Artist Statement

In Mother Courage and Her Children, the journey of light is one that reflects both the period setting of the play which Brecht wrote, the time he wrote it in, and our present moment as a way of understanding not just the cyclical nature of the issues the play grapples with, but how they evolve and become the ugliest version of themselves through mutation and “perfection.”

This can be examined in the rise of the merchant class in post feudal Europe, the sharp mark of existential horror imprinted in a post-nuclear 1945, and how events like these are traced forward into the contemporary with living in a world of endless proxy war, and an economic system with ever growing wealth disparity.

Stylistically, the design will reflect both Brechtian modes of lighting which seeks unambiguous reveal of the actions being depicted, a sense of endless possibility and neutrality which will be contrasted and punctuated with gashes of color, fractured lines of light, splashes of motion, and various moments where the "magic of contemporary light" is displayed and one can see in ways that are aesthetically distinct, but are inkeeping with the philosophy of distancing as well as the specific journey through periods depicted here in Mother Courage.

Beyond this theoretical/aesthetic description, the contrasting styles and the forward momentum of the timeline echo the sense that the more things change in Mother Courage, the clearer it becomes that the core of the issues remains constant. The machine of capitalism that makes the world starker, the horror and chaos brought by war, and the murkiness of the path forward. The simplicity of the former and the chaos of the latter are ultimately two sides of the same coin.