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Lighting designer (+2)

Lighting designer, Set designer, Video designer

Jesper Kongshaug

Copenhagen

Denmark

Lighting designer

Set designer

Video designer

Artist

Approved

Jesper Kongshaug was educated in the USA and has worked on numerous art institutions worldwide.

Jesper Kongshaug has over the last 25 years worked his lighting magic on a wide range of stages internationally.

JK is a radical and innovative lighting designer, and with his inimitable sense of theatrical images, shapes, style and character, he illuminates his “landscapes” with a style that ranges from the classic to the experimental.

As an artist, Kongshaug distinguished himself during Copenhagen’s European City of Culture, when he created a grand lighting installation “Winterlights" that stretched 14 kilometers to downtown Copenhagen and in 2013 JK was commissioned to do a Lighting art Installation on the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. named “Aurora Borealis” / “Northern Lights”. He has done award winning lighting design within stage art and architecture, as well as recognized stage design.

Lighting Design for the new Royal Playhouse has given JK the Danish and the Nordic Lighting prize 2008. The Reumert prize for set design was awarded him in 2012 as well as the US Edison Award in 2014. Jesper Kongshaug teaches regularly at Shanghai Theatre Academy and Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and gave lecture at Stanford University, California, USA, on “Lighting as Art in the Public Space”.

JK is honorary professor at the Design School Kolding and teaches at the National Danish Theatre School. His lecture in Beijing 2017 for the “Thousand Plan” Lighting program was hosted by Chinese Ministry Culture. His stage works “The Capital” and "Sarajevo" are frequently running in Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. His international works include extensive travels with Hotel Pro Forma’s “Operation: ORFEO” created in 1994, “The Magic Flute” in Boston Lyric Opera, USA, “Rosenkavalier” at Opera de Lyon in France, “Le Grand Macabre” at San Francisco Opera, USA.

Wagners “Lohengrin” he has done both in Moscow, at Novaya Opera and in Berlin at Deutche Oper. Der Ring des Nibelungen he also has done both in Aarhus and Copenhagen.

In Vienna, in 2004 he did “GOYA” with Placido Domingo for Klangbogen Festival at “Theater an der Wien”, where he returned in 2007 for “Le Nozze di Figaro” and in 2014 he did “Idomeneo” at Staatsoper in Vienna.

He is the Lighting Designer for the beautiful Tivoli Gardens theme park of Copenhagen with H. C. Andersen, celebrating its 175 years anniversary. His lighting is currently on display at the main exhibition at Venice Biennale Architettura 2018 in Italy, together with architect Dorte Mandrup.

English

Opera in two parts, in five acts, in French with Hungarian and English surtitles

The plot might remind some viewers of Tristan und Isolde, as it also involves an older man standing in the way of two young lovers whose passion for each other costs them their lives. This piece nearly devoid of actual stage action unfolds in the borderlands between dreams and reality, which is exactly what piqued Debussy’s interest! An exciting pairing with this remarkable and somewhat surreal world will be the Danish ensemble Hotel Pro Forma founded by Kirsten Dehlholm, and their unique stylistic language. What they do is create productions that span branches of the arts and genres, merging the visual arts with text, theatre, installations and architecture, not to mention the many other forms they develop through their constant dialogue with each other.

Premiere: Feb. 25, 2022

Video

Completed

Claude Debussy: Pelléas és Mélisande | Pelléas et Mélisande (SZFE trailer)

AMDUAT. An oxygen machine is a visually compelling performance with newly composed, live music, ambient sound-landscapes, video art, lighting and performance – all on a rarely-seen 28-metre stage.

Like Harald Voetmann’s book, the performance is an amalgam of the story of a man dying at Holbæk hospital and the journey of the Egyptian sun-god through the land of the dead at night. Amduat means ‘that which exists in the underworld’ and is the name of the ancient Egyptian understanding of the land of the dead.

Music and sound-images are the work of the composers Hari Shankar Kishore and Marie Højlund. On stage, Hari Shankar Kishore creates rhythmic sound narratives by blending electronic music with authentic present-day Egyptian music of choirs, voices and sound-images from Egyptian street life. The rhythmic music is interrupted and framed by ambient sound landscapes created by the composer and sound-artist Marie Højlund from her research into auditive hospital environments.

About letting go of life

With AMDUAT. An oxygen machine, Hotel Pro Forma focuses on the theme of life’s basic conditions and of letting go of life, but also on how myths can have a softening effect on taboo and difficult issues. Kirsten Dehlholm says the following about this:

“If the process of dying which is described in AMDUAT. An oxygen machine were to be told clinically and soberly, it would be exceedingly grim and sad. But precisely with the vitality of Harald Voetmann’s language and his use of the interweaving with Egyptian mythology and an ancient-Egyptian understanding of the land of the dead something fantastic happens. The story produces strongly evocative and highly visual universes, and the dying process is thus charged at the same time with black humour, and becomes absurd, sensual and highly present.“

Jesper Kongshaug / Repertoire

Repertoire

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