“Absolutely,” I replied.

But what does that word professional mean? Certainly getting paid for work is one commonly used definition of professional. But I have a hunch most people would see a slight difference between my niece and Idina Menzel. What does it mean to be a professional?

I know a lot of so called professionals, with memberships to their respective unions, working in the theater and making most of their money from other sources. Some are fortunate enough to teach, or assist more advanced professionals, but others wait tables, drive cabs, build websites, or assemble electronics. Clearly then making money can not be the only limiting factor when determining whether one is a professional.

Perhaps then we should look to something more ephemeral. Dedication could be one way of looking at a professional. Many professionals have dedicated all their time and energy to perfecting their craft and pursuing a career.

This line of reasoning only goes so far. We are left with the issue of those untalented yet dedicated folks who never get work but persist nonetheless and have more tenacity than many working professionals. At the same time, dedication becomes complicated by those who have the right connections to regularly get work despite a lack of interest or talent.

So dedication then, and even talent, are not enough to make one a professional.

Perhaps this question is being asked in the wrong fashion. Perhaps the issue is not about defining whether one is a professional or not. Perhaps a more interesting question is “What is professionalism?”

Perhaps being a professional is one of attitude and approach. Are you one time? Do you complete your work to the best of your ability and resources? Are you polite and courteous? Do you work towards the common goal of creating strong work? Do you make agreements and stick with them? Do you follow accepted industry practices? Do you set standards for your work and seek to exceed them? Are you constantly striving to improve your craft?

In the end, being a professional is something one self identifies as. It is not an absolute. It is a way of being. A state of mind.

Many people in the theater, especially outside major theater towns like New York, are talented amateurs. They might have one or two companies they work with regularly and they may do good work, but they are not professionals. This does not mean they are better or worse than anyone else. It simply means the center of gravity for their life is somewhere else. The work is community theater. I do not mean this in a pejorative or diminutive sense. I mean it is theater for the community of which these actors, directors, and designers are a part. That is a very valuable thing, but I am not certain it is professional.

Companies which refuse standard contract clauses like right of first refusal for a designer on a world premier are not playing hardball. They are demonstrating a lack of professionalism. A designer who imposes their “ideas” on a reluctant director and creative team who do not understand the design is not clever or innovative, they are displaying a lack of professionalism.

A professional, in a collaborative art form, must play well with others, deliver their work on time and be complete. They must be creative, if not innovative, and never stop trying to improve. Perhaps defining a professional is like defining pornography. I can’t give you a list of adjectives, but I know it when I see it.

Over the past few weeks we have repeatedly heard the phrase “witness to history” with regards to events in present day Egypt. Since January 25th the common people gathered in Tahrir Square, itself a literal narrow place, in protest of their totalitarian government. This weekend they were delivered from that modern day Pharaoh. How appropriate then that Tahrir translated into English means “Liberation.”

The value of spirituality lies in the ability of metaphor to shed a light on aspects of our lives which are lacking or perhaps, more importantly, on aspects of our life where we lack gratitude. Far and away the situation of most Jews on the planet today is so far removed from the situation dealt with in Exodus as to bear a kinship in name alone. Yet even sixty years ago things did not look so good.

Times change.

The darkness of a tunnel can be foreboding when looking to the side at the imprisoning walls or backwards at the evidence of a long journey. Yet like that narrow place in Egypt it is only temporary. Up ahead shines a light. Outside the tunnel it is a clear and beautiful day.

In 2008 I watched as project after project I had been asked to light lost its funding and either cancelled entirely or reduced from an Off-Broadway to a Showcase contract. Projects fell apart and companies cut seasons. It was not a fun period. By the end of the year I felt brutalized by the economics of theater. Not one year before I was riding high on a fully booked schedule that had me darting back and forth across the country and across the Atlantic. I had no idea what was to come next.

At the end of 2008 I made a rather rash decision. The pretext I used was one of optimism, but the real cause was far from that. My career, it appeared from where I stood, had fallen apart. Time to put down the cards, round up the remaining chips, and go home. There was an air of defeat that I felt which was honestly a quite novel experience for me. Or at least it had been so long it felt new.

