Chahine
Yavroyan – Lighting Designer, musician, performer, artist
Born
February 17 1950; died September 3 2018
Chahine
Yavroyan, who has died aged 68 following a short battle with cancer, helped
revolutionise what a lighting designer could achieve onstage, both for
text-based work and the more playful abstractions that the dance world opened
up. Beyond a stream of collaborations with world class artists as a lighting
designer, Yavroyan was a polymath and renaissance man. As a musician, sound
designer and performer with People Show, the pioneering live art troupe he
joined at the end of the 1970s, he was an artist in every way.
As
everyone who ever came into contact with Yavroyan observed, he was the epitome
of cool. This wasn’t just about his immaculate approach to dress, which saw him
perennially clad in a white shirt and waistcoat combination alongside an array
of hats that was the everyday attire of the Egyptian men about town Yavroyan
grew up beside in Cairo. It was as much to do with an attitude that was both
inscrutable and quietly anarchic.
As
described by People Show founder Mark Long, Yavroyan was “a beautiful mystery,”
who could speak umpteen languages, but “spoke English posher than any of us”.
He was also, by all accounts, wonderful in drag.
As
outlined in Long’s history of People Show, Nobody Knows But Everybody
Remembers, Yavroyan was a sea of calm as all about him floundered. It was such
attributes running alongside a bohemian self-assuredness which helped Yavroyan
look the part as well when he appeared as one of a trio of shady-looking
wheeler-dealers in the nightclub-set video for Smooth Operator, the 1984
nouveau-jazz hit single by Sade.
This
was but a playful diversion, however, from a career that put Yavroyan at the
centre of an increasingly ambitious and ever forward-looking set of
collaborations that were experimental expansive, and which shed light on the
overall staging of a production in every way.
Yavroyan
was put into the spotlight himself in 2005 in People Show 114 – The Obituary
Show, in which he played a pianist who dies at the start of the play, with the
rest of the show following a civil servant’s efforts to find out everything he
can about the pianist in order to write a government-sanctioned obituary. The
show ended with a sharing of people’s real life memories of Yavroyan that made
for a moving display of affection towards a man adored, not just by his peers
and close friends, but by passing acquaintances too. Even the owner of the
local café he frequented had something to say in a homage that showed just how
powerful and charismatic a spell Yavroyan cast.
Born
in Cairo as the only child of Armenian parents, Yavroyan was initially brought
up among the city’s Armenian diaspora. As a child, Yavroyan moved to Beirut, where
between the ages of ten and eighteen he lived with his mother and grand-mother,
where he was sent to music lessons, excelling on the piano.
Aged
eighteen, Yavroyan enrolled in Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where he studied
stage management before moving to London, and ended up working on some of
Steven Berkoff’s early plays. In the late 1970s, Yavroyan became sound
technician at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, then a hothouse of
institution-baiting avant-garde activity. It was here that Yavroyan fell in
with People Show, the UK’s premiere live art troupe, who had formed a decade
earlier in the ferment of London’s counter-culture.
Yavroyan
worked on sound collages for the company, gradually moving into lighting
design, an art which until then was barely acknowledged. As a performer, as
well as The Obituary Show, Yavroyan played the title role in People Show 85 –
Dentist, and took part in People Show 108, Cabaret, alongside Long and fellow
People Show regulars Emil Wolk and George Khan.
While
Yavroyan remained an integral part of the company over four decades, as his
skills as a lighting designer developed, he moved into other areas, always
looking forward, forever teaming up with increasingly world class collaborators
who, as his CV shows, he returned to again and again.
During
the 1980s Yavroyan spent seven years in Bologna, where he effectively lit the
city in a swathe of artistic activity focused on illuminating buildings. This
experience had a huge impact on his work, both in conventional theatre spaces
and what came to be known as site-specific work.
In
the 1990s, he worked extensively at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh at a
crucial time in the theatre’s history. Under then artistic director Philip
Howard, Yavroyan lit the original production of David Harrower’s modern
classic, Knives in Hens, David Greig’s early play, The Architect, Perfect Days
by Liz Lochhead, directed by John Tiffany, and Mike Cullen’s play, Anna Weiss,
directed by future National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Court artistic
director Vicky Featherstone. Yavroyan also lit Gagarin Way by Gregory Burke,
again directed by Tiffany, Iron by Rona Munro and other plays by Greig
including Outlying Islands and Damascus, all directed by Howard.
The
Traverse’s current chief electrician, Renny Robertson, who knew Yavroyan for
thirty years, describes him as “the Tom Waits of lighting, pushing in
directions no-one had thought of before and few dared to follow.”
It
was at the Traverse too where Yavroyan met theatre director Roxana Silbert.
Yavroyan would go on to light numerous productions by Silbert over the next
twenty years, including extensive work with Paines Plough and Birmingham Rep
right up to this year. Yavroyan and Silbert were married in the Highlands in
2017.
Elsewhere
in Scotland, Yavroyan lit Jane Eyre and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me at Perth
Theatre. With the National Theatre of Scotland, he lit two Anthony Neilson
plays, The Wonderful World of Dissocia and Realism, as well as Neilson’s
production of Caledonia and John Tiffany’s revival of Chris Hannan’s play,
Elizabeth Gordon Quinn.
Yavroyan
was also lighting designer on David Greig’s sequel to Macbeth, Dunsinane,
originally directed by Silbert for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Let The Right
One In, directed by Tiffany, and a collaboration with American company The
TEAM, Anything That Gives Off Light, at Edinburgh International Festival. Yavroyan
also worked extensively at the Royal Court, with Birmingham Rep and at the Gate
and Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
Yavroyan
never saw any barriers between artistic disciplines, moving easily between them
all as he shook things up, always thinking outside the box in terms of what
theatre and performance could be. In dance, he worked extensively with choreographer
Jasmin Vardimon over seventeen years. At the Royal Opera House he collaborated
on a new piece by The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, and at the Royal Festival
Hall with Simon Callow on the Shakespeare400 Gala Concert. Also at the Royal
Festival Hall, Yavroyan lit a performance by mercurial singer Diamanda Galas as
part of the Meltdown festival.
In
terms of range, vision and personality, Yavroyan was looked on in awe by the
lighting design community, lighting shows in a way that nobody else did,
ignoring convention and a ‘proper’ way of doing things in favour of something
more creatively radical. Yavroyan’s lighting expanded on the ideas of directors
and set designers, no matter how abstract, in a way that was effectively
painting with light.
Yavroyan’s
final completed work was on Anthony Neilson’s play, The Prudes, at the Royal
Court in April this year, before his illness forced him to step down from other
planned projects. These included Vardimon’s production of Medusa, and Rona
Munro’s Inspector Rebus adaptation, Long Shadows, with Birmingham Rep. A
planned update of People Show’s Cabaret will now only feature three of the
original performers. Yavroyan’s spirit, his cool and his subversive artistry
will undoubtedly shine down on each show’s every moment.
Yavroyan
is survived by his wife, Roxana Silbert.
The Herald, September 19th 2018
ends
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