The lighting designer John Spradbery, who has died aged 83, was a key figure in the company of the radical choreographer and director Lindsay Kemp, notably from the moment in 1974 when Kemp's Flowers, his avant-garde "pantomime" based on Jean Genet's erotic novel Notre Dame des Fleurs, began its 20-year world tour.
Like Kemp's performance as the transvestite Divine and in all his other roles, John's lighting was never the same from one night to the next, because he always created it manually. As lighting technology became ever more electronically controlled, John astonished admiring technicians all over the world with the way in which he operated his old-fashioned three-preset manual lighting board every night, swaying to the music in the dark at the back of the house as his fingers played on his hundred sliders, like an organist improvising ephemeral paintings with light, shunning the spotlight himself but spectacularly illuminating others.
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