Posts Tagged ‘beauty’

From the Archives: Risk and Failure – Seven Deadly Sins

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Note: This piece was originally written in 2006. There has been minor editing to fix some grammar.

Risk is something we must always engage with when creating art. There is no foreknowledge of the efficacy of the project. Collaborative art necessitates a strong and deep trust in the work of one’s collaborators. Sometimes these are people you know well while other times they are people you have met quite recently. Often some combination of these two elements occurs in the same production. Regardless, one must place a total trust in the work of your collaborators. The energy is created through this combination of danger and excitement.

When I worked on Seven Deadly Sins we had no idea until the show was over if it would work. There were so many pieces to fit together with the Orchestra, Opera singers, cabaret dancers, blacksmiths, acrobats, fire dancers, etc. etc. The stage was a ninety foot long by four foot wide catwalk with small end stages on either side. The audience sat arena style sandwiching the runway. We had seating for somewhere around 700 people and it quickly became evident to me that the other side of the audience would become a primary visual element of the overall experience.

As a general rule of thumb, a lighting designer tries to keep the light on the stage and off the audience. Of course rules, as we all know, were made to be broken. So rather than try and hide this very present and potentially massive audience, I chose to make them a feature of the evening. Large colored floodlights were pointed at the seating areas in an attempt to light our audience in various colors and thus take them, literally, on the emotional journey of the opera.

These discussions with my director, Roy Rallo, were quite difficult. Given that we did not have an audience, there was no way to test out this effect prior to the opening. As a result I had to convince someone, who I had never worked with before, that the primary storytelling device we would have with the lighting was an effect we could not test prior to the show opening. Essentially he had to trust me that this was the right course of action to take. I confidently told him it was and silently prayed that I was right.

The final effect was greater than I had anticipated. We were fortunate enough to have a filled to capacity house, so the effect was to be the best it could be. And it worked brilliantly. The faces of the audience were clearly visible from across the space and not only did their personal emotional reactions show but the group looked wonderful in the shifting light. There was an immersive quality to the experience that in some significant way derived from the environmental quality of the lighting.

Had we gone with a traditional lighting style, keeping the lights out of the audience, the effect of the piece would not have been so strong. The shifting backgrounds and the degree of contrast with the fire that we achieved would not have been possible. Without that risk of failure, the best aspect of the lighting for that show would never have been. Without risking failure we can never achieve greatness.

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Posted in design, opera, theory | No Comments »

From the Archives: Is Stanley McCandless German? OR The Rediscovery of Shadow in Contemporary Culture

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Note: This post originally appeared in July of 2006. It has been slightly edited to account for grammatical errors.

Theoretically the whole acting area might be lighted with one powerful instrument directing its beams to the stage from a distance, at an angle which would light up the face of the actor somewhat as the rays from the sun make objects visible on a sunny day.
–Stanley McCandless, A method for Lighting the Stage

During his time a single light that could cover an entire stage was nothing but theory yet now such technology is commonplace. The film industry has found a need to brightly illuminate large areas in a color identical to daylight such that the camera does not pick up the difference between the sun and the artificial lighting in the photography. Because of that need the HMI Fresnel was born. HMI is a kind of lamp that operates much like a fluorescent or neon in that there is a glass container with chemicals in it that gets flooded with electricity and lets off (very bright) light. Although originally designed for film these lights have found their way into theaters initially through European opera houses.

The difference between an HMI and a traditional incandescent lamp is like comparing watercolor to oil paint. One can achieve the same range of colors, perhaps, but the actual quality of the medium is quite different. By using these large lighting instruments one can achieve effects that are quite simply impossible with ‘area lighting.’ One of the biggest issues is shadows. Often in American theater productions one sees a stage floor covered with lots and lots of tiny shadows. These are the result of lots and lots of tiny little lights focused into lots and lots of little areas. This is common in so called ‘naturalism’ and yet it is about as unnatural as one can get. When we walk out into the sun at 4:30 in the afternoon we see a single shadow cast from a single source of light. Perhaps two shadows if we are near a building with a reflective glass wall. But nowhere, unless we are in an artificial environment, do we have twenty-three or more shadows one sees on a typical American stage floor.

