Shows are tomorrow, Thursday at 9:30pm and Friday at 11pm both at the Ohio Theatre. Ajax is being presented as part of Targety Margin’s Hellenic Laboratory. Ticket information here.
Archive for January, 2007
I was here all day in Tech
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007A good send off
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007Mother GOOSE! is packed away in a truck on its way to Arizona. I will not be going to Arizona, but my lighting will. My friend Ben is traveling with the company as a stage manager and lighting director. His job is to as faithfully as possible recreate my lighting for the Ballet. This means is in a few days my lighting will be up before audiences in two different states.
Sending a piece out on tour like this can be a tricky proposition. Not every venue will meet all the lighting needs for the piece. The result is that items must be placed in a hierarchy of needs such that the core ideas are maintained even when it is not possible to recreate the whole and complete work.
The same thing happens with staging as well. Some venues are bigger, some smaller. As a result the staging must expand or contract to meet those changing needs. Taking a piece on tour is a powerful reminder that the term “site specific” is a bit of a misnomer. All works are site specific. Every piece of entertainment, be it theatre, opera or dance is all dependent upon the specific site that it is located in.
Very often these sites are quite similar. All proscenium stages have a regularity to them. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Certain shots simply will not work in certain houses. Some places the proportion is such that the entire work needs to be restaged so that it feels right, even if it fits at a literal level. It can be a tricky balancing act.
The Last Word has its first preview tonight. My work with the play is done. I am going to stop in again on Wednesday to go over a few things with the stage manager about maintaining the design, but the work part for me is finished.
The floor was white tile, but the intent was to make it look old and dingy. That, for various reasons, did not happen until the night before the final dress rehearsal on Sunday. It is an interesting thing lighting a set that is still being finished. During tech we had our rehearsals and then in the evening afterwards were work calls to finish the scenery. What this meant for me was that there was a lot more bounce to the light during tech than there was going to be in the end. As a result I was forced to overexpose the lighting such that when the floor came down in value to its proper level, the lighting would look right.
I loved watching the show on Sunday. I had spent the few days before a little nervous that the value of light on the walls was a little to high relative to that on the performers. I had to keep reminding myself that the walls would get dim when the floor was less reflective. And it worked. I had guessed almost perfectly and the lighting looked exactly as I had intended when I watched the runthrough Sunday evening.
Photograph by Carol Rosegg
I have been up quite late the last few days working on various personal projects as well as tidying up a bunch of work stuff. Two shows I have coming up soon are fairly organic in their process. Of course that does not change the fact that lighting equipment must still be rented and dealt with.
It’s a busy time. I have four projects in the next three weeks. Artfuckers and Operation Ajax are full plays. Then I have a workshop of Ajax at Target Margin for two days. Also, I am assisting on a dance piece at The Danspace Project.
It is a bit intimidating, but somehow it all fits together nicely with days off for one coinciding with runthroughs for another. On the 8th is the official opening of Last Word. After the madness calms down I have a few days with no work in a theatre before I head south to Florida to meet up with the Ballet tour for a weekend of performances. Not Mother GOOSE!, they are performing a selection of their repertory for adult audiences in Delray Beach. And gauging by the weather here, I have a feeling that a Florida beach town will be a wonderful break from New York CIty.
Previews Begin Tuesday
Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Tickets here.
The Gooses are Back
Friday, January 26th, 2007After a long day of tech we are ready for an audience tomorrow. I have not seen the show in two years. I was skeptical how much of it I would remember. We focused the lights and it all started to become familiar. Then, we loaded the disk into the light board and and lo and behold there was the show. I love computers. Keeping my lighting safe and secure for two years only to come back just the same.
It is a curious thing about remounting a show. There are things about the show that get better. You see things you missed, or texture and nuance is added where there was not so much before. There are things that get worse. Some of the light will inevitably feel dull. There are choices that two years later you would not make. So then the whole process becomes one of negotiating between these various currents. Obviously the major ideas and structural aspects of the piece need to remain the same. At the same time one must take those ideas and evolve them into something that feels right, now.
It’s a great kids show, so if you have the little ones I highly recommend coming to see it. It only runs this weekend.
Focusing on Last Words
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007Halfway through focus today for The Last Word I realized that I have never lit a realistic interior. I have lit plenty of interiors, but they have been in musicals or somehow highly stylized spaces. I have lit quite a few realistic exteriors, with Becoming Adele being the most recent. But the realistic interior is something I have only done as a theoretical project in various classes.
Realistic plays enjoy their own degree of complexity and challenge in a way that more abstract works do not. This play is set in a rundown office space with an overhead fluorescent fixture and light through the windows. The light takes the lead from the fluorescent and is cold and soft.
Focus went well today. It was a little slower than I would have liked, but the space is deceptively tricky. So it took longer for the electricians to move around the room than would be ideal. But we got done. I think it will look nice. The trick of course is to maintain the realism of the piece and still have it be dramatically viable. Really this is all behind the scenes stuff. The conversations we had were about relating the scenery to the costumes to the lighting such that we could create the drama in something that through outward appearances looks like nothing special.
This is part of my job that I find fascinating. There used to be an idea about design that if you noticed it, something was wrong. In today’s world that is hardly a rule. In fact many shows work precisely because a costume or a lighting effect is particularly noticeable and calls attention to itself. This is not one of those shows. This is definitely a place where if you notice it, there may well be some thing wrong.
The lighting is also very old fashioned. Well, it is actually a hybrid of old and new. This is perfect for the play itself which deals with generational conflict as a central device through the piece. The color sense is highly modern, very contemporary. Yet the choice of angles could be pulled right out of Stanley McCandless 101.
