Light­ing design for Michael McQuilken’s Jib, an orig­i­nal play with music. Set and pro­jec­tions by Matt Saun­ders, clothes by Mark Nagle, sound by Chad Raines. It hap­pened at the Yale School of Drama’s Ise­man The­ater in Jan­u­ary of 2011.

All pho­tos by the phe­nom­e­nal T. Charles Erick­son. All rights reserved.

Trac­ing the way inspi­ra­tion flows through time and bod­ies, life and death, Jib fol­lows four lost souls who become guided by music and its infi­nite ghosts. Although they will never meet, the lives of these strangers will merge as aban­doned melodies drift between them unseen — one man’s rhythm secretly shak­ing another man’s bones.

Matt’s function-driven set merges the present, the past and the meta­phys­i­cal into a sin­gle sprawl­ing struc­ture designed to tell the intri­cate story of Jib, with the audi­ence on both sides. A close col­lab­o­ra­tion with Matt yields a light­ing design closely inte­grated with the set. 20+ hang­ing and set-mounted prac­ti­cals serve as signs for the diverse loca­tions. A ver­sa­tile and visu­ally present light­ing sys­tem echoes the “unit” approach of the set, and turns the the­atri­cal event into a sound­stage film shoot, then a sta­dium rock con­cert, then a play again. We take the audi­ence on a roller-coaster ride full of dis­cov­er­ies. My design aims to delight and sur­prise with­out hid­ing a thing.