Needless to say, the proximate cause of my return to California dissolved in a blaze of glory in rather short order. Add to that a continuing downward trend in the economics of art and things looked bleak. Companies were scaling back on travel expenses. What had made my first year on the West Coast financially viable, the fact that I was for all intents and purposes not working on the West Coast, was now gone. 2010 was going to be rough.

2010, much to my surprise, was far more interesting than I would have first expected.

My friend Mark took over as Artistic Director of a small opera company in the area. We had met a few years before when I was the lighting assistant at SF Opera and he was an assistant director. We had done one show together since that time. As he took over the company he asked if I would light their season. The company was traveling through its own narrow place when Mark took over. The budgets were tightened to the breaking point and they had just lost their long time venue.

Mark found a new venue, twice the size of their last one, and took the reigns of the company directing a new production of Don Giovanni. The show was a hit selling out its brief run and, as if rounding that last corner in a dark tunnel, light began to shine in. I lit three more shows for Mark’s company that year.

The end of the year brought another interesting collaboration. Director Jon Tracy, who had seen my work several times through projects I had done with his fiancee, asked me to light his newest work. The sequel to his, then running, outdoor adaptation of The Iliad. This would be the second chapter, The Odyssey. It was a phenomenal project both on purely artistic merits and for the quality of the collaboration. Of The Earth finished out the year to raving critical success.

While not the best year by economic standards it was quite satisfying creatively.

Finding myself in a bit of a narrow place financially, my deliverance came through creativity. What saved me was, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel. A 2K Fresnel perhaps, gelled in L201.

While the financial trials of an American pale next to the struggles of the oppressed to speak freely, they are for each a Mitzrayyim. We can only observe our fellow humans in their tunnels lost in the darkness. It up to each of us, as individuals, to turn our heads away from the past and look up.

The first time I freelanced full time, well half a year to be honest, was 2005, the year after I finished gradschool. Half a year at SF Opera and half a year freelancing. I did my taxes myself. Mixed income sources from two states. It was a mess. Having never had most of my income from 1099 sources before I was not prepared for how much I needed to have saved in order to pay the taxes. W2s are easy. Money is withheld at each paycheck and at tax time you settle up the balance. For me I had the whole bill all at once. Yikes!

I spent the next few months stashing everything away until I had enough to pay my, what felt to me, rather large tax bill. There must be an easier way.

The next year I got myself an accountant. Nice guy. Treats his clients on a sliding scale based on income and takes on a lot of artists. “Don’t worry,” he said when I first met with him, “I make my money with investment bankers so I can help guys like you out.” Awesome.

It took me a couple of years to really get my system down in terms of breaking up expenses into categories that make sense, how to notate per diem and travel days for him and so forth. By 2008 I had my system in place.

Now it’s easy. I just email him a text file with all my numbers and he sends me back a dollar amount to be made out to state and/or federal tax boards.

While I said it takes me less than an hour there, in truth, there is a bit more work than that. Sure the final compiling of numbers takes almost no time at all, but I enter data regularly, all year long.

I maintain a spreadsheet to track all my expenses, personal and business. Yes I know I could use quicken or quickbooks or any number of software programs. I like my spreadsheet. I set it up to do various totals and calculations that I find useful or interesting. And the layout works really well for me. Sure it is missing a few bells and whistles and may not be the prettiest of things, but it gets the job done. And done well.

By entering the information regularly, I try to do end of each day, but on busy tech schedules it often gets relegated to Mondays, I only ever have five or ten minutes of work at a time. Usually less.

Spreading the work out over the course of the year was one of the best choices I ever made with managing money. No one likes a huge pile of work. Certainly not me. Yet that was what I faced that first year, and a not-insignificant pile the year or two after as I smoothed out my system. It is no fun. It leads me to waiting until the last minute, because really, sifting through a huge pile of receipts is a fucking pain in the ass. Ten minutes, five minutes, two minutes, no problem.

