Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2019 - 54

he made for his lighting assistants following the final season strike, or in the
hallway during a chance encounter.
Nancarrow always held our undivided
attention as we were captivated by the
wisdom or story pouring out of his
mind.
Students encountered Nancarrow's approach to lighting design in his
Stage Lighting class syllabus, which he
began with a mashed-up quote by Robert Edmond Jones from The Dramatic
Imagination: "But at rare moments, in

the long quiet hours of light-rehearsals,
a strange thing happens. We are overcome by a realization of the livingness
of light. Lucidity, penetration, awareness, discovery, inwardness wonder....
These are the qualities we should try
to achieve in our lighting. Does this
mean that we are to carry images of poetry and vision and high passion in our
minds while we are shouting our orders to electricians on ladders in lightrehearsals? Yes. This is what it means."
As student electricians, we wit-

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nessed him bring to life the meaning
of these quotes in every focus and tech
rehearsal. There was always such a joy
in focusing for Nancarrow when one
of his uniquely placed lighting fixtures
(like far-cycs on the lighting bridge)
was turned on and created exactly
what he had envisioned, leading him
to exclaim his design victory in his low
tone full-bellied, "A-ha!" As electricians,
we willingly rigged lights for him in
unusual or uncustomary locations because we knew he had thought through
every paintbrush stroke of light he had
plotted, and although we might not understand at the time why it was there,
we waited with great enthusiasm to see
what magic would unfold as a result.
Nancarrow's zest for life was undoubtedly influenced by his childhood
growing up in England during WWII,
where life was uncertain. As he once
said to me, "You didn't know when
the bombs were going to come again."
Because of the bombing in London,
Nancarrow was often shipped from
his parents' home south of London to
a safer village in southwest England to
be with his grandparents. He met many
young American soldiers stationed
at the Hinton-in-the-Hedges air base
down the road from the village, and
helped his granddad run his small pub.
I don't doubt these experiences helped
him to learn at an early age how to tell
a story. His granddad taught him to
read using the Bible and The Complete
Works of Shakespeare, which started
a lifelong love of the Bard's work. Following the war, Nancarrow's schooling
would return to normal, and it was during his grammar school years that he
started to play around in the theatre.
He began as an actor, but he found
backstage work more to his liking. Following his primary education in England, he went to work as a lab assistant
at Guys Hospital in London where his
creativity and intelligence caught the
attention of an American doctor working there. Dr. Camp sponsored Nancarrow to come to America and his family
established a scholarship for Nancarrow to study pre-med at the University
of Virginia.
While Nancarrow did come to
America and pursue pre-med studies,
he also continued to explore the theatre and was as a very active member

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Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2019

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