December 2020: Out With Lights

No one goes out into the woods alone and then returns feeling lonely.

Original performance concept and design, location specific to the Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh.

This project was part of my studies at Edinburgh College of Art. The assignment was to create an original, location specific performance concept, adapted to suit pandemic restrictions at the time. In addition to this, design all costumes for the project, with the restriction of using majority recycled or repurposed materials, presenting it in a project book with material samples and technical drawings, and finally realizing one of the designs.

I would love to realize this project in one form or another. If you are interested and would like to know more, or otherwise discuss ideas, please contact me on e.lundellhyden@outlook.com.

A lineup of six watercolour illustrations. The six characters are wearing loose-fitting garments of uncommon cuts, masks, and odd hats. Several of them have dense and long fringes.

Character lineup from left to right: the Host, the first Caller, the Mediator, the Second Caller, the Guard, the Lightbearer.

Still being relatively new to the city at the point of pandemic restrictions shutting down most opportunities for meeting new people, I was experiencing a feeling of tremenduous loneliness at the time of the project, often taking long walks through town and the surrounding parks to peoplewatch and ease my sense of isolation. This became the core of the project, in which participants walk a trail made up of lights in the dark, encountering performers along the way who guide them on their journey and set a tone for the experience. The light trail is adopted from my experiences with the swedish branch of the World Scout Movement, which have "ceremony and ritual" as an express part of their method for creating meaningful experiences and community. I was also influenced by professor of religious studies David Thurfjell and his work on post-christian, secular spirituality.

Three spreads from a costume book. They have text and photos. The headers read: ceremony and community, spirituality and nature, ritual and spiritual dress. Some of the photos featured: two people in venetian masks, an open woodland space at dusk with lights spread through the grass like flowers, whirling dervishes and a sikh man with a sword dressed in blue. A collage of sketches showing development of the six characters. It is dense with their colours: yellows, maroons, purples. A spread from a costume book placed ontop of a photo of a fabric sample. The sample is several seven-strand braids, made out of colourful rags, sewn together in breadth. The spread is titled colour and features text and pictures, such as colour maps and manipulated photos.

Pages from costume book, detailing the research process; collage of sketches for costume designs; page from costume book, discussing the use of colour, overlaid a textile sample.

Out With Lights was designed to be accessible and meaningful regardless of past history with the performing arts, age, background, intellectual or linguistical capacities. It does not have a fictional narrative or dialogue, instead creating an internal language of symbolism and tradition, looking at global methods for creating ceremony and ritual. The costume designs are intended to not emulate any specific tradition, instead seeking common denominators within how spiritual dress is made and worn, such as making garments a sensory experience or using them to make a distinction between a material and a spiritual world.

A digital storyboard illustration. On a dark hillside stands a tall silhouette among towers of lights. In the background is the glittering lights of a city. A hand-drawn map of Salisbury Crags, with notes of the different locations and other information. A digital storyboard illustration. Two wire fences, decorated with rags of fabric, run on either side of a path, downhill between the shrubberies. It is dark and at the bases of the fences are lights. In the distance a figure with a lantern can be spotted, and eventually the glittering lights of a city.

Above: two storyboard propositions for spot 3 and 6, respectively, as shown on the map in the middle.
Below: costume designs for the Host and the Lightbearer.

A watercolour illustration of the front and back side of a character. They wear puffy trousers in pale blue and red, a dark red jacket made out of braids, ending in a thick fringe at the sleeves and lower hem. Underneath the jacket is a light shirt. They are also wearing a fez-style hat and a mask with closed eyes and a long nose. A watercolour illustration of a character in two versions. Both versions have a yoke in pale blue and red, to which two cowbells are attached, finished with a zig-zag edge. The left hand version has a thick fringe of yellow rags running from the yoke and down to the ground, where dark purples and red start to mix in. The right hand version has a yellow bodice made up of braids, a skirt and big, billowing sleeves made out of thick fringe of purple and red rags. There are more cowbells attached throughout the fringes. The character is wearing a pointy black hat with a purple fringe in front of the face and both versions are holding a lantern.

While much of ceremonial dress is lavish, detailed and highly intricate, it is also often made out of simple materials. One of my references was Charles Fregers photo series Wilder Mann (2012), presenting a wide range of European ceremonial dress, in which it is apparent that much of the value put into ceremonial dress is in labour rather than material. This combined well with a goal of using entirely recycled materials for costume production. Using worn-out T-shirts cut into rags I made a number of different composite textiles using braiding, weaving and layering, making it easy to find materials and colours to work with and making it a feature of the garments. Having created a number of textile samples and silhouettes I created a visual language unique to the world of the performance.

A photo of one of the characters made into a real outfit. A jacket made up of panels of yellow and white rags woven into a basket type surface. Poofy trousers made out of a myriad of short, colourful rag loops. The jacket has edge detailing made out of pale red and blue plastic, creating a zig-zag pattern. A close up photo of the back of the character, showing the woven rags and the zig-zag trim, as well as the standing collar.

A close up photo of the under shirt. A white shirt with a hidden button closure and the same sort of zig-zag trim along the button placket, but this time in white fabric. The collar is a square standing up. A close up photo of the jacket, this time from the front. The front of the yoke goes down in a V-shape from the shoulders and over the chest, which also creates a slight shelf over the sleeve head.

Thank you to the anonymous model.