Ghost lighting: community-making with theatre technicians

Abstract

This thesis concerns ghost lights, a piece of lighting equipment often used in theatres, commonly at the discretion of the theatrical stage technicians who work behind the scenes. For this reason, this work centres the voices of stage technicians, engaging their perspectives through ethnographic research carried out at professional theatres in English-speaking Canada. Supported by a variety of folkloristic literature and material from the field of performance studies, this thesis explores ghost lights through a variety of lenses; first as occupational folklore, where creating and using a ghost light offers technicians a way to prove membership to the folk group and their own occupational competence. Second, this thesis explores what ghost lights can tell us about occupational folk belief, and how this contributes to the theatre folk group's understanding of community. Finally, this thesis analyzes ghost lights as vernacular expressions of grief and solidarity during Covid-19. Shared through images on social media, ghost lights were a way of engaging creativity to provide community care during global crisis. Through this exploration, I argue that ghost lights offer a mechanism to simultaneously make and mark (Moore and Myerhoff 1977) members of the technical theatre folk group, providing an avenue to perform both professional and creative community care.