I am not arguing for an aesthetic that knows only deep shadow. If everything were like that, it would get as boring as unchanging shadowless light. A deeper appreciation for shadow could greatly enhance the beauty and dynamism of the American stage. In some ways this is a political stance. I never watch TV unless I am on an airplane, but when I have the chance one of my favorite things to watch is Fox News. Their lighting designer must be one of the most brilliant propagandists alive. Watch one of their cable news shows some time it is fascinating. All the anchors are lit so evenly that there is not a single shadow to be found. They represent the ‘truth.’ They are ‘fair and balanced.’ Then they have their Conservative guests on camera who have slight shadows. Nothing big, but just enough to differentiate them from the hosts. Finally you have anyone other than a conservative wingnut. They always, ALWAYS, have a shadow underneath their chin. Minor issue right? Who cares? Indeed. No one cared in 1962 when Nixon and Kennedy debated on television. Appearance in front of a camera means nothing. Nothing at all.

Shadows indicate secrets. Subconsciously we know this somewhere. It is an accepted part of our culture. Shadow = untruth. Or at least half truth. We can not believe the shadowed figure as much as our fair and balanced hosts. They have nothing to hide, so we must trust them. I do not believe this was always the case. For shadow means something else entirely. It means Mystery. Sometimes a divine mystery one is rightly in awe of. One need only look at the paintings of Rembrandt or Caravaggio or El Greco to see a strong Western tradition that appreciates the beauty of the shadow.

It is time to reclaim the beauty of shadows. Like Tanizaki did for Japanese culture with In Praise of Shadows, we must relearn the beauty and truth of shadow. They need not be things to fear so long as we know how to approach them. Batman after all, one of the greatest dark heros of modern mythology, hides in the shadows. We are afraid, as a culture, to look inside ourselves and stare at the void. We are much more content to turn on the television and be told about our fair and balanced world. But it is time for our art to show us that void. If we can not go there unaided, then our art, our cultural subconscious, must be brought to the surface of our attention. We must learn to stare out at the dark expanse of human consciousness and see possibility and potential. We must learn to live in praise of shadows.

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From the Archives: The Aesthetics of Control

Monday, October 19th, 2009

This piece was originally posted in January of 2008.

Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.
Martin Heidegger, What is called Thinking?

Heidegger’s concern with beauty here has its essence in Humanity’s relation to its own quest for self knowledge. The quest to understand the Self, that true and unwavering quest is itself the essence of Beauty. He calls this unique human essence Dasein, that which is concerned with its own being. Beauty then, is the clear and unadulterated understanding, or quest for that essence.

When he takes up the issue of art it is most often through poetry. Or poetry as the essential in a poetic understanding of the world. But it is that larger poetic understand of the world that is key. When Keats claims that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all // Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” he is speaking here to that same essential mode of being, that poetic worldview. But is this “truth” the truth of the poem, or the Grecian Urn for which the poem was written. Or was the Urn itself a mere tool for which the poem may express some larger understanding of the world?

These questions are inherent to the making of art. Surely one can make a piece of art, be it a poem, a painting, photograph or piece of theater and be unthinking in that action. Such a work may even point to some aspect of truth. But such unthinking works rarely tend towards that poetic essence whereby some larger truth is found and some deeper understanding of the Self and its relation to the world is made manifest.

In Architecture of Authority, Richard Ross explores the poetic beauty of post-modern fascist architecture in contemporary culture. In this book he is exploring spaces that, rather than being pure in themselves and allowing the person experiencing them to create their own relation to the space, force a particular mode of relation onto the individual. Prisons, courtrooms and psych wards are explored, but so too are a Chelsea gallery and Montessori Preschool.

In fact, his work calls into question the very idea that fascism and control are mechanisms and tactics perpetrated by individuals at the upper echelons of power. Rather they are ubiquitous throughout culture and humans, at every level of culture and development, create spaces wherein the control and manipulation of their fellow being can occur.

Through his lens these spaces of torture and control, of confinement and terror, become at once beautiful and horrifying. It is as though he has seen the essential truth of the politics of control and captured it here in his book. But more than that, the aesthetics that underlie these spaces are the same design sense that one finds in Ikea furniture, or the structure of an Ikea store itself.

