The Real Value of a Good Electrician

January 31st, 2011

Last week I wrote about trouble with a show in terms of being incorrectly informed about inventory and house plot units. A bit of a cliffhanger that was, so I wanted to give you the resolution instead of leaving you with nothing but doom and gloom.

The problems I faced were three fold. First was an incorrect count of the inventory. In practical terms it meant working with mostly old 360Qs rather than newer Source-4 lekos. I could have done the whole show, or at least the vast majority of it, with Source-4 lekos but did not know that until well after the plot was submitted. The second problem had to do with a whole lighting position moving from an onstage boom to a makeshift box boom. The third problem was a larger than anticipated house rep plot which could not be moved, causing fixtures to not be hung as drafted due to space concerns. Combine problem 2 and 3 and you can see where this is going. Yikes!

This could be a total recipe for disaster. As it was the whole process turned out about as well as it could given the circumstances.

The 360Qs were as much a headache as I anticipated. The units are old, poorly tuned, and dim. While I typically begin my compositions with sidelight, the nature of this show, French Farce, demanded a Frontlight approach. Sidelight being secondary I used the 360Qs for my Sidelight systems. The units were in quite bad shape and there was no way to get decent overlap. I was spread a little thin as it was, having based my plot on a smaller than ideal inventory, and the extreme hotspot issues made the crosslight a bit of a disaster.

I worked with the electricians over the few days of tech to get the worst of the culprits tuned better, but even at their best they were very inconsistent. The inconsistency was amplified by having to move one of the sidelight positions downstage. It made the crosslight angles rather uneven, shifting from true sidelight to slightly frontal and back to real sidelight. We did our best, but there was only so far these would go.

Problem two, the moveable boom. The solution for this one should get full credit to my Master Electrician. He found the best placement for the moved position and made it work with minimal impact on the rest of the already compromised systems.

Never underestimate the value of a good electrician.

Sure, I redrew the position to get the right lights in the right(ish) place, but he devised the structure and, albeit somewhat awkward hanging position, the placement of fixtures.

Finally we come to our larger than anticipated house rep plot. The rules in the venue are refocus, but don’t move the c-clamp. Well, when most of my light is coming from the box booms and the rep box booms are bigger than anticipated this could be a problem. Except it was about the best possible outcome we could have. The rep color wash, a system of four Source-4′s with Seachangers per side, was doubled. Instead of an 8 unit color wash suitable for toning the stage, I had a 16 unit wash which was a nearly complete full stage system from both sides.

Well color me impressed.

The box boom positions are fairly good in this theater so I got a lot of mileage out of these units. We did have to do a fair bit of light wrangling to get some of my other lights in a useful position, but it was not too bad all things considered. Including moves and a slow genie focus I was able to get the plot focused with an average of 120 seconds a light. Well above my average of 90 seconds, but under the circumstances quite a good pace.

All of this was ultimately made possible through a talented electrics staff. A good ME, who is thorough and thinks ahead of problems, is a rare thing, certainly out here in California. Working with someone who really knows their craft and can make a plot happen on time under these circumstances is valuable indeed.

When life hands you lemons make lemonade. Though with the Seachangers it was more like also being handed a nice Cognac and making myself a Sidecar.

Tags: , ,
Posted in design | No Comments »

Moving Problems

January 24th, 2011

I just had a phone call from my ME for an upcoming show. Good News and Bad News. Good News: The theater has a larger inventory than we initially thought. So we can return most of the rental. Bad News: He spent a huge amount of time shopping the rental around to various houses to make it under budget. More Bad News: a lighting position needs to be moved because the venue will not allow it to be where we had previously got clearance to place it.

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in business, design | 2 Comments »

A Colorful Exchange

January 17th, 2011

I remember an exercise in my World History class freshmen year of High School. We were studying the Industrial Revolution and did a sort of game to understand the rapid rise in urban population which occurred in tandem with industrialization. Each student was given a piece of paper with a xeroxed hand drawn map of “London” on graph paper with a grid. Houses were one square, tenements 3×3, factories 5×5 and so on. The teacher would then say “Draw three houses” and we would outline three squares. Pretty soon the pace and scale of the requests got to be at the limit of our ability to draw. Needless to say everyone’s paper lost whatever semblance of order it had when they started. The lesson was that the rate of growth outpaced the ability to do any orderly urban planning.

