Twenty Years of Agnes opened Friday.
Tickets available here.
Archive for September, 2006
Twenty Years of Agnes
Saturday, September 30th, 2006Antigone Blog
Thursday, September 28th, 2006The production of Anouilh’s Antigone that I am lighting in November has a group blog. I am as curious as anyone to see inside rehearsal. I am not sure how much I will be posting there, as one blog is more than enough for me, but I sure will be reading it. Go Check it out if you are interested.
Giving Birth to Decay
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006I love doing site specific work. There is a special kind of relationship one must develop with the space. There is a predictability in theatre spaces as far as how light moves that does not exist in found spaces. There are common elements, sure, but in the end each one must be taken on its own terms.
My personal favorite spaces are ones that are run down or partially run down. Those that have a sense of old, a feeling of history. There is a wonderful sense of giving birth to something new out of the decay of the old. Reclaiming a space and giving it a new purpose. This is where my love of industrial spaces comes from. An old factory, or warehouse transformed into a living breathing entity that renegotiates its existence with the event it contains.
In a contemporary world where everything is prefabricated and disposable, it is an important act to recycle the old. To repurpose the dying for the new.
This is why I love Hip-Hop.
Specifically Graffiti art and Scratch DJ’s. These art forms are about taking found objects, public space or prerecorded music, and through ones art repurposing and transforming the artifacts into something new, vital and alive. Bansky is very popular these days, but my real love is for train pieces and other large scale work, like Tagging Air Force One.
The only answer, that I see, to the death of American Theatre is find a new framework within which to place the performance. The setting, which includes the theatre as much as scenery and lighting and other such elements, must be reconceived for the 21st Century. Theatre must enter into a larger socio-cultural dialog or it risks falling in on itself under the weight of its own self-referential inertia. Otherwise it will not wake up its sleeping audiences, and continue lumbering along, half-dead, and half-asleep.
The Artifice of Authenticity
Monday, September 25th, 2006I have not said much about Antigone recently as I have been busy with other projects. We had our first read through with the cast last night. It was quite wonderful. The translation of the Anouilh is a new one, finished only days before the reading. I love how the newness of the translation makes the event both like a new play and like a classic. It is a great fusion of those two energies. The combined effect of which is perfect for the play itself. The tension between the new freshness of youth and the stoic acceptance of ones role in life that comes with time.
The Sophocles version has a very formal classic sense of ethics. Creon, having violated the will of the Gods is set against Antigone who represents pious familial duty. Their places are clear. Anouilh makes the situation far more ambiguous. Over the course of the play it becomes clear that the roles of ‘Creon’ and ‘Antigone’ are artificial constructs as much as the ethical systems they represent. Antigone’s journey towards death is almost halted by Creon. His logical explanation of the factual truth of the situation almost convinces Antigone to accept the comprimises inherent to social life. Almost, that is, until he offers her happiness. A kind of blank unthinking happiness that one gets as a social being containing their impulses. Sacrificing desire in favor of social norms.
As Derrida says:
[F]reedom and responsibility are incompatible with the mere reporting of the existence of a norm, a normative reality. Freedom is free with regard to such a normative reality, as is responsibility. If there is responsibility, if there is an ethical and free decision, responsibility and decision must, at a given moment, be discontiguous with the normative or the “normal,” not in their misrecognition of norms, not in their ignorance of a knowledge about norms – rather they must take a leap and welcome a sort of discontinuity, a heterogeneity in relation to the normative as such . . . This means that, at a certain moment, questions of norm must escape scientificity, they must escape a techno-scientific programming.
Freedom and responsibility demand that one know what is known, that one take knowledge into account as rigorously and in as unlimited a way as possible, but the moment of the decision, of responsibility as such, is not a moment of knowing, and neither, consequently, is it a moment that depends on what this knowledge of norms might have to teach us.
Antigone knows the truth of her brothers. She knows they are both despicable hateful people not worthy of respect. She knows that Creon acted out of duty toward the state and his role as leader, rather than out of any inherent will to honor a hero. And still, still she decides to continue her march towards death. It is with full knowledge of the artificiality of her situation that she marches inevitably towards her suicide. There is no other option for her. It is the role that was written. She must negotiate between the negotiability of her own existence and the non-negotiability of her situation.
While at a physical level, her course of action does not change, at an existential level it is wholly different. We see this existential transformation so clearly when she says to Creon:
Yes, I am ugly! It’s demeaning, isn’t it, the shouting, the fighting over scraps? Papa only became beautiful afterwards, when he was really sure, in the end, that he had killed his father, that he had slept with his mother, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, could save him. Then he grew calm, very suddenly, almost smiling, and he became beautiful. It was finished. He only had to close his eyes to never see any of you again! Oh, your faces, your sorry-looking faces, all candidates for happiness! You are the ugly ones, even the most beautiful of you. You all have something ugly in the corner of your eye, or clinging to your mouth. . .You think you can order me to do anything?