Learning what is an expense and what is not has been a huge lesson. I am very conservative with my numbers. If there is a grey area I tend to err on the side of not counting it. But one of the best tricks I learned was to organize my life in such a way that I could maximize my expenses.

When I lived in New York nearly all of my friends were business colleagues, designers, directors, choreographers, producers, and a few actors, etc. As such my social life revolved around work and nearly every dinner party, round of drinks, and so on was in the context of talking about one project or another. Nailing down design details or finishing up a few last bits of production meeting at the restaurant or bar was a typical evening. After all, this is New York where most business of this kind happens in public.

California has been quite a bit different. A smaller percentage of my social life is inherently work related. There are fewer late night, post-tech, restaurant excursions. The relative percentage of the categories of expenses has shifted dramatically. A lot are quite a bit less. But then, when I work in New York, I get the highest daily travel allowance the IRS allows. It all balances out.

Navigating taxes is certainly not fun but I have learned quite a bit through trial and error. The most important thing I learned was to get an accountant. In matters of great importance there is no suitable replacement for a professional.

The two biggest constraints when designing are what lights do you have access to and where can you put them. In fact that is design, placing lights in useful positions, pointing them in useful directions, and turning them on at useful moments. Without the proper information it becomes near to impossible for us to do our job. If a designer can not do their job effectively it means more work for everyone and no one ends up happy.

On the question of inventory, being off by one or two lights is no big deal. In fact, I know of plenty of venues which hold back 2% or so of their inventory such that when the designer inevitably uses every light available to them and then needs to add a special, they can do so easily. But 60% practically is your inventory. Two dozen lights is another full stage system of crosslight, or backlight, or two systems of frontlight. It is the difference between “oh, well this will work well enough” and “Fantastic, this will work perfectly.”

We are always overcoming handicaps. There is never enough money or time or crew. It is always a tight squeeze to make it to opening. There is no reason at all to make it more difficult by not updating paperwork.

The issue of position placement in this case was not a paperwork concern. It was a venue guidelines concern. At one point a scenic wall was located such that I had access to place one boom. And that was fine. After a few discussions we decided that opening up the wall to allow a mirrored boom on the other side would be advantageous to the look of the show. And so we did.

The operators of the venue decided that, because the scenery was no longer obstructing the main curtain, they would rent out the space to corporate clients on dark days and tell them they had access to the main. Which they wanted. This, of course, was discovered after the drawings were submitted and the design complete.

A few days later I am told the booms need to move. In the rush to figure out a solution they end up placed in an inelegant location. On top of that, the larger inventory includes a larger house rep plot which impacts several other lighting ideas I had placed in other locations. So the quick fix move of a boom to a box boom, doubly impacts some other lights which can’t be hung as drawn due to rep plot concerns.

For me, the impact, until focus this afternoon when I actually survey the carnage, is a few quick drawing revisions and a couple of phone calls. For the ME it is hours of work and labor, along with the other electricians who also have to move these lights twice.

Further, because several lights are essentially moving to where there is room rather than where they want to be, there is a fine chance they will need to move again at focus or during notes sessions. This is unfortunate.

Had all of these factors been known clearly in advance the design would have been quite different. Had the use of sidelight truly been impossible, as it is proving, I would have used diagonals. Had I known about the additional rep units, I would have made different choices with regards to systems versus specials in the plot. With different angles, my color choices would have been different.

In short, I would have submitted a different design.

While the result we end up with will, I am sure, be perfectly serviceable for the show, it is a less than optimal situation. Making theater is hard work. There is no need to make it harder through unclear communication and out of date paperwork.

A few month ago I got an email from the producer of a show I lit three years ago. The production is going to be remounted in Connecticut next summer. This is fantastic news. I truly enjoyed the project and my collaborators, it is a strong piece that deserves a wider audience. This also means I have at least one show definitely scheduled more than 8 months out. I have soft offers going well into 2012, but uncontracted and thus not yet firmly placed in my calendar.