His work begs the question wherein does this Beauty lie? For to most of us, I would presume, a prison is not a beautiful space. Yet Ross captures some essential beauty in his photographs. It seems then that the beauty lies not so much in the thing itself but in Ross’ unique relationship to contemporary fascistic control. Beauty is that which is contained in the worldview of the observer, in the relationship and continual dialog between observer and observed.

The photograph is a visual representation of the relationship of the photographer to its subject. The beauty lies not so much in either of those, but rather in the energy created through this relatedness. For a worldview can not exist in a vacuum, it must, by its very nature have a world to resonate off of, to shape and be shaped by. So too can the world not fully exist in an existential sense without a viewer to complete the relationship. A world is a container and that container is empty without that which it contains.

The world, to return to Heidegger, conceals that which exists only in relation to the viewer, to the subject. But that which exists in the relationship between the viewer and the subject is in turn concealed by the subject’s own subjectivity. Just as the manner in which fundamental particles are measured in physics causes their very nature to change, so too does the subject’s subjective viewing of the world cause that which would be revealed to withdraw once more into concealment.

The world is a collaborative space. It takes the work of every man, woman, child, animal, plant and fungus to make it what it is. The aesthetics of control have pervaded our society so deeply that the same clean lines of the new chic apartment, or commercial play, are those same lines found in the jail cells of the Guantanamo detention facility. We have already bought in to the aesthetics of control. What we have not yet given up fully is our relatedness to that world.

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The Path to Relatedness

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

It has been interesting recently to re-ignite my interest in the writings of Martin Heidegger. What makes his work so fascinating to me is two primary things. First is his interest in fundamental ontology and phenomenology. That is, his work is concerned with human activity at the most basic level. Where many philosophers take issue with the absolute, god, reason, and so forth, Heidegger is concerned with walking through doors or using a hammer to build a chair. The second point of interest is the way in which his writings feel like a journey. He is the tour guide to the reader through the phenomenal aspects of human existence, again contrasted with most western philosophers who act as the supreme lecturer disseminating information to the lowly masses.

His thoughts on art and the poetic worldview are of specific interest to me. In What is called Thinking? he speaks of the essential nature of craft and art by exploring the work of a cabinetmaker in saying “what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.”

In art, this relatedness is essential to the work. It is a relatedness that is itself an entire world of being, and the artist must negotiate that being-in-the-world. Take for instance the play. The playwright must have a relatedness to language, a relatedness to story, character, theme, plot and so forth. Each one of those “related tos” are one strand in a web of relations that comprise the matrix of relations necessary for the play to be wrought.

Stepping away from the act of writing a script, or engaging in a play being wrought is the production as a whole. Every member of the collaborative team must needs have a relatedness to the other collaborators. No one person can act and create in a vacuum, certainly not if the intent is to create a true work of art. Instead a web of relations builds or is made manifest that allows the creation of the play to happen.

But returning to the more basic level, the artist must have a relatedness to the work. I, as the lighting designer, must have a relation to light. And that relatedness to light is what guides and shapes the way the light relates to the play. To the work as a whole.

David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish talks about this relatedness from a different direction. He speaks of the artist’s relatedness to creativity or, as he puts it, ideas. Through meditation he finds it possible to transcend the day to day confusions and get right to the heart of one’s relatedness to creativity. “Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution – seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together.”

Intuition can only exist when the artist has cleared the path for the relatedness towards the medium. If you are hungry you are related to food, tired to sleep, angry to frustration. Clearing the path towards that primary artistic relation allows the work to happen. To flow. It makes, as Heidegger would say, “the world fall away” and creation to commence.

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The Aesthetics of Control

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.
Martin Heidegger, What is called Thinking?

Heidegger’s concern with beauty here has its essence in Humanity’s relation to its own quest for self knowledge. The quest to understand the Self, that true and unwavering quest is itself the essence of Beauty. He calls this unique human essence Dasein, that which is concerned with its own being. Beauty then, is the clear and unadulterated understanding, or quest for that essence.

When he takes up the issue of art it is most often through poetry. Or poetry as the essential in a poetic understanding of the world. But it is that larger poetic understand of the world that is key. When Keats claims that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all // Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” he is speaking here to that same essential mode of being, that poetic worldview. But is this “truth” the truth of the poem, or the Grecian Urn for which the poem was written. Or was the Urn itself a mere tool for which the poem may express some larger understanding of the world?

