Death and the Powers Program: Program Notes: Production Designer Note
MAR 9, 2011
A note from Death and the Powers production designer Alex McDowell.
When Tod first invited me to join the creative team for Death and the Powers, the double whammy of opera and the Media Lab – the lure of theatre PLUS science – was irresistible.
That Simon Powers disappears into the System and literally vanishes from the performance space, uniquely requiring the stage set to become the physical and emotional expression of the lead performance as the central motif of the piece, is a most compelling problem that speaks directly to a designed environment’s ability to carry narrative and expression.
We conceived the System to be both the metaphor of a living space and an organic entity, each design element created by a scaled series of simple and complex cellular forms that in combination can create a full range of expressive live performance. For example, the Chandelier, which starts as a light and becomes first a metaphor for a bird with three identical wings laced with mathematical form, and then an elegant organ – Simon’s head, ‘or some other juicy part.’ Or the Walls, which develop the metaphor of a library, with each translucent book spine capable of delivering procedural and performance driven visuals and emotionally expressive light.
Essentially the System is the sum of the parts – the skin, the appendages, the head. All are tied together with light – a matrix of single points of light distributed across the robots’ surface, the chandelier and in the vertical planes of the set.
For me, this has been an inspired five-year collaboration with Tod, Diane, Robert and the other creators of the opera, and the powerfully complex, poetic and pop-cultural music and text have really driven this abstracted and metaphorical set. This has been a transformative experience, and one of the unique design challenges of my career.
