This book explores the operation of light in live performance, as both an affective material presence and a meaning-making language on the stage.

Arguing for the value of light as an integral language of performance making, it draws on the author's experience as a lighting designer alongside a wide range of examples of contemporary theatre, dance, and performance practice. The book presents an ontology of light that is rooted in dramaturgical action and provides a critical language for the ways in which light shapes seeing, feeling, and meaning-making in live performance. Employing an experiential framework that positions light in direct relation to audience experience, chapters facilitate theoretical discussions about the dramaturgical impact of light and its relationship to other elements in performance, its slippery materiality and challenges to perception, and how it can become a generative force in performance.

Moving beyond existing models that tie light's power to the artistry of individual practitioners, this study interweaves a selection of examples of large- and small-scale performance work to evolve an argument about the material affectivity of light itself. Chapters consider work produced by artists including: Complicité, Gecko, Javaad Alipoor, Robert Icke, Julia Croft, Robert Wilson, Thaddeus Phillips, and Robert LePage/Ex Machina, among many others. The book identifies and articulates powerful and compelling ways in which light can become both an arresting aesthetic presence and a kind of actor, working simultaneously with, but independently of, other elements in performance. In so doing, it provides a new critical language to capture ways in which this most ephemeral of theatrical materials emerges as a distinct and impactful interlocutor in performance.