These questions are inherent to the making of art. Surely one can make a piece of art, be it a poem, a painting, photograph or piece of theater and be unthinking in that action. Such a work may even point to some aspect of truth. But such unthinking works rarely tend towards that poetic essence whereby some larger truth is found and some deeper understanding of the Self and its relation to the world is made manifest.

In Architecture of Authority, Richard Ross explores the poetic beauty of post-modern fascist architecture in contemporary culture. In this book he is exploring spaces that, rather than being pure in themselves and allowing the person experiencing them to create their own relation to the space, force a particular mode of relation onto the individual. Prisons, courtrooms and psych wards are explored, but so too are a Chelsea gallery and Montessori Preschool.

In fact, his work calls into question the very idea that fascism and control are mechanisms and tactics perpetrated by individuals at the upper echelons of power. Rather they are ubiquitous throughout culture and humans, at every level of culture and development, create spaces wherein the control and manipulation of their fellow being can occur.

Through his lens these spaces of torture and control, of confinement and terror, become at once beautiful and horrifying. It is as though he has seen the essential truth of the politics of control and captured it here in his book. But more than that, the aesthetics that underlie these spaces are the same design sense that one finds in Ikea furniture, or the structure of an Ikea store itself.

His work begs the question wherein does this Beauty lie? For to most of us, I would presume, a prison is not a beautiful space. Yet Ross captures some essential beauty in his photographs. It seems then that the beauty lies not so much in the thing itself but in Ross’ unique relationship to contemporary fascistic control. Beauty is that which is contained in the worldview of the observer, in the relationship and continual dialog between observer and observed.

The photograph is a visual representation of the relationship of the photographer to its subject. The beauty lies not so much in either of those, but rather in the energy created through this relatedness. For a worldview can not exist in a vacuum, it must, by its very nature have a world to resonate off of, to shape and be shaped by. So too can the world not fully exist in an existential sense without a viewer to complete the relationship. A world is a container and that container is empty without that which it contains.

The world, to return to Heidegger, conceals that which exists only in relation to the viewer, to the subject. But that which exists in the relationship between the viewer and the subject is in turn concealed by the subject’s own subjectivity. Just as the manner in which fundamental particles are measured in physics causes their very nature to change, so too does the subject’s subjective viewing of the world cause that which would be revealed to withdraw once more into concealment.

The world is a collaborative space. At takes the work of every man, woman, child, animal, plant and fungus to make it what it is. The aesthetics of control have pervaded our society so deeply that the same clean lines of the new chic apartment, or commercial play, are those same lines found in the jail cells of the Guantanamo detention facility. We have already bought in to the aesthetics of control. What we have not yet given up fully is our relatedness to that world.

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Posted in theory | No Comments »

Risk and Failure – Seven Deadly Sins

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

Risk is something we must always engage with when creating art. There is no foreknowledge of the efficacy of the project. It necessitates a strong a deep trust in the work of ones collaborators. Sometimes these are people you know well, other times they are people you have met quite recently. Often some combination of these two elements is inherent in any production. Regardless, one must place a total trust in the work of your collaborators. This situation leads to an energetic combination of danger and excitement.

When I worked on Seven Deadly Sins we had no idea until the show was over if it would work. There were so many pieces to fit together with the Orchestra, Opera singers, cabaret dancers, blacksmiths, acrobats, fire dancers, etc. etc. The stage was a ninety foot long, four foot wide, catwalk with small end stages on either side. The audience sat arena style sandwiching the runway. We had seating for somewhere around 700 people and the it quickly became evident that the other side of the audience would become a primary visual element of the overall experience.

As a general rule of thumb, a lighting designer tries to keep the light on the stage and off the audience. Of course rules, as we all know, were made to be broken. So rather than try and hide this very present and potentially massive audience, I chose to make them a feature of the evening. Large colored floodlights were pointed at the seating areas in an attempt to light our audience in various colors and thus take them, literally, on the emotional journey of the opera.