I hear in these words an echo of the great late 20th century existential text “It is only after you have lost everything, that you are free to do anything.”
In the end, Creon sounds the most reasonable. Not because he is right, or because his rational arguments are more true, but because anyone who embodies Antigone, is not sitting in a theatre. The Antigones are all dead or locked up, or about to be dead or locked up. They are the unrelenting. The uncompromising. The Invisible. They may put on the mask but they know it is only a tool. Perhaps they are not all dead or locked up. Perhaps it is possible to wear the mask with full knowledge of the absurdity and inherent deceit of that act and still remain authentic in ones actions.
Regardless, their existence is a constant negotiation between life and death. Not at the physical level, that is true for all beings. But at an existential level. At the level of the soul they must constantly negotiate between that which will cause their death and that which will give them life. They must do this in full knowledge that what might give the soul life could swiftly bring death to the body. These two, the soul and body, continue on down the path of life together, each at every moment risking the death of the other. This is the ongoing negotiation of the awakened soul in the social sphere.
As NOFX asks, “Even if it’s easy to be free, what’s your definition of Freedom?”
disillusioned
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006There was a debate going on about New York Centrism in the theatre blogosphere. Some good points were made. Some bad points were made. Tempers rose and then settled again. You know, a blargument. The most interesting response came from Dan Trujillo who decided to put the proverbial money where his mouth was and create an artistic response to the discussion.
What I enjoy about his piece is that it is a genuine response. It takes an event and processes it, then creates something born of the decay. Something new and beautiful birthed from the dead matter of an argument. An understandable reaction from a playwright who is also a new again father. And there is something more to it as well.
Dan concludes his piece by citing his source material. The various posts on the argument, and this article from November 2001. New York Theatre is Dead it cries over and over again missing its own point. New York Theatre is not dead. New York Theatre, like all theatre, is speaking to a specific localized audience. The theatre is not dead. The audience is. Now before anyone gets all up in arms let me say that I am including myself here as the audience. For I am part of that audience. And I am as guilty of my own death as anyone else.
I was talking with my friend Yuval, who is directing the site specific Italian piece I mentioned, yesterday. We got to talking about the differences between European and American audiences. Now, obviously these were generalizations, but I think they are important, taken with the understanding that they contain no nuance whatsoever. The basic difference, we thought, came down to a matter of engagement. The European theatre goer comes to a show asking “What are you going to show me?” While the American(New York) audience member sits smugly saying “I dare you to break past my jaded disillusionment.”
There is a general unwillingness to truly engage a work. “You can’t do that to MY opera” or “They are DESTROYING Shakespeare” is heard all too often. But what is truly being destroyed? Perhaps it is the quiet set of assumptions that the audience has built up that are being challenged. Shakespeare will never be “destroyed,” his works will still be there on the shelf like new waiting for the next generation to open them up. So what is “destroyed” is an unwillingness to engage in a true negotiation with a text. What is destroyed is a sense of comfort. But whoever said art should be comfortable. Even “experimental” works are a specific genre that conform to certain rules so an audience knows what they are getting into when they go see “experimental” theatre.
New York theatre is not dead, but it is produced for a dead audience. Does this mean theatre does not work for a New York audience, of course not. It works all too well. The creators being a part of that audience know all too well the tropes and gimmicks to use in order to illicit reaction from the jaded New Yorker. It works. But it works on the surface. The typical New Yorker matches, in many ways, the geography of Manhattan. Divided on all sides from its neighbors, it presents a tough and inhospitable exterior, while secretly hiding within it the glorious repose of Central Park. My problem with a lot of theatre in this city is that it speaks to the Divide, or to the grime, but never approaches the soul.
The origins of Western Drama are in religious ceremony. As far from that beginning as we get, as secular as the medium becomes, that origin is always there. That foundational place is always already in the text, an echo weaving its way in and through every production. The production may embrace or reject that but it is always there.
In the days following the trade center attacks, I saw the soul of New York bared. Tremendous acts of giving and hope and honesty that made my native hippy Californians look like cynics. But all too soon the masks went back on, the facade returned and life went on. But life went on too calmly I feel. There have been countless docudramas and documentaries about that event. I have lit more than my fair share of WTC attack inspired works. But there is always a distance. The facade is always there. The docudramas hide behind a tough gritty exterior while the abstract works flow with the rivers. But nothing I have seen truly captures the heart, that raw open spirit that is jealously guarded and kept safe. It is as if the event itself has been passed over in favor of recycling old modes of storytelling, even though the event itself destabelized the very foundation of those modes of storytelling.
Everything returned to normal. A little less awake. A little less engaged. Perhaps we drank a bit more and said a bit less. A local tragedy was turned into a national symbol. The scared little monkeys in Michigan with their guns and militias run around screaming for the heads of the terrorists, while we calmly go to work every day in the buildings where anthrax was delivered or over the bridges that are primary targets. We think nothing of it. And neither does our art. And that is precisely the problem.
