Edward Saunders
Ed is a lighting designer for stage and film. Starting out as a follow-spot operator at the Oxford Playhouse, Ed began lighting shows in black box studios as a student before scaling up to build a portfolio which includes site-specific work, fringe shows, and international touring productions.
Since receiving a commendation for design from the National Student Drama Festival for Gruffdog Theatre’s Peer Gynt, Ed’s most notable work has included a touring production of Twelfth Night in Japan, as well as Luke Brown Dance’s tour of For You I Long the Longest. He lit a ground-breaking festival of new Ukrainian writing in Kyiv, and most recently designed for a site-specific and multi-sensory staging of Stockhausen’s Stimmung at St Bartholomew Hospital’s Pathology Museum in London.
Featured Work
Theatre in Two Weeks
To create three fully-realised stagings of three pieces of new writing by Ukrainian playwrights in two weeks: this was the challenge of the festival, an international collaboration and the first of its kind in a country where new writing rarely has the opportunity to outgrow its rehearsed reading incubation.
With constraints of time, place, and resources, it was the lighting which was to define the performance spaces: the lighting helped to tell these new stories, but just as the success of the festival was in proving that theatre can be forged quickly and outside of institutional territory, the real success of the design was in packaging the productions as fully-formed theatrical events. For audiences, the venues – one fringe and one site-specific – became ostensibly legitimate theatre houses, but more lastingly, the slick marketing materials drawn from production shots are being used to propel future collaborations and showcases of Ukrainian talent.