These discussions with my director, Roy Rallo, were quite difficult. Given that we did not have an audience, there was no way to test out this effect prior to the opening. As a result I had to convince someone, who I had never worked with before, that the primary storytelling device we would have with the lighting, was an effect we could not test prior to the show opening. Essentially he had to trust me that this was the right course of action to take. I confidently told him it was, and silently prayed that I was right.

The final effect that I saw at the opening was far greater than I had anticipated. We were fortunate enough to have a filled to capacity house, so the effect was to be the best it was going to be. And it worked brilliantly. The faces of the audience were clearly visible from across the space and not only did their personal emotional reactions show, but they took on a wonderful quality with the shifting light. There was an immersive quality to the experience that in some significant way derived from the environmental quality of the lighting.

Had we gone with a traditional lighting style and kept the lights out of the audience the effect of the piece would not have been so strong. The shifting backgrounds and the degree of contrast with the fire that we achieved would not have been possible. Without that risk of failure, the best aspect of the lighting for that show would never have been. Without risking failure, we can never achieve greatness.

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Posted in opera, theory | No Comments »

Is Stanley McCandless German? OR The Rediscovery of Shadow in Contemporary Culture

Friday, July 14th, 2006

Theoretically the whole acting area might be lighted with one powerful instrument directing its beams to the stage from a distance, at an angle which would light up the face of the actor somewhat as the rays from the sun make objects visible on a sunny day.
–Stanley McCandless, A method for Lighting the Stage

During his time a single light that could cover an entire stage was nothing but theory, but now such technology is commonplace. The film industry has found a need to brightly illuminate large areas in a color identical to daylight, such that the camera does not pick up the difference between the sun and the artificial lighting in the photography. Because of that need, the HMI Fresnel was born. HMI is a kind of lamp that operates much like a fluorescent or neon in that there is a glass container with chemicals in it that gets flooded with electricity and lets off (very bright) light. Although originally designed for film, these lights have found their way into theaters, primarily through European opera houses and increasingly in the US as well.

The difference between an HMI and a traditional incandescent lamp is like comparing watercolor to oil paint. One can achieve the same range of colors, perhaps, but the actual quality of the medium is quite different. By using these large lighting instruments one can achieve effects that are quite simply impossible with ‘area lighting.’ One of the biggest issue is shadows. Often in American theatre productions one sees a stage floor covered in lots and lots of tiny shadows. These are the result of lots and lots of tiny little lights focused into lots of little areas. This is very common in so called ‘naturalism’ and yet it is about as unnatural as one can get. When we walk out into the sun at 4:30 in the afternoon, we see a single shadow cast from a single source of light. Perhaps two if we are near a building with a reflective glass wall. But nowhere, unless we are in an artificial environment, do we have the twenty-three shadows one sees on a typical American stage floor.

Now, I am not arguing for an aesthetic that knows only shadows. If everything were like that, it would get as boring as anything else. But, a deeper appreciation for shadow could greatly enhance the beauty and dynamism of the American stage. In some ways this is a political stance. I never watch TV unless I am on an airplane, but when I have the chance my favorite thing to watch is Fox News(or Faux News, in the patriotic dialect). Their lighting designer must be one of the most brilliant propagandists alive. Watch one of their cable news shows some time, it is fascinating. All the anchors are lit so evenly that there is not a single shadow to be found. After all they represent the ‘truth’ they are ‘fair and balanced.’ So then they have their Conservative guests on camera who have slight shadows. Nothing big, but just enough to differentiate them from the hosts. Finally you have anyone other than a conservative wingnut. They always, ALWAYS, have a shadow underneath their chin. Minor issue right? Who cares? Indeed. No one cared in 1962 when Nixon and Kennedy debated on television. Appearance in front of a camera means nothing. Nothing at all.

Shadows mean secrets. Subconsciously we know this somewhere. It is an accepted part of our culture. Shadow = untruth. Or at least half truth. We can not believe the shadowed figure as much as our fair and balanced hosts. They have nothing to hide, so we must trust them. I do not believe this was always the case. For shadow means something else entirely. It means Mystery. One need only look at the paintings of Rembrandt or Caravaggio or El Greco to see a strong Western tradition that appreciates the beauty of the shadow.

