Let there be light: Mildred Moyo, Zimbabwe's only female lighting designer, shines the way

There’s a little over an hour to go before the curtain goes up and Mildred Moyo is so busy she can barely breathe. Weaving her way through a complex lighting rig, she stops to direct her assistant, then climbs onto a platform leading to the control room in Reps Theatre, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest auditoriums.

Glancing down to ensure that power is not interrupted to the lighting, sound, and screen sections of the stage, Moyo, 37, lets slip a smile. She is clearly in her element.

A Bulawayo-based production team has secured a limited time slot in the auditorium to film a virtual concert. Time is tight as the venue is currently a hive of activity following a year of COVID-19 shutdowns.

“They called me on Thursday after lunch, saying "we need you to do lighting for us and we need to be up and running by 9am”, she says, smiling even more.

Moyo is one of only a handful of lighting designers who can command the control system of the eccentric theatre, tucked into the corner of a busy shopping centre in Belgravia, an area just three kilometres from the city centre. Today she is the only lighting designer on site.

With her assistant Delroy Sichore in tow, Moyo escapes to a separate section of the stage in order to assemble lighting there. She is scrambling to be ready. Three hours after the 9am call-time, any delay now will spill into rehearsals for a theatrical production she is also lighting on the premises later in the day.

Eleventh-hour calls like these are more common than Moyo lets on. This is a stressful field of work. And as Zimbabwe’s only female professional lighting designer, Moyo also works in a totally male-dominated field. But she seems to suck up the stress. Added to which, as she says, she has always taken “the path least trodden”.

“I’ve never been a conformer,” she says. “I just never liked the normal stuff, I never had many friends. I was weird. But now that I’m older, I always say I was weird in a very cool way,” she chuckles.

Curious spirit

Moyo hails from Bulawayo but it was Harare that nurtured her curious spirit. She moved to the “sunshine city” in 2004 for no reason other than to slake her thirst for adventure.

“I didn’t have any particular reason why but I needed to move, and I moved,” she recounts. Then one day, while at the Belgravia shopping centre, she spotted the building that would chart a new course in her life.

“I would leave home and go for walks and come back in the evening, so this particular day, I’m walking towards the shops in Belgravia and I see this enormous building and the doors are wide open. I didn’t know it was a theatre,” she narrates.

Moyo walked in on a ballet production rehearsal and was awestruck at the sight of ballerinas in full flow as the stage crew worked on the production.

“There were lights, nice costumes, sound. I went home amazed at this magical world that I had never seen, that I didn’t even know existed,” she recalls.

Reps became her safe haven. She spent a year pursuing ballet, then turned to audio but the head of sound at the time, Tracy Gerard, had a hunch that Moyo was better suited elsewhere.

“I went to her and said 'I want to join sound'. She turned around and said to me 'you’re not an audio person, you’re a lighter.' It made sense because I always could tell the dark spaces in the area. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know how to express it,” she said.

Worked her way up

Moyo worked her way up the light production hierarchy until she was entrusted with lighting theatrical productions during festivals. These included the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) and concerts during the urban culture festival, Shoko. She also lit stages for musicians including the late Zimbabwean icon Oliver Mtukudzi as well as for South African hip-hop artist Cassper Nyovest, during a tour in Zimbabwe.

In 2019, Moyo launched her company Phenomenal lighting and Power Solutions. The first thing on her agenda was to extend seats at the table for female lighting designers. 

Her professional lighting class was birthed in the process, through which she groomed and trained female lighting designers. With 15 women under her wing, she followed the training up with a Zoom masterclass series, primarily targeting aspiring female lighting designers. She also began featuring international guests.

In 2020, Moyo enlisted renowned lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe − who has lit stages for performances by some of the “greats”, including pop star Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson (Woodroffe lit Jackson’s performance in his last film, ‘This is it”) − as a panellist to share his experiences for the masterclass series.

“She wrote to me some years ago. I think she had seen Michael Jackson’s film, ‘This is it’,” Woodroffe says of Moyo in an interview online.

“She got in touch a year or so again and I just thought, ‘this is a really, smart, bright, enthusiastic woman who works in my field’, and I thought it’s really worth supporting an enterprise like this,” said Woodroffe.

Cultural and language centre, Zimbabwe German Society (ZGS), jumped on board to support the technical requirements for the project.

“Mildred’s masterclasses are an innovative way to get young women (people) interested in light engineering. It removes all the pressure of not knowing something or where to start and as a result, makes it accessible for all. Seeing and hearing someone you can relate to share their experiences and knowledge does something to the soul. Then watching them talk to renowned engineers that are known worldwide - and have worked with names we only dream of - does an entirely different thing. It says it’s possible and gives that flicker of hope and opens up a world of possibilities.” said Taremeredzwa Chirewa, Director of the ZGS.

Pivotal role

Moyo also found that with each stage she lit, she realised more and more what a pivotal role the “intangible art” of lighting, plays. Even now she struggles to reduce into words the transformative power of lighting.

“It was amazing how you could just put a red light on a white surface, and you could see it change instantly, change it to green, it would be something else. If you switch it off, you could see how even your eyes would react to that darkness.”

HIFA Production designer Carine Tredgold, who witnessed Moyo’s growth over the years, agreed.

“Lighting can enhance a set design tenfold, so it’s really important for a production designer to work with a director and a lighting director to make sure all the elements work together,” she says

Shoko festival production manager Tongai Makawa recalled two of his favourite shows lit by Moyo. One was an edition of Shoko Festival hosted in a water park and the other was the 2020 virtual edition, adapted to meet COVID-19 regulations.

“The water slides really allowed Mildred to set up crazy kind of lighting,” Makawa said. For the 2020 virtual Shoko festival, the “lighting was a combination of playing with shadows, pockets of darkness,” according to Makawa.

'Lighting bae'

Moyo coined the name “lighting bae” as her moniker and has become one of the most sought-after lighting designers in Zimbabwe. Despite her masterclasses, she remains the country’s only woman professional lighting designer. That is still something she is working hard to change.

“I’ve said to my students, ‘I need you to challenge me for the name (lighting bae). If you can do half of what I’ve done, I’ll leave it,’ so I’m just holding onto it until another girl emerges in my country,” she asserts.

That protégé needs to come soon. Moyo was recently accepted for the September 2021 intake on a master’s program in lighting design at a United Kingdom university, while Woodroffe has also tapped his networks to support Moyo’s next “big adventure”.

There are many of those supporters – among them, founder and director of dance and performing arts hub AfriKera Arts Trust, Soukaina Marie-Laure Edom – who fervently hope Moyo will return to continue developing lighting production in Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, back at Reps Theatre, the stage has come to life, each light in place, cues set, and the lighting team perched anxiously in the lightroom, ready for showtime. Moyo’s face comes alive but she and her colleague Sichore still exude a sense of calm, in this moment before light transforms the stage.

“Light is disruptive, you see the sun when it comes up in the morning, sits there and commands attention. I love lighting because you cannot ignore it,” Moyo says.