Soldier Songs is one of the most beautiful projects I have worked on in a long time. It is harsh and tender and cuts right through to the core of your heart. The music is stunning, the acting and singing wonderful, the staging and production design truly beautiful.
Now we just have to light it.
Performances are this weekend Saturday and Sunday. Seating is limited so I would encourage you to buy tickets early.
Soldier Songs opens next week. I have not written much about it, but it is a very exciting project that I have been looking forward to for some time.
It reunites me with director Yuval Sharon who directed Aida last summer at the Berkeley Opera.
If you like new music, you should check it out!
It has been a crazy time at Berkeley Opera. Aida is coming along well and I am increasingly pleased with it although the hours have been very demanding.
It will be interesting to see how we are received as this is about as unconventional a production of the work as possible.
I suppose I will find out when I take my bow on Saturday night.
It feels as though it has has been quite a while since last I posted more than a link and quote. The trip to California was very good, and very packed. I had several meetings that were very productive. I saw several plays. I met with many friends. I celebrated my grandmother’s 94th birthday. All in all it was a lovely trip. And oh my! The weather. I forget sometimes just how wonderful the weather is in the Bay Area.
Things get rather hectic over here at Light Que 23 as of this afternoon. This week we are workshopping Antigona. There will be a reading on Thursday and Friday nights that may or may not have lighting. Details are still TBD as we are primarily focused on Rumania and getting all that stuff together. I think the play is coming together rather nicely. I have not seen anything since last Monday, but the direction it was going when last I saw a rehearsal and by all reports since it should be quite an exciting show.
I have a big design meeting this weekend for Aida. The director, set designer and I will sit down and do a listen through of the piece while discussing scenic and lighting ideas. It should be a good meeting although the piece is long to begin with and once discussion is added in it may well take the better part of the day. I met with the technical director of the theatre when I was in California and was able to figure out several of the quirky aspects to the space that will at least minimize surprises.
Next Monday we load-in for Fate’s Imagination at the Players Theatre. We had a bit of a snafu as the theatre drawings the set designer received were rather deceptive as to where certain walls were located, so the design had to be reworked for the realities of the space. Quite a lot to do so close to a load-in, but so it goes from time to time. At least we found this out before we were in the space thus the only problem is a time crunch rather than a full rebuild and delayed opening.
So much of this work must be taken on faith. Faith that the drawings are correct, that other people are doing their job, that your work on paper bears out in reality. All of this before even considering an audience and the performative aspects of the show. It feels like the work I do is one long series of hypothetical statements punctuated briefly by the answer of opening night. This “answer” as it were is in many if not most ways incidental to the journey of arriving there.
The hectic schedule continues as we leave for Rumania the same day as the first press preview for Fate’s Imagination. So at least with that one I miss the punctuation. I will be working on another show in another country when it opens. I still get a little surprise when that happens despite it being a fairly regular part of my work flow. By the opening the show is done, and usually has been for several performances. My work is and has been over for some time so really it shouldn’t feel strange. Of course a lot of it is the disappointment in missing out on the party.
I have been working on the lightplot for the revival of Cinderella with New York Theatre Ballet. Largely the plot is the same as last year. However there were some changes in the house plot at Florence Gould Hall and the repertory program that plays with Cinderella is different so the lightplot has changed some.
I think these are all very beneficial changes. Some things have been streamlined, some others expanded. For the most part it has been a matter of maximizing what is available in the palette. The company prefers a very colorful look. This is a fun aesthetic to work in, but the trick is to get the color sense without using so many colors that the light gets muddy. It is very easy with a lot of color to make costumes look old and dingy. The trick is to have a look that is clean and also shows off the dancers, costumes and scenery to the best advantage.
I love working in heavy color environments. Windows was quite the extreme as far as the use of color goes, but it helps make the point. Often, though, I find that direct saturated colors like that are not what is wanted in a colorful space. More the need of the piece is a sense of color. The feel of color is very different than the direct application of heavily saturated colors themselves.
