I have been working on the lightplot for the revival of Cinderella with New York Theatre Ballet. Largely the plot is the same as last year. However there were some changes in the house plot at Florence Gould Hall and the repertory program that plays with Cinderella is different so the lightplot has changed some.
I think these are all very beneficial changes. Some things have been streamlined, some others expanded. For the most part it has been a matter of maximizing what is available in the palette. The company prefers a very colorful look. This is a fun aesthetic to work in, but the trick is to get the color sense without using so many colors that the light gets muddy. It is very easy with a lot of color to make costumes look old and dingy. The trick is to have a look that is clean and also shows off the dancers, costumes and scenery to the best advantage.
I love working in heavy color environments. Windows was quite the extreme as far as the use of color goes, but it helps make the point. Often, though, I find that direct saturated colors like that are not what is wanted in a colorful space. More the need of the piece is a sense of color. The feel of color is very different than the direct application of heavily saturated colors themselves.
The color sense of a piece is often a key factor in how a piece if perceived. Medea wanted a terse look. It needed a strong but minimal framework to place around the action of the play. The result was heavy use of shadow, black is a very important color in the lighting designers toolbox, and a very contained color palette. The Last Word . . . , a totally different kind of show, had en even tighter color palette. The color varied by less than 1000 degrees Kelvin, with no black.
New York Theatre Ballet can be a tricky aesthetic to nail down. My experience has been that it works best with a sense of color, but when saturated colors are used they are kept in the background. Saturated colors are very present, purples and blues and greens and reds, but the majority of the color work is “invisible.” That is, the colors are tints. A cool white or a warm white, slightly pink or a touch of amber or a pale blue, but no strong color.
It is the careful mixture of these tints, combined with the selective use of saturated colors, that gives the overall piece its color sense. Color can be a difficult thing to get a hold of. One of my reasons for going to NYU for graduate school is the legendary color lecture of John Gleason carried on by Curt Ostermann. And while this can provide all the rules, it then takes hundreds of experiments and breaking of the rules to really get a grasp on it.
Every play or dance or opera is a kind of experiment. Even revivals. They are never definitive, but always propositions. Will this piece resonate with an audience today? What must be done to make it speak in a language accessible today. In many ways dance is the strongest in this regard. There is an immediacy to dance that is a much less common thing in a play. In Opera it is the rare occurrence that it holds that fresh immediacy, but when it does, it is a sight to behold!
The color sense can be a powerful tool to help bring a piece into a framework accessible to the audience. It is a delicate balance to find what is both true to the work and at the same time pulls the audience into that work in a clear and direct manner. Lots of work, but a hell of a lot of fun too.