It is time to reclaim the beauty of shadows. Like Tanizaki did for Japanese culture with In Praise of Shadows, we must relearn the beauty and truth of shadows. They need not be things to fear, so long as we know how to approach them. Batman after all, one of the greatest dark hero’s of modern mythology, hides in the shadows. We are afraid, as a culture to look inside ourselves and stare at the void. We are much more content to turn on the television and be told about our fair and balanced world. But it is time for our art to show us that void. If we can not go there unaided, then our art, our cultural subconscious, must be brought to the surface of our attention. We must learn to stare out at the dark expanse of human consciousness and see possibility and potential. We must learn to live in praise of shadows.

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Posted in design, theatre, theory | 6 Comments »

Methodical Thinking

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

A method for Lighting the Stage by Stanley McCandless was first printed in 1932. My personal copy is a 1984 reprint of the 1963 correction to the Fourth Edition that was first printed in 1958. I mention this only because this book was, and by many people still is considered a primary text for lighting design. Rather than being “a” method during all those years, it was considered by many to be “the” method.

The specifics of the book are uninteresting to anyone but a specialist, so I will glaze over them for the moment. The basic idea is this. Light, in any setting is motivated by some source, i.e. a lamp, the sun, a fire, etc. Thus, any object that is hit by that source has essentially two sides, a light side and a shadow side. McCandless then divided up the stage space into a grid of acting ‘areas’ and into each area would focus two lights, each coming from the front on a 45 degree angle. One would be warm, perhaps a pale amber, and one would be cool, a blue. Which was which depended upon where the lamp or window or whatever was placed. This is a very efficient means of lighting a stage space. You cover the entire stage and you can control the relative brightness or dimness of different locations on stage. If you have six areas, you need twelve lights. Clean, simple, done.

Much of what was going on in McCandless’ thinking had to do with problem solving for a much less advanced technology than we now have available. Power and control were two of his main concerns. In those days there simply was not enough electricity to power more than a few dozen lights. And controlling them was an insane job taking several electricians operating large panels of levers. Then and now is like comparing a mid-century computer and the latest laptop. One is large, bulky and slow, the other small, fast and efficient. For his time it was an amazing and progressive way of dealing with a very real situation. And this is a situation many people still find themselves in in the ‘indie-theatre’ world, where power and control are the first concern and art the second. The Method is a great way to turn minimalism by circumstance into minimalism by design.

The real tragedy of McCandless’ legacy is that too often his writing is taken literally, that one must light a show from the box booms with amber from one side and blue from another. If you want an old fashioned look, then this is certainly the source to begin with, but I would hope that our aesthetic sensibilities have evolved past the 1930′s. What I find interesting about going back to texts like this is to try and extract the essence of the idea, the motivation behind the specifics and then attempt to apply it to a contemporary setting. This is what I was getting at yesterday,

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.

While we were working on Norma at the San Francisco Opera, Heather turned to me and said with a wry smile, “See, that’s how you light an opera for less than $12,000.” Both of these designers are interested in an economy of volume. They want to fill the space elegantly and beautifully, minimizing waste and maximizing the dramatic story telling. Their motivation is the same, where they differ, truly, is a matter of aesthetics. McCandless is looking for some replication of reality, while Carson’s concern is the idea. Her work tends to be very intellectually engaging and cerebral. It is very abstract, but the light follows very clearly defined rules of movement and transformation.

The conventional American style of lighting a play is in many ways an evolution of the McCandless idea. However, rather than a reworking of the initial impulse, an economy of volume, it has been a modification of the ‘area lighting.’ The stage is broken up into many little areas and a lot of little spotlights are pointed at those areas from various directions and in several colors. Virtually every theatre in the U.S. is equipped to light a show based on some variation of this idea. It is a very effective means of lighting a stage, but in many ways it feels like its aesthetic usefulness is coming to a close. I certainly do not envision seeing a broadway show radically diverge from this model any time soon, but something about it feels increasingly out of place in the modern world.

My fundamental problem is that it looks at the performer as an object. As little more than a moving prop that talks. The actor moves, the light moves, simple and easy. Yet, there is so much more available to light than mere illumination. Film understands this. The great cinematographers use light as a dynamic storytelling device in ways that are almost unthinkable in the theatre. There is a fallacy among a lot of people in the theatre that ‘if I can’t see their eyes I can’t hear them.’ Yet, Marlon Brando was heard throughout The Godfather while cloaked in shadow for most of his screen time. A cursory look at the Noir genre shows the almost limitless potential of light as storytelling device.

