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This report shares the author's twenty-five-year experience of lighting cultural shows, architectural and historical sites, and theatre in East and Southeast Asia.
While lighting a corporate show in Hong Kong, events so conspired as to get me involved with the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts and to extend my career as a lighting designer into Asia. A two-year hire as the school's head of lighting design was prolonged into a twenty-five-year career based in Asia, becoming dean of the school and maintaining a professional portfolio of lighting design throughout the region, where entertainment arts have been rapidly evolving and growing exponentially. Prior to the late 1980s, I had been based in England, with a body of work that included a string of West End productions and even a Broadway transfer. But nothing could have prepared me for the longest-running production of my career or, indeed, "the longest running theatrical show in Asia," as it has since become known. This show is Legend of a Kingdom, staged at the Phuket FantaSea's Palace of the Elephants theatre, a 3,500-seat, purpose-built theatre constructed inside an extraordinary cultural theme park on Thailand's resort island of Phuket.
My interest in stage lighting dates back to my first pantomime at the Bristol Hippodrome. Coming from a poor family, we could only afford the cheapest seats, high up in the gallery. I was mesmerized by the followspot positions, the carbon-arc Sunspots that delivered an enormously bright column of light over our heads and swept majestically through the darkened theatre toward the stage. In secondary school I took over the lighting of school plays from the physics master, and later, although rejected from theatre schools, landed a part-time job as a casual worker on the lighting crew for the Bristol Old Vic, working my way up in this prestigious repertory theatre company to lighting designer in a revival of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy (first production, 1946). After a relatively few years, I became the company's head of lighting design and lit most of the company's major productions for twelve years.
With increasing confidence and ability, I began working concurrently as a freelance lighting designer, designing both nationally and internationally. I designed for theatre, opera, dance, architecture, events, corporate...