Will Dart, one of the UK’s brightest up-and-coming young lighting designers, recently visited SA with Bastille, a band he’s been working with since 2012, together with Jamie Thompson, another innovative UK new-wave lighting and visual designer.
Dart lives in north London, although he’s seen little of his home for the past 18 months as he’s been constantly on the road with Bastille and other projects.
His industry career spawned when he studied Music Industry Management with Live Production at Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe, about 40 miles west of London.
During this time he volunteered to help out in running the Student Union’s club venue with a lighting rig that was in need of some serious care and attention … and this first fired his interest in exactly how much impact you could make to an environment with the medium.
While studying, he had also made contact with locally based lighting rental company Siyan, which has a penchant for nurturing emerging young designer talent as well as supplying lighting production to a host of new and trending bands.
Will completed his three-year BA Honours course and was by this time thoroughly bitten by the lighting bug, so he decided to pursue the technical production route as a career.
In 2009 he started working full time in Siyan’s warehouse. In addition to the work he’d done there while at college, he saw it as an ideal opportunity to learn more about the equipment as well as from those actively involved in touring and to generally gain an invaluable grounding and understanding of how the lighting production process works.
“I realised that it was essential to learn the basics first and then have a hands-on approach to designing practical and tourable rigs that would fit into the truck and the venues on the itinerary!’ he explains. “There is little point in designing something that is completely unworkable, and now whenever I am designing a show, I can always refer back to that fundamental knowledge.’
He adds that the warehouse experience has also helped gain respect from others. “Now when students ask me the best place to start a potential career, I will always say that they should be grounded about the industry and working on the road rather than be romantic about it … or imagine that they can just walk straight into a situation as an LD.’
While that scenario does sometimes occur for various reasons, it’s rare. His first actual tour was with Essex rockers We Are the Ocean in 2009 – their LD Ben Inskip asked if he could do it as he was committed to other work at the time. This was a complete eye-opener, but he took the many challenges in his stride. The tour was on a very tight budget so all the kit had to fit into the back of a van. Apart from that, it took imagination and ingenuity each day, changing lights around, fitting them into tiny venues and using them in inventive ways to produce a show! Despite all that Will relished every gig and by the end of the run of shows was completely bitten by the touring and lighting design bug!
That year he also started working at Siyan full time, leaving at the start of 2012 and going straight on tour around Europe as a technician with Thriller Live, a Michael Jackson tribute show.
He started working with Bastille mid-2012, as Jamie Thompson wanted a lighting director / operator to tour with the show as he was busy with The Script at the time.
The Bastille era started with small clubs utilising basic house lighting rigs and grew steadily, culminating with a Festival Republic stage appearance at the 2012 Reading / Leeds Festival.
Their phenomenal debut album Bad Blood was released in March 2013 and shot straight to the top of the UK charts, and in 2013 their career path followed a truly supersonic trajectory, including rocking the Radio 1/ NME Stage at Reading / Leeds, receiving four 2014 Brit Award nominations, amassed a loyal and devoted fan base and a star-spangled future.
Will takes creative inspiration from a wide variety of sources. He’s a big David Lynch fan and enjoys “art house’ movies and experimental theatre productions.
He also really admires the work of Paul “Pablo’ Beckett of Bryte Design, video designer for Bastille and numerous other cool projects. For Bastille they worked closely together to achieve a cinematic stage aesthetic with a distinctive, edgy, off-beat Twin Peaks style surrealism.
They wanted a big WOW factor without having a massive back wall of video – which is refreshing in these days of LED overkill!
For a career that’s progressed apace, Will is extremely modest and hardly a person who readily likes “blowing his own trumpet’. It’s clear that he’s where he is now through plenty of hard work, foresight and a careful balance of design and programming talents with diplomacy and good communication skills … and a likeable personality.
“I’m very lucky,’ he says with a smile.
Apart from actually doing the job, he loves travelling and experiencing new places and cultures. If he has time off while on the road he makes a real effort to get out and visit and take in some of the local ambience.
His favourite places so far have included Tokyo. “It’s like being on another planet!’ he declares adding: “It’s fantastic, people are really friendly, the level of detail in almost every aspect of life in Japan is awesome and the absolute dedication and professionalism in staging a show or a festival is incredible.’
His first impressions of South Africa were equality enthusiastic.
They played two shows at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, where Dart was blown away by the breathtaking views behind the stage overlooking Table Mountain, followed by a show in front of 15 000 enthusiastic fans at Emmarentia Dam in Johannesburg – all three were completely sold out.
Lighting for the gigs was supplied by A E Technical in Cape Town and Stage Effects in Johannesburg.
They also managed to squeeze in two days on safari during their whistle-stop week in SA.
“It’s a beautiful country, everyone was fabulous, the productions were well organised and brilliant and we all had a great time! It’s definitely somewhere that I and everyone else involved want to return to – hopefully soon,’ he concludes.
