I was fortunate to have an excellent lighting designer who really created a sense of place for QXK.

There were no backdrops or set pieces to set the scene, but Susannah Hewson, who has lit my works before, brought in a number specials and put squares of light on the floor, creating a chessboard-like setting.

This was the most obvious of her tricks, but all the subtle ones involving angles, starkness and softness of lighting, saturation of color, and timing of crossfades all came together to put the dancers in an environment and to fill the space more fluidly than set pieces could have.

Debora and I also spent a lot of time with my costume designer, Jennifer Craig, honing the look of the costumes. There was a lot of back-and-forth in the development of the costumes and the working process was important. There were some constraints simply from a financial point of view (more on that later) and we could not always execute things the way we wanted. But overall, Jennifer put together a great-looking set of costumes on a shoestring budget.