This same problem, it seems, has plagued the manufacturers of lighting color media for the last several decades. The demand for new and increasingly precise color media has caused the companies to produce new and varied Gels at an alarming rate. Lee Filters, one of my favorites, solved their jumbled industrial revolution by switching from the Numeric Edition swatch book to the Designers Edition almost a decade ago.

The reasoning, which I fully understand, runs something like this: the colors in numeric order are such a jumble of red to blue to bastard amber to yellow to red to blue that it can be difficult to make sense of by browsing. Putting the items in numeric order places “Special Lavender” next to “Pale Green.” In an attempt to make the process more user friendly they devised the Designers Edition.

The Designers Edition solves the jumble problem by placing the colors along a chromatic scale. The reds gently flow into the ambers then to yellow then green, blue and finally into lavender and purple. It places L106 right next to L182 allowing for good comparisons.

Unfortunately this system is less than ideal for two reasons. The first is that I remember colors by number and not name. And my memory is imperfect. If I am under a tight schedule for a plot, sifting through the Designers Edition to confirm that it is L137 and not L138 that I want in my Box Booms takes too much time. The second reason, related to the first, is dealing with House Plots. When I get a hookup from a venue I just want to quickly find the numbers and see what the color is. I don’t want to cross reference a numeric listing to find the page the gel is on, sift through the book, and then double check that my conversion is right. I just want to look up the number.

The other week I was working on a plot. I was using my old and very beat up Numeric Edition swatch book which has many colors cut out for samples and tests or old scroller magic sheets and while it was in numeric order, it was more rundown than a derelict 19th century factory town. Being saddened by my inability to procure an up to date Numeric Edition swatch book for the better part of a decade I bemoaned my fate on Twitter and was quickly responded to by LeeFilters.

Less than a week later a small package arrived in the mail. Lee Filters has begun producing their Numeric Edition once again. Oh the joy! The rapture! The sheer ecstasy of this momentous event will cause the heavens to tremble.

The return of the Numeric Edition swatch book from Lee FIlters is a thing of beauty akin to the complete restoration of a beautiful old 19th Century Iron and Brick factory building. Now, as I write this, with swatch book laying beside me in the sunlight I feel a calm wash across me. The universe has come back into alignment. The imperfect beauty of the Lee swatch book has been returned to its Original form. Allowed to stand proud knowing that the colors contained therein are so strong and powerful they do not need the precise ordering of a chromatic scale.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in design | No Comments »

Fundamentals

January 10th, 2011

In learning new skills one, by necessity, focuses on fundamentals. You have to learn the rules before you can break them. Or you learn the rules so you know never to break them. In Zen mind, Beginner’s mind Shunryu Suzuki makes the observation that “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” Suzuki encourages the student to cultivate a Beginner’s Mind such that they might continue to see unlimited possibility as they progress through deeper levels of awareness and understanding.

This cultivation of a Beginner’s Mind is no less important to art as it is to the study of Zen Buddhism. As one progresses in their artistic life it is seductive to see one’s accomplishments as proof that they have mastered a subject or a technique. I have come to that line of thinking myself from time to time. When I find myself there, I try and force myself back to a beginner’s state. I refocus my efforts on the fundamentals. My essays on color theory were written more as my own personal exercise in fundamentals than they were an attempt to demonstrate mastery. The same was true when writing about templates or most any other subject that appears in this blog.

Reminding myself of fundamentals can be a truly difficult task at times. This can be especially true when working in a space I know well. “Oh yeah, the sidelight spaces out like such and such.” But every set is different. Every show is different. This show might need a steeper angle than that last one. The comedy a lower angle than the drama.

It can be a hard discipline to actually sit yourself down and do all the worksheets. I’ll admit I cut corners from time to time. But in the end it is a far more enjoyable experience to finish focus early and go out for drinks than it is to stay late and move a whole sidelight system. It happens both ways. For every designer who doesn’t check each zone of sidelight there is an electrician who eyeballs the distance between the lights. And when those two meet, oh boy will it be a long and painful focus session.