When dates are uncertain and contracts are unsigned it is important to keep an awareness of projects without letting them be firm limiters on one’s calendar. This is an almost constant dance of finding out which soft offers and potential contracts (if only we can get the funding!) become real and what new concrete projects will come in the meantime.

This December was mostly free for me as few days ago. My last show of the year opens December 3rd. The following few weeks would mean a nice bit of downtime from production to get my bookkeeping and paperwork in shape, start preproduction work on 2011 projects, and generally get a bit of rest. Then the phone rang two days ago. A play. In Dallas. Focuses on December 6th. That’s three days after my last contracted show opens and eliminates much of that downtime I had previously thought I would have in December.

This is the way of things. It can be a roller coaster at times. Sometimes nerve wracking. Sometimes thrilling. Never boring.

I remember November of 2007. I had almost my whole year penciled in in my calendar. It was going to be awesome, filled with a wide array of regional and Off-Broadway projects, a season with a dance company, and several experimental pieces. Then the bubble burst. One by one I got calls from producers that they were unable to secure funding for such and such a project and it would be postponed indefinitely. By January 1st 2008 over 80% of the projects I had lined up were gone.

Over the course of that year new projects slowly filled gaps in my schedule. I made it through the year, scraping at times, but pulling through. Freelancing is never easy, but the Great Recession sure makes it that much more challenging.

Even during good economic times the schedule of a freelancer is never easy. You sign a contract for a project because you have a hole in your schedule to fill, it’s not the best, but its work. Then, two days later, your dream project falls in your lap and the dates are identical. Managing the overlap is an art unto itself.

Many designers hire assistants to carry them through the overlaps. Fees being what they are, one must calculate if the overhead of hiring an assistant is worth the value of the contract.

Managing multiple projects artistically is the easy part. We learn tricks for finding inspiration so we can keep moving ahead with our design work. Managing multiple projects logistically is a whole different beast. As a freelancer I can manage my preproduction work largely on my own schedule. But the one thing I can not manage is when the show opens.

Being a freelancer you share many of the same skills with a project manager. You are in charge of making and maintaining multiple projects on numerous timelines for a variety of clients. It is very different than simply running a small business. You have, at times, the administrative workload of managing a large business and maintaining a full time creative life.

No one ever said freelancing was easy. But as a student, and before I freelanced full time, I tended to think of the difficulty coming from an artistic direction. Relative to the administrative and scheduling aspects of the work, the art is the easy part. Add the increased volatility of our current economy and the roller coaster gets a lot steeper, faster, and jolts your around harder.

The new rendering engine is so much more powerful, in fact, that I ran into a few problems right off the bat. Nemetschek claims that their new engine is many times faster than the old one. Yet when I did a side by side Final Quality Renderworks test the new engine took much longer to produce its result. Curious I looked further into this and discovered that the actual image was much better quality and, in order to get a quality equivalent to the old FQR, I had to set everything in custom to “Low Quality” and turn off Ray Tracing. Then the engine was faster. In short, the only way to get a true apples to apples comparison is to put the new RW on its lowest settings and the old Renderworks on its highest settings.

What’s that Ray Tracing thing he mentioned?

That’s right, the new Renderworks adds Ray Tracing functionality, meaning you can set how many times an individual photon bounces off objects. This gives renderings a more natural quality as bounce light is included in the rendering of the final image. This does increase rendering time and can cause a simple scene to take a fair amount of time to render. But you definitely get what you pay for. A little more time for a much higher quality rendering is, in my opinion, worth the wait.

One of the first things I did with the new Renderworks was rerender my lighthouse drawing. Here is where I hit the first, and only real snag, in the new system. Because the rendering engine deals with light and textures in an entirely new manner, the old textures did not map properly. As such, I had to rebuild my textures from scratch. This will cause some users a bit of frustration during the initial upgrade, but the final results will be well worth it.

A side by side comparison of my rendering of the lighthouse in RW2010 and RW2011

As you can see from the above comparisons not only are the shadows softer and more true but the detail in the drafting is much clearer. I did not change any of the physical drafted objects for the rerender. Only lighting sources and textures were changed.