The color sense of a piece is often a key factor in how a piece if perceived. Medea wanted a terse look. It needed a strong but minimal framework to place around the action of the play. The result was heavy use of shadow, black is a very important color in the lighting designers toolbox, and a very contained color palette. The Last Word . . . , a totally different kind of show, had en even tighter color palette. The color varied by less than 1000 degrees Kelvin, with no black.
New York Theatre Ballet can be a tricky aesthetic to nail down. My experience has been that it works best with a sense of color, but when saturated colors are used they are kept in the background. Saturated colors are very present, purples and blues and greens and reds, but the majority of the color work is “invisible.” That is, the colors are tints. A cool white or a warm white, slightly pink or a touch of amber or a pale blue, but no strong color.
It is the careful mixture of these tints, combined with the selective use of saturated colors, that gives the overall piece its color sense. Color can be a difficult thing to get a hold of. One of my reasons for going to NYU for graduate school is the legendary color lecture of John Gleason carried on by Curt Ostermann. And while this can provide all the rules, it then takes hundreds of experiments and breaking of the rules to really get a grasp on it.
Every play or dance or opera is a kind of experiment. Even revivals. They are never definitive, but always propositions. Will this piece resonate with an audience today? What must be done to make it speak in a language accessible today. In many ways dance is the strongest in this regard. There is an immediacy to dance that is a much less common thing in a play. In Opera it is the rare occurrence that it holds that fresh immediacy, but when it does, it is a sight to behold!
The color sense can be a powerful tool to help bring a piece into a framework accessible to the audience. It is a delicate balance to find what is both true to the work and at the same time pulls the audience into that work in a clear and direct manner. Lots of work, but a hell of a lot of fun too.
This summer is looking to be quite exciting on the travel front. I will be working outside of New York for several months on a variety of projects. I find traveling to different cities for work to be truly invigorating. The new and changing locales help to give new life to the work I am doing and cause me to think much more fundamentally about the choices I am making in the various works.
In June I will be in Rumania working on the Antigona. This one woman adaptation of the Antigone story is very powerful and I think will be quite exciting. The text is very engaging as is the space we are performing in. I have never been to Rumania so this is quite a new adventure for me. Not only are we performing in Sibiu in the chapel of a fortress, but we might be performing in a bar in Bucharest. There are a few days between these dates, so there will be some nice opportunity for sight seeing. Perhaps even a little bit of travel can be arranged depending upon how the final dates work out.
After that I return to New York to work upstate at Glimmerglass Opera, assisting lighting designer Robert Weirzel. They are doing an entire season of operatic versions of the Orpheus Myth. We are doing Gluck’s Orpheo. I studied with Robert at NYU and have assisted him a number of times in the last few years. Its always fun, so I am greatly looking forward to this.
After Cooperstown I will be traveling to Berkeley, CA to light an opera of my own. I will be lighting a production of Verdi’s Aida with the Berkeley Opera directed by my friend Yuval Sharon. Being from Berkeley it will be a wonderful chance to spend some time with family and friends as well as having the opportunity to work on this rather compelling take on an operatic classic.
After that it is a bit of a mystery. August and September have some interesting prospects although nothing yet is settled. I am in discussions about projects in Scotland and Ireland, but there are still a lot of logistics to figure out. I may have another project in the Bay Area in November, but that too is still in the process of working through logistical questions.
All this travel is certainly thrilling, but before we get there we have a very New York series of shows what with assisting at New York Theatre Workshop, lighting the New York Theatre Ballet, and lighting a play for Gotham Stage Company.
I must say, I really am enjoying 2007.
It’s better than shuffle mode. No really. The future really is a fun place to hang out. It is curious that with all the technology available to us, the essential human really does not change. Biologically we are no different than we were one thousand or even one hundred years ago, and yet the potential of our lives is radically different. Or is it?
Sure there is more plastic and blinky lights, but that is all just cover. It is the superficial. It is the mask we wear. The cultural mask of technology worn by the proto-future. But what do we have behind that mask? Our needs have not really changed. Nor have our emotions. Yet far too often we find ourselves falling into habits formed by and through our use of technology.
