The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Maboneng, Johannesburg

 THINKING IN LIGHTING

In September 2026, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted Thinking in Lighting, a four-day mentorship led by renowned lighting designer, Urs Schönebaum, where six selected participants were taken through a close and considered engagement with lighting for performance and other stage-based works. 

WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT LIGHT?

“Scientifically, we don’t know what light is; we can’t actually see light. We can only see light when it hits a surface,” – Urs Schönenbaum

For Schönenbaum, it begins with sight. Before we can start thinking about light, he says, we must think about how we are able to see it. The way light moves through the world, the objects it bounces off, refracts through, and illuminates, is linked to our perspectives, and our learned ways of seeing. 

So, day one of the mentorship sees the participants engaging in an exercise in perspective. A blackened out room becomes a makeshift camera obscura, where light from an external scene passes through a small hole and strikes a surface inside, where the scene is reproduced. Here, what seems like a kind of magic, is shown to have a deceptively straightforward logic. 

This is the simplicity of light: projection, reflection, and perspective. 

WHAT STORY ARE YOU TELLING, AND FROM WHICH PERSPECTIVE?

“Good lighting design is this: you should be able to enter the theatre in a blacked out state, no set, no actors, and go through all of the lighting states, and those states should be able to tell you a story,” – Urs Schönenbaum

Our respective cultures, backgrounds, and positionalities ultimately influence how we engage light. The colour blue, for example, might signify sadness for some, calm for others. A quick association game among the participants reveals myriad interpretations of the colour red – anger, passion, sexuality, danger, spirituality and more. 

Similarly, a simple scene – a figure on a chair – can take on multiple meanings, contexts and emotions depending on how it's lit. From below? Sinister. From behind? Mystery. 

Working both with one’s own ways of seeing and those of others is key to understanding what light does on stage, says Schönebaum. 

There are lessons in art, too. Caravaggio’s late Renaissance paintings, for example, play with light and darkness in impossible ways, while a painting like Hopper’s Morning Sun uses light to harness and influence emotion – a lone figure seated on a bed, staring into the light streaming in from the bedroom window. 

But while Hopper’s scene can be reproduced with stage lights, Caravaggio’s cannot. Painting is a fiction, but as Schönebaum reminds us, so is theatre. “It’s our job to tell a story using light,” he says. “We will have certain limitations, but we are also able to bend reality.” 

It’s the space between the pragmatic and the poetic, then, that the lighting designer must occupy. It is here that one’s ways of seeing can be put to work, while remaining open to coincidence and to the unexpected, in order to tell a fuller story. 

Watch the participants of Thinking in Lighting reflect on the week, here.

THE OPEN MOMENT 

On Friday 19 September, the mentorship culminated in The Open Moment, a public showing that provided the opportunity for an audience to witness and participate in the material and approaches explored throughout the mentorship. 

In addition to these exercises in seeing and perceiving, lighting with objects, bodies, and set design, the Open Moment sees participants working with a short extract from Exodus with No Last Name, a play that emerged from SO Academy’s preceding Thinking In Writing and Thinking In Directing mentorships. Using Schönebaum’s exercises from the workshops, participants lit the same scene with three different focuses – shadow, colour, and angle – to reveal how this shapes the scene in radically different ways.   

In this way, Thinking in Lighting sees SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea continuing its series of Thinking In mentorships, designed to address the fundamentals of theatre-making, and with the intention to create, incubate and stage new works from scratch.  

– David Mann

CREDITS: 

MENTOR | Urs Schönebaum
PARTICIPANTS | Gavin Krastin, Joël Leonard, Hallie Haller, Melony Eksteen, Phumeza Primrose Damane & Phala Ookeditse Phala
PERFORMERS | Jaques De Silva & Khanyisile Ngwabe
DIRECTOR | Aalliyah Zama Matintela
LIGHTING DESIGNER | Michael Inglis
LIGHTING ENGINEERS | Themba Mthimkulu & Bongani Mpofu
MOMENTEUR FOR THE SO ACADEMY | Athena Mazarakis