Light Cue 23

In the Wicca tradition, Halloween is the day of the year where the veil is thinnest between the living and the dead. It is the holiest day of the year. The day when all the witches can STOP wearing their costumes and go out dressed as themselves. The thin veil carries over to the Catholic tradition with the dia de los muertos in Mexico.

It is a day of transformation. A day when costumes go on and real life comes off. Or real life goes on and costumes come off. What I love about Halloween costumes is that there is a metaphoric truth to them, even if one is not literally a witch or a zombie.

Of course I wore the same costume I wear every day, the Lighting Designer Costume. I love it. Its easy to do, works with my existing wardrobe and changes every year. This year I wore a brown striped shirt with green slacks and brown shoes. I thought it looked quite good. I had several meetings today. One with the director of Antigone and the other with the lighting designer I am assisting in January at the Virginia Opera. Since getting home I have made dinner and after writing this, will get on to work on a few projects that I did not finish this afternoon. No Halloween parties for me this evening.

The subject of transformation got me thinking about color and how color can be used to transform a space in the theatre. The most common means of changing colors is to turn off a light of one particular color and turn one on of another color. Another very common means of transforming color is through the use of color scrollers.

A scroll might have 13 or 23 or 42 or however many colors on it. As you advance the scroll one direction or the other, the color changes. The problem with these is that, because they are preset colors, you might have a blue and then a green and then a red. So if you want the stage to transform from blue to red you either have to go through the green frame or turn the light off, change the color and turn it back on. Both of these methods force the designer to do two transitions with a specific intermediate color. Further, neither of these methods allows for a true transformation of color.

In two recent shows, The Children and Windows, we needed real transformations of color. The Children used color faders, a device that employs the three primary colors of subtracting color mixing to be able to mix, literally millions, of colors out of a single light. In Windows we used CXI‘s. These are somewhere in between the Color Faders and a traditional scroller. Rather than using a single string of various colors the CXI uses two strings with preset levels of Cyan, Yellow and Magenta to mix thousands of colors.

They both allow for more transformations of color than do a traditional scroller. However, the CXI’s still have occasional large “steps” between colors while the Faders are continuously smooth and effortless. Depending upon the type of show one might want a traditional scroller, a CXI or a Color Fader. They all have advantages and each one deals with time and change in a different manner.

And that is as close to a product review as we will see in this forum.

I am listening to Aida for the first time. It is a fantastic piece that I have only heard selections from, but never all the way through. It looks like I might be lighting a production of it this summer. It is probably too early to be talking about this project yet, but I am excited as I love Opera, and Verdi is just fantastic. I have not lit an Opera since last January when I did the Seven Deadly Sins.