Who?

LILIGHT is a name I invented while playing with my Hungarian first name and one of the most beautiful things in the world for me: Light. I’m working as a Lighting, Stage and Costume designer since 2012. Born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, at the age of 18 I moved to Mexico City, driven by my curiosity to discover my Mexican roots. I studied Stage Design in the National Fine Arts University, and specialized in Lighting and Costume design. I live with synesthesia, what makes me a highly sensitive person to colors, touch and sensory impressions in general. Since I discovered my condition instead of repressing it, I started consciously using it as an important part of my work and a source of everyday inspiration.  The result of this integration is my growing interest in perception, body and movement and I think the most important part of my work is making people feel things, using light, fabrics, silhouettes and movement.

What?

 I have mostly worked with independent dance and theater companies to develop complex lighting and costume designs, hand in hand with talented directors and creatives. Every production is a new challenge and it has its own needs. I see stage costume design as a personal space of the performer and the character, the space where they encounter and transform.  Costume making is building – around a human body in movement- a space full of metaphors, symbolism and storytelling.

As a freelance lighting designer I’m working at present on a range of different scale projects including dance, theater, concerts and opera. Light is a living art form, just like music, specially because it transcends intellectual and cultural boundaries: we can feel it and understand it way before we have a conceptual idea of it. Light can transform space, and the way we perceive things.

Temperature, tone, color, intensity, contrast, angle, texture, direction are the main qualities of light and a Lighting Designer composes with these elements a dynamic play between darkness and light. 

A stage design comes to life when every element merges on stage into an ephemeral yet deeply true act: fiction.

Lila Mendez Pap