We are dynamic creatures. We are either growing or we are dying. We are moving forwards or we are moving backwards. Never are we actually still. In order to keep moving ourselves forward, to keep evolving as individuals and as artists, we must keep a focus on improving ourselves. Be that through emotional awareness or artistic craft, if we are not working to improve then we are allowing our skills to atrophy.

Fundamentals.

Some friends of mine recently published a book on Cocktails. The myriad recipes for divine ambrosia can be intimidating to look at. Someone coming at them, unfamiliar with contemporary cocktailing, might balk at the use of mango and jalapeno in a drink. Or worse, think that a cocktail is nothing more than a bunch of random food items mixed together with some obscure booze.

But the reason these recipes are so effective is that they are born out of an understanding of cocktail fundamentals. The oldest definition of a cocktail is from 1806 and defines it as “a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” Rather simple. The Old Fashioned is the clearest example of this, but any classic cocktail, more or less, fits the bill. Many of these fancy newfangled cocktails are really just an elaboration on these original oldfangled cocktails.

Whether one is making a Filibuster or a Sazerac a knowledge of the fundamentals of cocktailing are necessary to make a first rate drink. Be they recipes from Jerry Thomas’ How to Mix drinks or the formulas laid down in David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, a master mixologist must know her fundamentals to make new concoctions worth drinking. Before inventing your own recipe, you need to master the Old Fashioned.

Design works the same way. Lighting is, first and foremost, about putting light where you want it and taking it away from where your don’t want it. Rather simple. This same principle applies whether we are talking about a one man monologue, or Spider-Man, or a tradeshow floor. The details might change. The technology might change. Yet the fundamental underlying principal remains the same.

This is why I like to look back at old lighting texts. Stanley McCandless or Jean Rosenthal deal in fundamentals. Back before we had automated everything, with hundreds of dimmers and almost limitless capacity, they were finding solutions to make a limited situation as flexible, durable, and dynamic as it could be. Returning to these basic texts can help us step back from the cutting edge of technology and actually look at what we are doing.

Finding access to that Beginner’s mind, focusing on the fundamentals, can keep us moving forward and perfecting our craft. With the Beginner’s Mind we keep working on the fundamentals, we keep growing. As we deepen our awareness we deepen the mastery of our craft.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in art, design, theory | 4 Comments »

Beginnings

January 3rd, 2011

Here we are on the first Monday of a new year. 2011. Beginnings like this, similar in many ways to birthdays, are a common place to make resolutions for change. I have come to realize after many years of making resolutions that unless the change was already underway a mere date is not sufficient for bringing about personal transformation. I prefer to note trajectories.

One thing a new year allows is an exploration of novelty through the familiar. By taking note, we make the known and familiar new again and celebrate change even if there is no distinct change to be found. A grand social masquerade of sorts. We all agree that this is a new beginning starting now and allow ourselves to move forwards from there. These markers allow us useful places to take stock of both where we are and where we are headed.

Over the holidays, at a white elephant party, I came away with a little book. This book contained an introduction to the game of Go and a small Go set to start learning. I have long wanted to learn the game yet never got around to learning how. Funny enough, at my first ever white elephant party years ago I opened a game of Go but had it stolen from me and was unable to retrieve it from the other players. A dozen or so years later and I finally win that game and begin my exploration of a subject long mysterious to me.

While the game in itself is wholly new to me, it bears some interesting connections to many threads running through my life. It symbolizes for me, in many ways, the idea of the new year as an exploration of novelty through the familiar.

As a child, from roughly the ages of seven to seventeen, I studied the martial art Aikido. The principles of Aikido, Keep One Point, Weight on the Underside, Relax Completely, and Extend Ki, translate perfectly to the game of Go. Unlike Chess, a game I learned as a child and lost mercilessly to my father until my tweens when I started winning, Go has no simple strategy like “capture the King.” Rather Go is about influence. One extends one’s influence across the board just as one extends Ki in a room.

Influence is a give and take. To gain this influence, to Extend Ki, one must be centered, on firm footing, and relaxed. Being too aggressive in Go can actually be a bad thing. Without maintaining balance, or Keeping One Point, one risks a lopsided influence. A top heavy influence that might easily be toppled. One wants to maintain the initiative, which is about making the right move to guide the action, more than a series of attacks.

