Our performance seems to be taking a different direction to what we had originally thought. Although the site is still an abandoned shop in Grantham, we are now adding an element of science to the performance rather than relating it to retail. This is because the final performance is going to be part of a festival held in Grantham called ‘Gravity Fields’. The festival is inspired by the work of Isaac Newton and includes ‘a dynamic and creative programme of science, arts and heritage events’ (Gravity Fields Festival, 2014). As the performance is being commissioned, we were sent a brief from the festival organisers. This included four different themes that each group would have to adopt; Gravity, alchemy, and two groups focused on light. I had decided that I wanted my final piece to involve the science behind sound and so it made sense to link this with the theme of light. Part of me saw the festival as a positive as it meant our piece had a starting point that we could develop. On the other hand I felt that this could have restricted us and our ideas that we already had due to the specific audience and nature of the festival.

Groups were formed based on interest in the different topics and once in a group, we knew we had to research Isaac Newton and his theories in great detail. After hours of thorough research, I found out that he discovered light is not a single colour, but a combination of all the colours on the light spectrum. He backed up this theory by shining a white light into a prism; the light which came out the other end was multi-coloured. This experiment had been completed before, making people believe that prisms were responsible for the colour change. Newton extended this experiment by using another prism which the multi-coloured light shone into. This time the light which exited the prism was white as the colours had refracted together, proving that the prism did not colour the light. ‘…Newton refracted sunlight with a prism into a colour spectrum – each coloured ray with a specific refrangibility, or angle of refraction. With a second prism, he demonstrated that each refracted ray of the colour spectrum is dispersed to the same degree as with the first prism.’ (Marcum, 2009, 458) Newton also went on to discover that light is made up of particles rather than just being a wave.