The new Renderworks allows the importation of HDR images from which lighting information can be extracted and used for lighting your 3D models. Several HDRIs are included with the basic RW package and the user can import their own as well. Not only can this be a quick way to mock up basic lighting conditions, it also allows for the creation of really nice looking white models.

Turning off Textures and Colors in the Custom RW palette and then turning off ambient light from the Lighting Options Palette, setting indirect lighting to one bounce and Environmental lighting to HDRI white can give results like this:

Whitemodel of my 3D drafting of a house built from shipping containers. HDRI Environmental lighting and one directional light source.

In addition to vastly improved lighting options, the texturing capabilities of Renderworks 2011 are significantly improved. While imports of older files will require a rebuild of the textures, the user should find this worth the effort. Not only are simple colored textures improved, but the bumpmapping is better as well. One thing that could use some improvement is the transparency function. I have yet to find a suitable combination of settings which give adequate results for something like a translucent fabric.

The ability to add Decals allows for greater dynamic range of rendering options as well. A decal is an image file placed on top of an object with another texture. This allows the user to put graffiti or a poster on a wall for example.

Emitter options allow the user to set a reference white color temperature for light emitting objects. This is useful in a number of ways, not the least of which is when creating a texture that emits light allowing one to approximate fluorescent tubes, video screens, or lit walls.

Along with the new and expanded tools in the lighting and texturing areas. The artistic Renderworks options are newly redesigned as well. Users who are familiar with the old functionality of the Artistic RW settings will need to adapt to the new system, but the options are robust and give interesting and useful options for rendering one’s drawings.

Obviously the new Renderworks Cinema 4D engine is primarily of interest to those users who draw in 3D regularly. However, given the improvements in the 3D drawing environment in Vectorworks 2011, I expect an increasing number of users to begin working in 3D and using the new rendering engine.

Quick 3D sketch with Background image and Decal. Background image courtesy SnaPsi

One of the key differences between being a freelancer and being an employee is that a freelancer is typically given a deadline on a project but is not specified when and where they are supposed to work. In exchange for this freedom of working, there is the uncertainty of when and where new work will arrive to fill in the gaps. The employee takes on an imposed work schedule and place of working for the security of a steady paycheck.

For those of us who work in live performance, the realities of our work is more of a hybrid. While the prep work can be done on our own schedule, the real work of lighting the show happens in a prescribed time and location that we have no choice over. At the same time there is no guarantee of ongoing employment. Should we not find work we have not been employees and are thus not eligible for unemployment insurance and other benefits that regular employees have. This is why I am strong proponent of building a solid financial foundation to your freelance career.

These unfortunate realities are outweighed by a love of the work. If that is not the case I would encourage you to find alternate means of employment immediately. For those of us who love the work enough to overcome these concerns we must put our focus on scheduling and picking projects that make the sacrifices worth it.

I have been offered several pieces to consider designing for next year. It is very flattering to be asked to light these rather interesting projects. 5 operas, 3 plays, and a couple of dance pieces thus far. While this is nothing approaching a full year’s employment, from the perspective of mid-June the year before, it is exciting. And all the projects are interesting. A rare occurrence to be perfectly honest.

I have been finding myself wanting to design more opera recently and the universe appears to be providing for that desire. Next month I will design my third opera of the year. There are a few more potentially happening before the year is out, but no signed contracts yet.

I find it fascinating that while I have been asked to light these rather interesting projects, there is no guarantee they will happen. It is the nature of freelancing. The companies could get into financial trouble, I could get an alternate offer for the same production schedule and have to balance out the two possibilities weighing artistic and financial considerations, or any number of other temporal concerns might arise.

The life of a freelancer is never easy. Even when all the projects are compelling there can still be scheduling and timing issues. When production schedules overlap you need to find a balance between satisfying all of your artistic collaborators, making a living, and creating good work. Being a freelance designer can be like putting together a 3 dimensional jigsaw puzzle where there is no guarantee that the pieces actually fit.

