Peter Mumford

Peter Mumford trained as a stage designer at the Central School of Art in London, studying under Ralph Koltai, in the late Sixties. In 1969, during his last year at art school, he became a founder member of the mixed media experimental theatre group Moving Being (director Geoff Moore), with whom he worked as designer and lighting and projection designer on all productions until 1978, moving to Cardiff with the company in 1972. After that he continued to work with Moving Being on a project basis but began a wider based freelance career. In the late Seventies he became a part time member of the faculty of the London Contemporary School of Dance at The Place, teaching a course relating choreography to visual art and design and also at that time began collaborating with a number of choreographers in their early work at The Place, such as Siobhan Davies, Richard Alston, Ian Spink and many others. When the company Second Stride was formed in the early Eighties Peter was a founding collaborator as lighting designer - another working relationship that would last for nearly another decade. In the Eighties, Peter designed the lighting for a huge number of dance works for companies such as London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Rambert, Second Stride, Siobhan Davies Co. and many other individual projects at that time. He also continued to design projects with Moving Being like the major site specific “Mabinogion” - first at Carnarvon Castle and later in Cardiff. His work gradually expanded into opera, designing sets/costumes and lighting for “Parsifal “for WNO in 1978 and then into drama more towards the end of the Eighties. “The Overgrown Path” at The Royal Court in 1985 was the first straight play he lit in London.