The study of Aikido early in life also gave me a deep appreciation for Japanese aesthetics. The dojo is a spare room, but carefully ordered. White walls, some simple black scrollwork, tatami mats on the floor, and a simple arrangement of flowers on the small black altar. This harmonious minimalism is something I deeply admire in the realm of art. My favorite shows to work on tend to be minimalistic works. Even when the overall work itself is not, when a minimalistic approach to the lighting is called for, I deeply enjoy it.

The game of Go is incredibly simple in terms of rules of play. There are, perhaps, five rules to the game. With only one kind of piece to play, it is far simpler to learn than Chess which has six different kinds of pieces, four of which have variations in movement. Yet, this simplicity of structure does not mean simplicity in game play. The most advanced computer simulations of Go compare to a weak or moderate amateur, versus chess where the game has nearly been solved by machine computing.

While Chess can be cold and brutal, Go has a gracious quality that I find refreshing. The system of handicaps is as much about mutual enjoyment as it is about leveling the playing field. Winning too easily stops being fun. So a simple system is put in place to increase overall enjoyment. Again we see a simple system which makes for a deeply satisfying and complex experience.

The visual aesthetics, like the aesthetics of the gameplay, are minimalist, yet surprisingly complex. Black, white, and polished wood. The black pieces, traditionally, are made slightly larger than the white such that the visual illusion which makes the white pieces appear larger is compensated for. This level of detail and harmony is, in my opinion, true beauty. Combining my background in black and white photography with my love of grey it would be no wonder that an object with this kind of visual design would appeal to me so strongly. As the game is played, the most wonderful patterns emerge on the board.

Of direct relevance to lighting design, the closest I can come is that my first Off-Broadway play was set in modern day Japan. At a subtler level the game strategy is very much like the role of the lighting designer. The proper design is one that finds harmonious balance between the many and competing needs of the production. From basic visibility, to enhancing other design elements, to flashy effects, to simple recreations of nature, the designer must stay relaxed, grounded in the work in front of them, and extend their eye to solve problems and enhance moments. Light can not be forced it must be coaxed. In the same way Go is more about following the flow of the pieces and the natural patterns of movement than it is about forcing the issue.

In the end, it may not be wholly new, and like many a resolution may not be maintained far into the year, learning Go has given me a new lens through which I can explore old ideas. It should serve me in good stead so long as I remember to Keep One Point, Weight on the Underside, Relax Completely, and Extend Ki.

Tags: , ,
Posted in theory | No Comments »

The Year in Review 2010

December 27th, 2010

It sure has been a productive year here at Light Cue 23. Over a hundred blog posts, most of them 1-2 page essays (if written in a non-digital format), so somewhere between 100-200 pages of text. Whew!

I sure enjoyed it. But what was it all?

I wrote extensively on Color Theory

And Gobo theory

I wrote a lot about software including Maya

and Vectorworks

I lit some beautiful shows, but only got pictures of


Don Giovanni


and Of The Earth

I wrote about the theory of design

The practical aspects of design

I was Interviewed by iSquint. And I argued, to seemingly wild applause, that Theater is Boring

Have a wonderful New Year! See you in 2011.

Tags: ,
Posted in meta | 1 Comment »

Theater is boring

December 20th, 2010

Theater is boring.

This is more true than most theater makers are willing to admit. I can not count the number of times I have seen some version of “Our subscriber base is getting old, how do we get young people into the theater?” “It must be ticket prices, let’s do a special rate for people under 30.” Sure ticket prices may be part of the problem, but they can only account for a small percentage. “It must be competition from TV and movies for entertainment dollars.” Perhaps.

Or maybe, just maybe, most theater is boring.

The sad part is the problem is cyclical. Audiences decline and theaters panic. In order to ensure a slower drop off they play safe with their subscriber base (main source of income) and program boring stilted shows they think their increasingly greying audiences want. They are shocked when younger people don’t want this and choose instead to spend their money on a rock show or going out to clubs. More income drops and the shows become safer, and smaller, and more like sitcoms. They become dead and boring. They lose their theatricality and their aliveness.

There are interesting works out there, they are just not the norm. Cirque du Soleil is an expanding global franchise. Not only do their shows pack in audiences, but these audiences are willing to pay a premium price for the experience. Triple digit ticket prices may be grumbled about but they are paid. When the audience leaves the theater there is a smile on their face. Traditional theater, not so much. And it baffles them, these producers at traditional theaters. “We’ve been doing the same good work we always have, why is our audience dying off?”