Last March I received more offers than I could take. At least three projects I was asked to design had perfectly overlapping production schedules. Even after eliminating the impossible, I ended up with a schedule where I was lighting a circus show during the day and cleaning up a play in previews at night.

This summer is rather light on the work front giving me a nice stretch of time to relax. I have an opera and a few special events to design. While I appreciate the time off, a luxury often passed up by many designers, I can only hope that I will not face the opposite problem when the projects start coming in and I find myself with five offers, all of which open the same weekend. I have been in that position before and it is not fun.

How the future shapes up is all in the timing. The only control I have over my calendar is the power to say no. Nothing about freelancing for live performance is easy. But I can’t think of another job whose payoff could be greater as far as I am concerned.

I am often surprised by the number of designers who do not have their own headset. For me it seems like a non-question. Given that we are sitting at a techtable 10 hours a day for days on end it seems natural that we would want our headset, which we are wearing the majority of the time, to be something known, familiar, and comfortable.

Just like I would not try drafting on someone else’s computer I would not want to start writing light cues without my headset. A lot of this comes down to familiarity. When freelancing, so much of the day to day routine is managing new and different situations. As such I like to keep as much as possible known and knowable. Because the headset is such a basic tool I make sure to bring my own.

There are several reasons for wanting my own headset. There are the miserable situations of the theater which has some ancient headset that keeps falling off your head. Perhaps it is slick from decades of other people’s sweat caked into the ear muff. There are the less than ideal situations where the earmuff and mic can only sit on one side, and it’s not the side you want it on. There are the fine situations where the intercom system is brand new and everything fits perfectly. The trouble is, you often do not know which of these you are walking into ahead of time.

Bringing your own headset avoids any of these problems.

The hygiene issue was a major factor for me. How many people have sweated through an exceptionally hot day or coughed into the mic of the house headset? Just a few? Hundreds? Who knows? But I am less than interested in picking up last year’s flu from a headset.

While the hygiene issue is, in reality, a fairly minor concern, of practical concern to the making of art is the control of your environment and experience. If your attention is focused on keeping the headset on your head, you are not as focused on making good work. If you have to fumble with your earmuff, or take it off every time you want to hear the person next to you, you have less time and attention available for solving problems.

In the end that is what it comes down to. Time. And attention.

We are working under rather strict time constraints in a medium that is constantly shifting before us, and thus requires total attention. Anything we can do to organize our experience such that maximum attention is paid to the work at hand will pay us back many times the investment. A few extra seconds could be all it takes to have the “ah ha” moment that pulls the difficult Act 2 lighting into place.

A headset, like our drafting technology, paperwork, cheat sheets, magic sheets, and so forth is a deeply personal thing that will be different for every designer. We all have our own needs and desires and comfort levels. Knowing what those are for ourself, and solving those needs ahead of time, gives us the extra room during tech to create wonderful things rather than simply put out fires and get through it.

This is just one of the things I carry along with me when I travel to a gig. For a more detailed list look here.

Do you bring your own headset to tech? Why or why not?

This can be a dilemma many people face but it is exacerbated in the fields of theater, opera, and dance. LORT, the bargaining organization for regional theaters, has the official position that they do not owe designers a living wage. The theaters, which are ostensibly in the business of making art, do not feel responsible for paying the artists they employ enough money to live reasonable lives. Leaving aside the issue that the upper management and staff of these organizations do typically make a good living wage, this idea is flawed to its very core. The artists, the people who actually make the art, are not expected to be able to live off the work. Something is wrong here.

The result of this brilliant financial strategy on the part of regional theaters is that not only will they save thousands of dollars each year (yes only thousands, and intended sarcastically) but they will drive talented people out of the industry. This friend of mine is no small potatoes. He is highly respected within the New York theater community, has won awards, gets flown around the world to light shows, and yet finds the economics so troubling that he can not both live well and do the work he loves. He is not alone.