Revealing the actor to the audience is the primary goal of lighting. Yet how that revelation occurs is something that must be answered uniquely at every moment. A character is not simply illuminated. They are revealed. They are revealed existing within a given psychological and physical context. The are revealed through someone’s perception. They are revealed in relationship to some one or some thing. The performer does more, much more, than simply stand here, then there. They live. They exist as a complex matrix of thoughts and feelings and action. It is that whole that must be revealed, not just the deed of crossing the stage.

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Posted in design, opera, theory | 4 Comments »

un/conventional

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

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.

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Risk and Failure

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

There is an element of risk in any work of art. There is the simple risk of not knowing if it will get finished, and then there is the more complex risk, of meaning. Are you saying what you want to say? But deeper than that, are you forcing yourself to look beyond your previously determined limitations? Working in a medium like writing this kind of concern becomes clear, in lighting it is much more oblique. Still, we are concerned in the first degree with language and its derivative, meaning. Verbal and oral language on the one hand and visual language on the other.

In a very real sense I do not feel there is any point in doing art if one is unconcerned with risk taking. One can make pretty things by following a formula. Hell, Martha Stewart made an entire career out of the attractiveness of formulaic aesthetics. But this is not art. Art is about risk, it is about danger. Art is about sacrificing that which comes easiest to you and looking for a new path upon which to forge ahead. Art is about failure.

The best art, and yes I am making sweeping generalizations here, always fails. It fails because it does not conform to the accepted aesthetic criteria of its time. It fails because the standards by which it is judged can not encompass it. It can be neither measured nor quantified. It stands apart from the judges, alone and solitary.

But it does something else too. Something positive. Its very reason for failure, its iconoclastic nature, causes it to transform the environment around it. It molds and shapes the world around it until that world learns the new tools by which to measure the work. This is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This is Brecht, Weill and Neher presenting Mahagonny at the Baden Baden Festival and getting booed off the stage. This is creating a work so powerful that it alters the way we look at the world.

Very few works will have the kind of effect that these two have had, and not all need to. What is important is the failure. The risk that what is being made may not turn out well. It may not appeal to the mass audience. Yet it still must be done. Without that risk we accept the status quo. Without standing on that ledge and staring into the void we are accepting this world and all that it stands for at face value without asking “what more?”

Guernica did not end war and The Seven Deadly Sins did not end Capitalistic exploitation. I am not sure any work of art can. That is not the role of art in society. Art in general and theatre in particular operates in a very powerful way as a kind of magnifying glass on society and self. It examines closely one or two specific areas of concern and forces us to look at those places within ourselves. This is one area where the live-ness of theatre is unparalleled. We can not escape the fact that this is a person before us. It is not an image or a likeness or a rendering. It is a person. A living breathing thing. It looks like us and speaks like us. Could it be . . .

It is not enough to look at where we are. It is not enough to explore the status quo. And in a way this is why a lot of overtly political art fails(in a bad way) for me. It leaves no room for further exploration. There is no question. Didacticism is rarely interesting. Brecht is not interesting because he proved that Capitalism is bad. He is interesting because in each of his works there is a question. It is not a question that begs an answer so much as a question that simply begs to be asked. Every time we approach a text for production we are not looking to answer anything definitively, rather we are looking to reopen the discussion.

Asking questions is a risk. There is an inherent danger in the act of asking a question because society does not like them. Trotsky argued for perpetual revolution because he knew that any socio-political system that remains static for too long will feel the calcifying tendencies of authoritarianism. It happened in Russia and Cuba almost immediately. It is occurring in the United States right now. Fewer and fewer questions are being asked. Statements are being disguised as questions to maintain the illusion, but that freedom of asking has already gone away. Though not quite completely. There are still cracks in the armor. And this is what we can do as artists. Ask those questions that need be asked and perhaps we might get some light through those cracks. Perhaps we will find the counter force to totalitarianism and control. Perhaps we will risk everything and fail gloriously.

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