Perhaps because the same good work has become boring. Perhaps paying $100, or $40, or even $10 to watch a small handful of people, only slightly more interesting than your friends sit around and talk about inane subjects is too much to pay. I can get that on TV, without cable. Fuerzabruta in New York packs in audiences like sardines. Why? The show is not boring. In fact, it is exciting and big and dangerous. Three adjectives rarely, if ever, applied to the typical regional and mid-sized theater.

Making money with live entertainment is hard. It is hard because you are asking patrons not only for their money, but for their time. Buy a painting you don’t like and you may be out a few hundred dollars, but you can just pack it into the closet, or resell it. CD you don’t like? Take it to the used record store. But with theater we have the audience trapped, for anywhere from 90 minutes to 6 hours. This is a not insignificant amount of time that they are never getting back. If what you are subjecting them to is not fucking awesome, then you are doing it wrong.

I am not saying it needs to be perfect. I am not saying it needs to be above critique. What I am saying is that it needs to not be boring. Sure there are exceptions. Theater makers like Richard Maxwell, and a large slice of the New York downtown avant garde, have taken boredom as an aesthetic lens through which to explore the human condition. That is different. Audiences going to those shows know what they are getting into and love it. Ibsen, Shakespeare, Checkov, Wasserstein, and many many more are regularly given mediocre productions of potentially interesting plays by reputable companies. This drives audiences away in a steady march towards irrelevancy.

Shakespeare should be sex, and passion, and sword fighting, and clownish baffoonery. It should be funny and scary and dangerous. Too often it is a pathetic imitation of a middle school English class production. The average non-theater-going public will go to a show because they think they “should” or to support a friend, not because it is exciting. Shakespeare is thought to be boring when his texts are anything but. Yet the productions he gets make me want to quit the entertainment business.

If the show is not dangerous it is boring. If the show is boring it is not worth spending time to go see. End of story.

Dangerous need not mean the audience risks having scenery fall on them. Ibsen, when his plays were first produced, contained dangerous scary ideas. It was feminism back when the very word was terrifying to the establishment. Not the mock fear we have now but actual existential threat. Today the ideas are small and the plays are still produced. And that is the problem. A new translation does not make it exciting.

Why would anyone produce A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler unless they had found a way to make it big and interesting and dangerous? English class is boring. Mabou Mines did that with their A Doll’s House. It is awesome and has been touring the world for the better part of a decade now. It is big and dangerous.

It is also theatrical. This is another problem rarely dealt with in theater productions. Most are not theatrical. I hear far too many people say something like “what is interesting about theater is it’s aliveness, having real live performers in front of you.” But that is only true if the production is alive. If we just have a few people sitting around a living room discussing the effects of the Iraq war it is not alive, nor very interesting. It is television. Too often bad television. If you want to write and produce TV shows, that is awesome. Go do it! But please, for the love of god, don’t put them on stage.

I’ll come clean. I don’t go to the theater much. I used to. There was a time when I would go see at least, at least, one show a week in excess of whatever I was working on. The problem I would encounter, over and over again, was a sense of having wasted my time and money on a boring TV show. These days, even if the ticket is free, I typically turn it down because I don’t want to waste my time. And many to most potential audience members have had the same or similar reaction. Why pay $50 for one TV show when I can get a month’s cable for that?

Vaguely apathetic middle class white people who speak in liberal talking points is not interesting theater. Nor are any of the other stereotypes of American demographics being paraded around on stage.

For theater to be interesting it needs to be big. It needs to think in big ideas and make broad gestures. It needs to entertain. Somewhere along the line many (it feels like most) American theater makers forgot that we work in the entertainment industry and began a transition to social medicine. Having a play about a cause is fine, but make it interesting. Angels in America was big and theatrical and scary when it first came out. That play is about as cause driven as you can get.

Theater will never go away. There will always be a sufficient amount of grants to combine with people who think they “ought” to go see a play to keep it limping along. But for theater to truly be alive, it needs to reinvent itself and be something that people are banging down the doors and waiting out in the rain and snow to see. It should cause rioting, or at least dancing, in the streets. It needs to be the event that can’t be missed. Because if it can be missed, why not miss it? There will be another, to be missed production, in a few weeks anyhow.