Many people I know, some very talented designers, work in fields not of their choosing because the economics of the field they love are so terrible. The issue does not limit itself to designers. One of the best master electricians I have ever had the pleasure of working with left non-profit theater to go work in a more corporate setting because the administration would not consider giving him a raise. In most situations, a worker who delivered under budget and ahead of schedule, all while pleasing the clients he interfaced with would be rewarded. But then, he worked on the wrong side of the building. Art, it seems, is not valued by arts organizations. Yet the top paid administrators made easily five times his salary. And the theater community lost one of the best electricians I have known.

There comes a point when the question arises, is this worth it? Is it worth working 80+ hour weeks for months on end only to end up with barely enough money to cover rent and bills? There is a bit of mental psychology that must be done when working like this. There is a rule I once learned the hard way by breaking it myself. I fast realized if I wanted to keep going I could never do it again. Do not translate into an hourly wage. Typically the results, in our fee for hire work, are far below minimum wage. The show I calculated out for ended up somewhere around thirty cents an hour. And this is at a professional level.

At the Broadway level, the minimum rate for a lighting assistant comes out to just under twenty dollars per hour. Not terrible, but you are working 14 hour days for weeks at a time, so you can have no life while this is going on. At the low end of the scale people have no compunction asking someone with years of experience, an advanced degree, awards, and so on if they would give up two weeks of their life for a fee of a few hundred dollars. It doesn’t hurt to ask, but then if you accept, demands are made on your time that are beyond the pale of reason.

Making a living in the theater is possible. Making a life, not so much. The number of designers who wake up at 50 suddenly realizing they forgot to get married and have kids, or who send their kids off to college knowing less about them than about their assistants, or miss a major wedding anniversary for a technical rehearsal, is far far too much.

We are presented with a bit of a catch-22. The organizations which hire us have stated explicitly that they will not take care of us. It then becomes incumbent upon us to take care of ourselves. But if we do that, and allow ourselves to have a life, we are not working enough to support that life. Something has got to give. Too often, that means talent goes elsewhere.

Perhaps there was a time when the economics of it all were not so unfavorable. But looking around now at the state of the business it appears that the solution does not reside in the non-profit theater world.

Over time, the criteria I use to evaluate projects has gotten more refined, but in truth, more personal. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to projects that fully meet my creative artistic needs. If I am doing a job just for the money, the money better damn well be worth it. Otherwise the project must support my artistic needs.

In these lean economic times finding work has been much more difficult than it has in years past. As a function of this I was on the path for a while of taking a few projects for which I had no artistic connection because I felt I needed the money. The more I thought of this, the more these projects would bother me. Finally, I realized what it was.

As a freelance designer I do not have the luxury of sitting in my studio and creating wholly out my mind. I do not get to generate the project. Rather, I am asked to do a project and I can either accept it or turn it down. While I learned a lot during my years of saying “yes” to everything, I am increasingly learning the value of “No.” This is not the No of negation. Rather this No is an affirmation of the aesthetic viewpoint I want to propagate in the world.

By saying No to projects that I do not wholly believe in I am saying Yes to the projects that I truly want to work on. The more I do this the more I find it has less to do with the specific pieces themselves as it does the people involved and the final product being created. In short, I have discovered that there are only two reasons for taking a project, the People and the Art. Follow those two things and the money will take care of itself.

There are a hand full of directors who I will work with at the drop of a hat and without hesitation because I believe in the work they do. One of these, a long time friend, has a very different aesthetic than I do when it comes to lighting. The process can often be quite a struggle for me as I overcome my own ways of seeing to get behind his eyes. Nonetheless, I believe in his work and larger vision strongly enough that this has sufficient artistic merit for me to take the project.

Working for the money, all you have to fall back on when things get difficult is the thought of that paycheck. Working for the Art and for the People keeps in clear view that what you are working for is something larger than yourself. It is, in fact, bigger than everyone involved.

As Moss Hart has famously said: “I have had many successes and many failures in my life. My successes have always been for different reasons, but my failures have always been for the same reason: I said yes when I meant no.”