I am probably too tired to be writing at the moment, but I don’t have rehearsal until the afternoon tomorrow, so I think I can stand to be up for a few more minutes. We had our first tech rehearsal for Queen Coziah today. It went fairly well. We have had a variety of technical set backs that caused us to not get the lighting system operational until a few minutes into the rehearsal so there was a lot of lost prep time. But in the end it happened and we got to work.
The lighting for this piece is very simple. The venue demands it. There are very few dimmers, so control of the lighting is rather limited. Fortunately the play is, for the most part, rather straight forward. It takes place in the front yard of a woman’s house as she recounts the story of the non-violent workers rebellion she led and won. This is not a story well known in this country. I was totally unfamiliar with it prior to beginning my work on this project, but Queen Coziah is a historical figure whose non-violent protests proceeded those of the better known Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
The show is a musical. A very dance heavy musical. The band is composed of a number of drummers, flute, and guitar. Two of the musicians are priests, one a Voodoo Priest, the other a Santeria Priest. While there is an incantation to various Lwa during the play, it is by an actor and not one of the priests. Having such strong personalities can certainly make for an intense experience.
Writing light cues this evening I fell into a wonderful trance precipitated by the music. Relaxing into my seat and letting the music guide my cueing was a wonderfully freeing experience. It reminded me of years ago when I would light all night dance parties in an Episcopal Church. Just letting the rhythms of the dance take over and guide the light where it wants to be. You, as designer, become more a vessel than an agent of action. It is more meditative than active.
The play only performs two days, at FIT, this Wednesday and Thursday and our rehearsal time is limited. I think we will get some good work done on the piece, but it will not be as polished as I would like. However, the people involved area lot of fun and do some good work.
My thesis at NYU was a design for Wole Soyinka’s adaptation of The Bacchae. It is interesting how much of the research I did for that is coming back to me. I have a recreational interest in Comparative Religions and looking at the parallels between the Yoruba gods and their American analogues is quite fascinating to me. So much of it is a direct transplantation from one soil to another. Many of the names are similar if not the same. The use of a highly structured color symbolism is also there.
The lighting at times engages these aspects and at times pulls against them. I think that is the best way. I have found this to be a common current in a lot of work I have done recently. Exploring harmony and counterpoint with the dramatic action in relationship to a lighting environment that at once exists wholly inside that dramatic action and is simultaneously outside it.
I used to have an obsessive need to find the exact structural mirror to the action in the lighting. The lighting had to follow the pace of the drama minute to minute, second to second. After that I spent quite some time exploring chance operations and random events. Both of these felt to me to fall short of the mark. Light is nothing so rigid as to be all one or the other. I find it to resist rigid categorizations and often falls through the cracks in any external system one attempts to erect around it.
