formal exploration of light as a performance element, to a deeply internal and personal process, merging the formal and the emotional, the external and the internal.

Here's the shortened and tightened blurb for the ODC PR:
Lumen, by Katharine Hawthorne, is a duet for two women and a moving light source. Lumen, a unit of luminous flux, measures the power of light perceived by the human eye. Lumen, a dance, examines the power of light to reflect and redirect.