Prof. Renate Pohl

The artwork of Prof. Renate Pohl of Grenfell’s Theatre Department has met "The Final Frontier." As part of the RumbleSat Art in Space Mission package, three of Prof. Pohl’s lighting designs, reimagined for the space environment, launched to the edge of space in 2017.

Via the Canadian Space Agency’s ASTRAL 2017 campaign and JP Aerospace in Nevada, her artworks were carried as part of a larger art/science payload that comprised the RumbleSat 1a and 1b missions. These artworks returned to earth and were exhibited in The RumbleSat Art from the Edge of Space Exhibition in Canada and the US during 2017 and 2018.

That same year, Nuit 150+ festival goers entered a Corner Brook art gallery and were transported in a different manner through the magical and imagined world of holograms, designed by Prof. Pohl. The interactive lighting and set installation titled Reflection/Transmission had participants asking is it real or is it fake? Am I real or reflected?

Prof. Pohl’s creative research in lighting design includes a comparative study of real holograms with fake "holograms" for the staged environment, commonly known as the Pepper’s Ghost effect. In addition to the Nuit 150 design, she created reflective and transmission holograms at the Holocenter in New York and the University of Toronto Impact Centre (2017), and Dynamic Staged Mirrors, a research week collaboration with theatre director Lois Brown that explored the relation of choreographed text to properties of light (2018). The project continues as a new play development process through to 2021.

In other artistic endeavours, Prof. Pohl was the set and lighting designer for the provincial tour of Dedication, a play that follows Field Marshall Douglas Haig, a First World War general, who travels to St. John’s on July 1, 1924, to dedicate the National War Memorial. He is interviewed by a local journalist and suffragist, sparking a fierce debate about the causes of the World War and its consequences, about the horrors of the past and their hopes for the future. Co-produced by RCA Theatre Company and Arts and Culture Centres over a period of three years, the production opened at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s, and toured Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Culture Centres during November 2017.

Prof. Pohl also presented workshops and research papers on the topic of applied staged lighting for space crew habitats, including "Holography Scenography: Budget Tech Theatre for Space" at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico (2016), "Technical Theatre, Space Transformation and Psychological Management" at the 15th Annual Canadian Space Society Summit in Winnipeg (2016), and "Lighting Design as a Countermeasure for Enhancing Crew Performance" at International Space University’s Space Studies Program in Delft and Leiden, Netherlands (2018).