“You Have To Start With A Crazy Idea”: Jerall Li Talks Lighting Design for ‘Love and Information’
In the week leading up to the winter solstice, I sat down with a handful of local theatre-makers to reflect on the year, learn about people’s upcoming projects, and find out what was keeping them warm through the short, dark days of December. This interview with Jerall Li is the fifth in a series which will appear on the Kingston Theatre Alliance’s Performance Blog in the early months of 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“You have to start with a crazy idea. You have to dream really, really big, and then you think about, oh, do I have the budget to do it? Do I have the time to do it? But still, you have to dream big. You have to be ambitious, and then you will actually put your effort into making those things happen, even if you don’t have the money, even if you don’t have the time—the end result will be so much better than if you just want to play it safe.”
When Jerall Li talks about lighting design, his whole face lights up. Now a student in Media and Performance Production (MAPP), Li initially came to Queen’s for Concurrent Education, hoping to follow his passion for theatre by taking drama courses while studying to become a teacher.
Li’s love of theatre began in high school. “I started by acting, because that’s all you could do with the budget we had—we couldn’t put on magnificent shows back then. After I came to Queen’s and worked on my first show, I got the offer [to do] lighting design, and that’s when I started learning about all that backstage stuff. I enjoyed being backstage more than being on stage, so I started to put my time toward learning about design.”
At Queen’s, he began to develop his talents as a lighting designer and technical director on projects with the DAN School Majors and Yu Theatre Society, eventually branching out to work with community theatre groups, including Blue Canoe Theatrical Productions and PeerLess Productions. “I’m enjoying the tech side. I like being able to see things from the beginning, where we plan everything out, and then through time, we build it up little by little, and then we can present it on the stage. It feels fulfilling, the same way as when you’re acting on the stage.”
While elements like technical direction and lighting design play a crucial role in creating a show, the theatre-makers who take on these roles often remain in the shadows, so to speak. “People remember actors’ names, they remember directors’ names. But can you name three famous technical directors? Three famous lighting designers? No, I can’t answer that at all. But you have to have these people backstage in order to make the show happen, to make the show good.”
For this semester’s DAN School Drama Major, Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, the tech team will have a unique relationship to the audience. With Li dreaming big as the show’s lighting designer, the team has been developing ways for audience members to influence the lighting during each performance. “We want to redefine what the audience is. We want them to be participants, to let them be part of the design as well. So in our lighting specifically, we are trying to build up an interactive show, where half of the lightning look is actually going to be finished by the audience members. Audience members will have the opportunity to, for example, change the colour of the stage, put a gobo on the stage—all those fun lighting tricks we can offer. We are using some really unconventional lighting techniques to try to use theatre as a frame to build a community together.”
Directed by Michael Wheeler, Love and Information explores the human need for connection in an information-overloaded, increasingly fragmented world. “It is categorized as a micro-drama—it has seven different sections of stories, and then for each of the sections, there are seven mini stories, or scenes, within it. But the fun part is all the seven stories within each section can be played in any random order, and that is what we will do.
“Every day, before the performance, we’ll have this massive calculation from the computer science side. They will calculate the order of the scenes of the day, and then they will perform it in that order. Between the audience interaction and the changing scene order, we’ll have infinite different possible combinations. It’s going to be different each time.”
When we spoke in December, Li had just finished working as technical director on The Other Shore, the DAN School Majors’ fall semester offering, and was preparing to work as the lighting designer for Yu Theatre Society’s Snow In Midsummer, which played in January. After Love and Information, he’ll be working on Blue Canoe’s tween production of Anne of Green Gables, followed by what he terms a “remix” of PeerLess Productions’ Reflections and Refractions. Meanwhile, he’s been putting his interest in education to good use, teaching an introductory technical design course geared toward middle- to high-schoolers at the Blue Canoe studio. “It’s going so well—they absorb things like a sponge. They are so good at it.”
Li appreciates the mentorship that he has received from Queen’s professors through the Majors. As an educator and mentor, he wants to pay it forward. “I enjoy giving this knowledge I learned from my background to the new generation, because I think that’s how you actually learn more things. I like to be mentored and mentor others—to make our industry more sustainable.”
Jerall Li is a theatre artist born in China and currently based in Kingston, Canada, with a focus on interdisciplinary design in theatre, particularly lighting. His work challenges traditional boundaries by exploring contemporary social issues such as queerness, race, and culture, while deconstructing theatre’s conventional elements to create bold, thought-provoking experiences.
The DAN School Majors present ‘Love and Information’ at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts from March 5 to 16, 2025. Tickets and more information can be found here.
