To enable a theatre company to run and produce a show, certain roles need to be assigned to the members of the company. Some examples of roles and teams needed within a theatre company are: a production team, someone to manage its finances (budgeter), a producer (to over look all decisions), a director and the obvious one of actors. Within our company, STAMP Theatre, I have been allocated the roles of lighting director and actress.

When delegating the roles within our company we had to make a team decision of who would do what, and since I had the most experience with lighting (though I do not have much myself) I volunteered myself to be a part of the technical team.

Often in theatre companies people will double role to save the cost of paying two people when one person could do both jobs. This obviously is not the case in our company, as no one is getting paid however, we have chosen to multi-role within our company because most of us wanted to act therefore, like a professional company some of us had more than one role.

As lighting director it is my job to transpose the ideas of the artistic designer to the technicians at our venue in a way that is understandable. I need to create various documents that will provide our venue with the knowledge to create the lighting settings we want. The documentation I need to provide is, a Lighting plot (also known as an LX plot), a magic sheet and a focus chart. Each document will need to be in a generic format that the technicians at various venues will be able to understand – if we were to tour the production, this would save making a new focus chart each time.

Thank you for reading,

Emma Huggins