Or perhaps the apathy in the theater is the same apathy which prevents people from standing up for their rights with TSA, or demanding that 9/11 first responders get health care. Perhaps, then, we have exactly the theater we deserve.

Tags: ,
Posted in theatre | 13 Comments »

Greek Drama and Aesthetic Archeology

December 13th, 2010

Modes of minimalist thinking often find fullest expression in Greek stories. Layers of culture are stripped back to the origins of Western discursive and narrative approach. Cutting through layers of history and culture to expose its root means cutting through all narrative structures to find their essence.

Minimalism forces upon us a kind of archeology of style. Idiosyncratic and stylistic flourish often fail when exposed to the archeology of minimalism. The Greeks allow for a minimalist narrative in large part because their stories are so close to the archetypal source there is little extra. Often, Greek stories provide the bare minimum of context before moving forwards with a primal and archetypal tale.

Sophocles, in many ways, deals in pure archetype. Some of this is based on the stories he chooses to tell. Focus on the parent child relationship, as in the Oedipus cycle, strikes to the core of the human experience. This essential story is amplified by the narrative structures available to him. In his day, drama was seen as consisting of two actors and a chorus. Because of this constraint, he was forced to fit the complexity of human experience into a dichotomy. It forced dialog and paired monologue instead of conversation.

This very contained world is in sharp distinction to the plays of Euripides. Not only is Euripides willing to call into question the very power dynamics underlying society, he does so through a revolution in the dramatic form. The addition of a third actor increases, logarithmically, the complexity of potential storytelling dynamics.

In The Bacchae, for example, the same actor who plays the priest also plays the god. The actor who plays the mother plays the son. The king is played by the same actor who plays the servant. In this way, Euripides is able to question social politics through the very structures of narrative. If the king and the servant are manifested through the same soul, through being played by the same actor, what does that say about power and control in society?

What implications does this have for those of us who would design these worlds? Are there lessons we may learn? What are these plays speaking that would inform us, in a useful way, as builders and designers of the worlds these plays would inhabit?

First, it would serve us well to look at the structure of these stories. As designers, we are first and foremost visual storytellers. The story we are telling comes from the text. If it is a minimal or archetypal text, then perhaps we ought to look for that archetype in our design.

But what kind of minimalism is this?

The minimalism of Sophocles is different than that of Euripides. Do the characters have a single, unchanging, soul? Do they have a shared soul which manifests different aspects? Are these writers even minimalist?

A lot of evidence indicates that these texts are little more than the equivalent of an operatic libretto. In short, we are missing the music, the songs, and the choreography which these plays originally had and which made them far more of a spectacle than common thinking often allows of them today.

It was recently discovered that Greek statuary was painted in vibrant colors. Perhaps, then, neo-classicism and classical minimalism are nothing more than aesthetic anomalies founded on a misinterpretation of historical evidence. Minimalism, as an aesthetic concern, may indicate a far more modern line of thought than we typically consider it to be.

All of this concerns us as designers of theatrical worlds. Scenery, props, lighting, costumes, and music are all implicated by our asking of these questions. Our results are determined by our answers.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in dance, theory | No Comments »

Of The Earth – Pictures

December 6th, 2010

Below are images from the Shotgun Players 2010 production of Salt Plays Pt. 2 – Of The Earth

Written and Directed by: Jon Tracy
Scenery by: Nina Ball
Costumes by: Christina Yeaton
Video by: Lloyd Vance
Sound by: Brendan West


All photographs courtesy Pak Han

Tags: , ,
Posted in design, pictures, theatre | No Comments »

Of The Earth – Opens Tonight

December 4th, 2010

Tonight is the opening of Of The Earth written and directed by Jon Tracy. This is a beautiful poetic piece with a very physical theatricality to the staging. If you saw Part 1 this past summer in the park you know what kind of awesome you are getting into.

I am very proud of my work on this piece. Along with my fellow collaborators we have created a dynamic visual and aural landscape that really should not be missed. Lest you think I am exaggerating, the production photos are quite stunning and capture the visual world of the play exquisitely.

Posted in design, theatre | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
Creative Commons License

All text on this site, unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All other rights reserved.