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Visionary designer Thomas Dunn transforming light, scenery for Theatre & Dance's 'Orlando'

Thomas Dunn, an award-winning scenery and lighting designer known for creating transcendent environments through light and space, is helping Auburn Theatre & Dance students bring their next performance to life.

Dunn has worked across the U.S. and abroad with dozens of theatre luminaries including Patti Smith, Mikhail Baryshnikov and JoAnne Akalaitis. He was educated at Bennington College and the Yale School of Drama.

Dunn joined the Department of Theatre & Dance as a visiting assistant professor who lends his expertise for the upcoming production of "Orlando." Dunn said he was drawn to Auburn for its similarities to his Ivy League alma mater.

"Part of what attracts me also to Auburn is something that was present at Yale, which is about creating work," Dunn said. "Students have the ability to do the work as opposed to just theorize about the work. That is a critical part of the educational process of creating theater, dance, any performance type work, whether you're a performer, designer, technician, you really have to do it. There is no substitution for that."

"Orlando," an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's classic novel by Sarah Ruhl, follows a young nobleman through the fluidity of time and identity. Dunn and his students use scenery and lighting to communicate the theatrical adaptation's magic and poetry.

Scenery is constructed with organic, everyday material. Because the environment relies heavily on imagination, a dowel can also be a sword, a sawhorse can become the legs of a table, and so on. This experimental approach to set design brings a certain playfulness to the stage while advancing the play's transformative themes.

Dunn also introduced a progressive lighting technique to the production: pixelated light boxes. Unlike regular stage lights, Dunn and his students can send pixelated videos through the screens. The soft light and blurred imagery create dreamlike movement and color.

"In my mind, I was thinking about memories of stories, fairytales and try to harness that fantastical space," Dunn said. "We really wanted to create a world in which people would immediately have a suspension of disbelief and accept that things are transformative. You're laying your imagination on to the thing and accepting the journey. That runs through the whole thing, asking the audience to engage in that belief of the magic of their own imagination."

Dunn tested pixel mapping at the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities' Holiday Light and Sound Show alongside student lighting designer Jason Owens. That student is now apprenticing Dunn on "Orlando," engineering the lighting sequences that sculpt the on-stage environment.

In class, Dunn and his students discuss how to conjure images, how the script drives the vision and how to work as a team to create both design and performance as one cohesive work. Dunn emphasizes the balance between creative freedom, budgets and time restraints, as well as a team mindset to make a production successful.

"When everything is locked in, that's when the production becomes a sublime experience. You can feel the audience leaning forward," Dunn said. "Everyone on the production has to be focused on serving the production itself, not necessarily individual needs. Of course, you want really talented individuals who shine, but it's all in service of the entirety of it."

Dunn's teaching philosophy has been shaped by his own educational experiences, from his first sculpture class in high school to Yale's competitive drama program. Throughout his career, he's sought to advance scenic and lighting design as an art form, and hopes to help talented Auburn students succeed themselves.

"I've had a pretty robust professional career and I'm at a point where I really, really want to share what I've learned and what I've been taught, and create the best possible scenario for learning," Dunn said. "Everyone, no matter what you're studying, has a great opportunity to learn the skills that it takes to create theatre, because they apply to so many other things. On this level, I would love to see more students from other disciplines take a class just to explore it as another avenue of rounding themselves off."

"Orlando" runs at the Telfair B. Peet Black Box Theatre from Feb. 20 to March 1. Buy tickets at the box office website.

Tags: Theatre and Dance Arts and Culture