I run into this with every project I work on. A light is a light is a light. You can make most any light perform most any function. Within reason. Similar with the lighting control systems. These are often computers, and every one has a unique programming language. Knowing how to use one kind of light allows you to know how to use most any other light. There really is only so much a light can do. Well, you know, anything. But the technology of how you control those lights is much harder to break through the surface.
The San Francisco Opera uses a lighting system that I had not seen since college, and then it was a much more primitive version of the programming language. When I started working there it took me a large part of my first season to really understand the language itself. I kept running into problems where I would want to perform a specific function and it was either not possible or incredibly difficult. And at the same time, things that I was used to being quite complex became very simple.
In the short term, what one could do, at least what one could do efficiently was determined by the technology. In many ways this was restricted to how you could organize information. Through various machinations one could perform the same operations, but how it was done and the order one needed to think in to make it happen were radically divergent.
So what does that mean at a cultural level?
I remember an experiment we did in a psychology class I took in college. Can you connect all nine dots with four straight lines without removing your pencil from the paper?
The results were interesting. The ability to solve the puzzle broke down along culturo-technological lines. The very presence of certain technologies precluded or radically hindered the ability of individuals to solve the puzzle. It changed the way they saw. Certain things, wholly unrelated to the technologies in question, became invisible by the mere presence of those technologies.
How much of our sight is determined by our language? Does the language we use actually hide things from us as much as it reveals.
The music and film industry is freaking out about pirated works. They want to have total control over the licensing and distribution of digital media. It seems to be a losing battle in the long run, and certain people love to point out the misguided foibles of these industries. But perhaps we could look at the issue from another angle. Why do we feel the need to own these things in the first place?
Perhaps we are owned and controlled by the very notion of ownership. It is ingrained in our culture. Happiness is only a metaphor for property. But as technology advances, notions of ownership become more a matter of sentimentality than they do of necessity. Maybe this constitutes a new mode of happiness. Or at least potentially new vectors for discovering it.
Either way, the path is uncertain and obscured. How then does this uncertain and floating reality impact us as human beings? In a world where nothing is real, how do we even find the forest?
Ok, four vacations sure helps explain my economic situation. But also my generally high level of sanity and calm. Thrice to California and once to the Dominican Republic. But so much work in between. Oh my!
Totals
Plays: 13
Dance: 6
Musicals: 3
Opera: 2
Benefits: 1
Assisting: 2
Vacations: 4
Show List
1) Designer, Seven Deadly Sins, Oakland, CA
2) Associate Lighting Designer, Land of Dreams, Montclair, NJ
3) Designer, 1/4″=1′-0″, New York, NY
4) Lighting Assistant, Dido and Aneas, Chicago, IL
5) Designer, Montclair Dance, Montclair, NJ
* California
6) Designer, Sake with the Haiku Geisha, New York, NY
7) Designer, The Crucible, New York, NY
Designer, Cupid and Psyche, New York, NY
9) Designer, Cinderella, New York, NY
10) Designer, A. Demille Celebration, New York, NY
* California
11) Designer, Bad Girls Good Writers, New York, NY
12) Designer, Hitting the Wall, New York, NY
* Dominican Republic
13) Designer, La Femme est Morte, New York, NY
14) Designer, Unlucky Man in the Yellow Cap, New York, NY
15) Designer, Twenty Years of Agnes, New York, NY
16) Designer, The Children, New York, NY
* California
17) Designer, Beginning of the And, New York, NY
18) Designer, Windows, New York, NY
19) Designer, Antigone, New York, NY
20) Designer, A Night with Gotham, New York, NY
21) Designer, Queen Coziah, New York, NY
22) Designer, Nutcracker, New York, NY
23) Designer, Five Points, Willamstown, MA
24) Designer, Waiting for Godot, New York, NY
25) Designer, Becoming Adele, New York, NY
It’s frustrating that I have pictures from less than half of these. I really need to get a camera. Or treat my projects as exercises in impermanence.