I am not sure of a solution. Part of this is my impetus to work in Europe and see if there is some kind of dialog I can work up in my projects. Are there aspects of visual storytelling inherent to each side of the Atlantic that the other can learn from? Are my idealized notions just that, or is there some truth to the situation? What is that truth? What is the role of the American artist in a global community that increasingly disapproves of America. These thoughts keep me up at night. At least when I am not up drafting.
Versione Italiano
Friday, September 22nd, 2006I had a meeting yesterday for a Site Specific piece I will be lighting in January. It is a new translation of a work by composer Salvatore Sciarrino. The piece will be performed in the Teatro at the Columbia University Italian Academy. While the space has a traditional proscenium theatre in the room, we will not be using it. At least not for performers. We may configure the room placing the audience on the stage, although that is still under discussion.
The project looks to be quite exciting. Very “unconventional” in style. I enjoy the site specific works. I have done a fair number of them. It always poses its own challenges. One can not put lights where one may ideally want them, so different solutions must be arrived at. Plus, one of the greatest things about a site specific project, is the site itself. The production must negotiate with the space in a wholly different manner than in traditional theatrical endeavors. It is a kind of dialog between the work and the space, whereas traditional theatre spaces serve more as framing devices for monologues.
I know the director from Berkeley, although we have never worked together before. We have a number of friends in common from the Berkeley Ex-Pat Theatre community and run into each other every so often. The set and costume designers are both friends of mine from NYU.
The show goes up in January for only two performances. A short run, but should be quite the experience. January looks like it will be a busy month for me. This project, then I will be assisting on an Opera down in Virginia. I am lighting a ballet in New York right when I get back from Virginia. After that I have a small Off-Broadway play, unless the dates change again, after that. So much variety, I can hardly contain myself!
What I am doing in the interim I wrote about here, in case you want to catch any of my shows. I am quite excited about my upcoming projects. It is very nice to have such a positive feeling about the work one is doing. Especially when, as a freelancer, one has no real control over what the work is.
Drafting Day
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006I have been drafting the lights for Windows for a good part of today and yesterday. I don’t think I have written much if anything about drafting here, but it is certainly no less important to the design process than anything else.
Since many of my readers are not lighting designers, I will take a moment to define relevant terms.
Drafting: consists of the technical drawings that lighting and scenic designers draw up to communicate the physical aspects of the design to the technicians. A lightplot gives very precise information to the electricians about what kind of lights go where, how they should be controlled by the lighting control system, how they are plugged in, what color they receive or any accessories, like color changers, patterns or iris.
Worksheets: The working drawings executed by a lighting designer to determine the precise angles of the lighting instruments. These show where the individual lights go and become organized as part of a whole lighting system. They are then translated into the lightplot.
I know a lot of designers who do not enjoy drafting or doing worksheets. They find it the tedious work that one does before the fun design work. As a result they often do not take enough time in this part of the process and often run into major problems once in the theatre. It is possible to have every move one makes in a theatre be determined prior to entering the building. This is important because time is of the essence. It is possible to work out on paper everything necessary to do the lighting designers work. The only surprises should come from errors, like scenery not built to the proper specifications.
I love doing worksheets. It is a wonderful negotiation with the scenery. It is a fun process of discovery in terms of how the light moves in this particular scenic world. Every good set contains within it the lighting. Much of the work of a lighting designer is to find the lighting inherent to the set that most effectively aids the storytelling of the play.
The set for Windows is fairly straight forward. Two scenic walls that bring some interesting angles into a generic rectilinear stage space. Upstage are a series of lightboxes. We are planning on using color as a major storytelling device and these lightboxes will be a key element to that aspect of the visual storytelling.
One of the major challenges to this design comes neither from the scenery nor from the complexity of the text. At least not at first. The lighting grid, as is the case all over New York, is very low, less than 12 feet from the stage floor. The irony of small, specifically short, spaces is that they require a lot more lighting instruments to illuminate the space than do larger spaces. One could conceivably light a warehouse or a spanish fortress with fewer lights than one needs for a small New York stage.
On top of this, the play has many locations and it flows in and out of memory, so even the same location might not be the same place. This necessitates a wide breadth in terms of the lighting palette. As a result, one must be rather precise with the drafting of the lights. And as precise as one is, there are sacrifices to be made. One must guess what the staging will be like and all one can do is hope the guess is correct.
Spending time on the drafting outside the theatre means more time can be spent in the theatre doing the composition. The fun work. Drafting the lights is like a painter laying out their palette. One chooses not only colors, but also if one will use oils or acrylics for the subject at hand. Is one using traditional brushes or perhaps a palette knife? Changes might happen mid process, but the lighting designer, like the painter, wants the majority of these decisions to be made prior to beginning the composition.
