Light Waves Dark Skies, We Made This, Chapter, Cardiff and Pontardawe Arts Centre

Developed over the last two years, Light Waves Dark Skies tells the story of a family trying to get to grips with the loss of their child. A mother who campaigns against light pollution and tells children about the stars, and a father who used to be a lifeboat man until the sea took his son, have run inland to escape the memories the waves stir. Gradually they’ve been piecing their life back together until their fragile existence is disrupted by a blast from the past.

Light Waves Dark Skies is from We Made This, an evolving company of theatre makers, whose name makes explicit the collaborative nature of their working process.

Light Waves Dark Skies, is directed by former National Theatre Wales Creative Associate (2011-13) and Camden People’s Theatre Artistic Director (2006-2011), Matt Ball.

He said, “Light Waves Dark Skies began when I read a short story by Gabrielle García Márquez nearly twenty years ago – about two boys who take the sentence “Light is like water” literally and learn to sail a boat on light. I’d been trying for years to think of how to stage this story – then I realised it wasn’t the story that was interesting but the creative leap where the imagined becomes real. So rather than telling someone else’s story we began to explore and try to find the story we wanted to tell, something that spoke to us about our world.

“For me, one of the important aspects of the way we make work, is that it’s not about my idea, or a writer’s idea, but about the ideas of a group of people. Light Waves Dark Skies, is a product of the collective who made it – and each ideas sparks another thought in someone else – till eventually we’ve gone somewhere that none of us could have imaged on our own, but with the power of our combined imaginations anything is possible.”