So far for next season I have been hired for two shows because of a reputation I have for “unconventional” lighting. I understand the intent behind this categorization, but I find it curious that my work is seen as unconventional. Perhaps this comes from the fact that I do not think, initially about theatricalizing the text, but approach my work at a more formal visual level. When I am lighting a show I do not think first about lekos and fresnels and gobos and gels. Rather I think visually in terms of what quality of light do I wish to create. Are we interested in directional lighting or soft diffuse lighting? Do we want a compressed grey scale or something very chromatic. Should the light be solid or dappled? This is why I love using images to discuss lighting a show. It keeps the conversation focused on what the lighting should look like rather than technical execution. That part comes later, much later. At the beginning of a process it is about looking and reacting.
Because of this approach I get sold on the look rather than the technique. As a result I use a mixture of traditional theatrical lights and other types of lighting instruments. Heather Carson taught at NYU my first year of graduate school and I had the pleasure of assisting her at San Francisco Opera this past season on a production of Norma. Heather is a designer known for her “unconventional” lighting. How she came about it is quite interesting. Working on a lot of European opera with Paul Steinberg, who creates large architectural sets, she began exploring architectural lighting. This search has led her to embrace an aesthetic composed almost exclusively sodium and mercury flood lights as well as fluorescent lighting. For those of you who are unfamiliar, sodium lights are the yellow street lamps and mercury, the white/green parking lot lights. Her work is quite stunning and very powerful.
Working and studying with her gave me a strong appreciation of the power and beauty of a much wider array of lighting instruments than I had previously explored. Let’s think of a lamp post at night. Most of us have probably seen some scene in a play that takes place outside where the characters are supposed to be standing under a street lamp. The lighting designer took a spot light, made the edges very soft and colored it some shade of yellow or amber. The effect feels little to nothing like a streetlight. An actual street lamp has a very beautiful quality to it. The light is very intense when you are close to it. Harsh and almost disorienting. As you move away the light thins out and dissipates rapidly. Far away there is a thin breath of light, barely visible. Certainly there is something here to be said for dramatic effect, but if what one wants is a streetlight, nothing can do that better than the real thing.
In Cupid and Psyche I was expressly interested in the quality of light. I was exploring the relationship between the formal quality of light and the creation of psychological space. We had quite a number of locations to deal with on a single set, so delineating the location came down to lighting. Two of the most important locations in the play were Cupid’s cloud where he laments his lovelstruck woe and the Apolo’s palace where Cupid takes Psyche to woo her. These two physical locations simultaneously represented psychological spaces as well. The palace was lit with 23 large tear shaped incandescent bulbs. They gave off a warm glow and reflected the other lights in their glass. This gave a kind of jewel like sparkle to the palace. The cloud on the other hand was a space of lovesick anguish. It was lit in a diffuse, soft, cold, grey light. Fluorescent tubes hidden behind the fabric walls of the set were the primary lighting for this location.
Had I limited myself to the conventional palette used by a theatrical lighting designer for Cupid and Psyche, the show would have been just that, conventional. In Suspendida we lit the entire piece in bare lightbulbs laying on the ground. Here the lights on the ground pulsed like breath, slow and deliberate, It was actually a very complex random sequence of programming, such that every time we performed the piece, the lighting was different. Looking beyond the conventional means of working a scene or an entire piece can be very difficult. A lot of the tradition has come about precisely because it works. But the sad reality is that a lot of work ends up looking very similar.
What I have found interesting is that as a result of doing a lot of “unconventional” lighting, I am able to take a conventional piece and give it a kind of unique quality. This is why I love working in a variety of mediums as well as in both traditional entertainment and more avant garde work. The different works talk to each other through me and inform one another in often surprising ways.
I was once working on a piece that wanted to be very “old-fashioned” in style, so I went back to the work of Stanley McCandless. What I ended up with was a modern interpretation of his ideas. And that research led me down some very interesting and exciting avenues of thought specifically in the realm of color theory that I might not have otherwise explored. The old and the new are often surprisingly close to one another. Both McCandless and Carson’s work is concerned with a kind of economy of volume. That is how to fill a stage both efficiently and beautifully. While the final product could not be more different, in many ways they stem from the same origin.
It is because of this that I find labels like ‘unconventional’ to be rather strange. In fact the whole idea of an Avant Garde sounds hopelessly mid-century to me. If for no other reason than the rate at which information is disseminated and absorbed into culture, the idea of an advanced rank of artists or producers of culture is just plain silly. Any work that has reached completion is already old and dead. The revolution is not a single event. It is not a deed or an act. Rather it is like the Aristotilian notion of Praxis, it is an underlying motivation that must and will continue until it has reached its final goal. If that final goal is a product then the revolution will die. If, rather it is a way of Being, a mode of existence, then it will continue on forever, always finding new sources of fuel and new means of expression.