My thinking about the lighting for this piece has been very strongly focused on the architectural reality of the play. After all, if we design the room right, then all we need do is make that room make visual sense. The set is fantastic. It is just the right balance of depressing and gloom yet still light enough to let this very comedic piece work on the several levels it needs to.
We begin rehearsals in the space tomorrow. So far things have been fairly relaxed, at least so far as I have seen. This promises to be a pleasant experience. Now go buy tickets!
I love my Mac
Monday, January 22nd, 2007[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8]
Upgrade
Sunday, January 21st, 2007I recently installed Camino on my computer and have been using it as my main browser for a couple of days. While it does not have all the supercool extensions of Firefox, it is a hell of a lot faster. So my time on teh intrawubs has been sped up tremendously.
One of the extensions it does not have is rss integration. I had been using Sage for Firefox, which is a very nice feed aggregator. As a result I opened a Bloglines account and easily imported all my Sage feeds. Overall the transition has been very smooth indeed. Although I do sorely miss my ‘undo close tab’ extension. Oh well!
Tomorrow is the lighting load-in for Last Word. The scenery went in today I am told and as there have been no frantic emails, I assume all is well. There was a small change to the scenery this morning. Nothing big, just a slight adjustment to the rotation of the walls. So the electricians are loading in the lighting and then we focus on Tuesday and begin the technical rehearsals that evening.
The run through the other day went very well. Travanti brings an amazing energy to the room. He is also at least as much of a coffee snob as I am so we had a great time discussing beans and brews around New York. I felt it my duty to help the out of town coffee connoisseur traverse the generally bleak landscape that is New York coffee.
This afternoon I saw a run of the first act of Artfuckers. It is looking good. Eduardo and I had a nice chat about the design of the piece. Because the play is set in the new York Art and Fashion scene, we are going to utilize an fashion photography aesthetic/vocabulary to light the piece. Fashion photography is one of my loves and there is such a wide range of styles and aesthetics within it, that to say “fashion photography” does not really narrow it down at all. What it means in this instance is using certain lights that are specific to the fashion/portrait photography world, like softlights and umbrellas. These we will combine with standard theatrical lights to create a lighting vocabulary for the piece.
It is interesting that a lot of fashion photography these days is highly theatrical. Not only does the lighting and styling create dramatic scenes, but the layouts ore often such that a whole story is told like fairy tales or Film Noir or something more abstract. Since there is already so much crossover into theatrical lighting the translation is rather simple.
And in the when it rains it pours department, I load-in and tech Mother GOOSE! at the end of the week and it runs through the weekend. Good grief!
Making light of Information Storage
Sunday, January 21st, 2007Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.While the initial test image consists of only a few hundred pixels, a tremendous amount of information can be stored with the new technique.
The image, a ‘UR’ for the University of Rochester, was made using a single pulse of light and the team can fit as many as a hundred of these pulses at once into a tiny, four-inch cell. Squeezing that much information into so small a space and retrieving it intact opens the door to optical buffering—storing information as light.
[SNIP]
“The parallel amount of information John has sent all at once in an image is enormous in comparison to what anyone else has done before,” says Alan Willner, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and president of the IEEE Lasers and Optical Society. “To do that and be able to maintain the integrity of the signal—it’s a wonderful achievement.”
Howell has so far been able to delay light pulses 100 nanoseconds and compress them to 1 percent of their original length. He is now working toward delaying dozens of pulses for as long as several milliseconds, and as many as 10,000 pulses for up to a nanosecond.
“Now I want to see if we can delay something almost permanently, even at the single photon level,” says Howell. “If we can do that, we’re looking at storing incredible amounts of information in just a few photons.”
Colorful Language
Sunday, January 21st, 2007LANGUAGES divide the spectrum up in different ways. Welsh speakers use “gwyrdd” (pronounced “goo-irrrth”) as a general word for green. Yet “grass” literally translates as “blue straw”. That is because the Welsh word for blue (“glas”) can accommodate all shades of green. English-speaking anthropologists affectionately squish “green” and “blue” together to call Welsh an example of a “grue” language. A few of them think grue languages are spoken by societies that live up mountains or near the equator because ultraviolet radiation, which is stronger in such places, causes a progressive yellowing of the lens. This, the theory goes, makes the eye less sensitive to short wavelengths (those that correspond to the green and blue parts of the spectrum). Unfortunately, though the Welsh do live in a hilly country, it is hardly mountainous enough—let alone sunny enough—to qualify.The ultraviolet theory, however, is just one idea among many in the debate about the psychology of colour. Like many debates in psychology, this one pits congenital, fundamentally genetic, explanations against explanations that rely on environmental determinism. Psychologists in the former camp think people are born with ingrained ideas about how hues are grouped. They believe the brain is preconditioned to pick out the six colours on a Rubik’s cube whatever tongue it is taught to think in. The other camp, by contrast, thinks that the spectrum can be chopped into categories anywhere along its length. Moreover, they suspect that the language an individual learns from his parents is the main explanation for where that chopping takes place.
[SNIP]
There is a fundamental—presumably congenital—distinction, as shown by the fact that the non-linguistic side of the brain distinguishes between blue and green. But there is also a language-mediated one, as shown by the linguistic side’s greater response.
The Stuff Daydreams are made of
Friday, January 19th, 2007Daydreaming seems to be the default setting of the human mind and certain brain regions are devoted to it, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.When people are given a specific task to do, they focus on that task but then other brain regions get busy during down time, the researchers report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
‘There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don’t give people something to do,’ psychologist Malia Mason of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital said in a telephone interview.
When Mason asked people what was happening during this down time, the answer was clear.
‘It’s daydreaming,’ she said. ‘But I find that the vast majority of time, people aren’t having fanciful thoughts. People are thinking about what they have to do later today.’
Her team has chosen to call it stimulus-independent thought or mind wandering.
