Light Cue 23

I had a brief tech this afternoon. My friend Trebien Pollard is presenting a piece at the Dance Sampler this Saturday at Symphony Space. The piece is a 12 minute section of a larger full evening work we will be presenting at the Joyce Soho this July.

Tech was very fast as is so often the case in the dance world. The evening consists of 16 works by as many choreographers. It can be quite an interesting evening. As a result each group is allowed 45 minutes to tech the piece. That gave us just enough time for me to write a dozen light cues and then run the piece twice. Organization is critical in these situations as there really is no time to lose.

What is funny about is that I did not get a chance to actually watch the piece(and will not be able to as I will be with the NYTB show that evening). I find there are two ways of observing a piece. One is how I look when I am working on it and the other is after it is done reflecting on the work I have completed. When I have only done the former, I do not consider it having seen the piece. My eyes are so concerned with the formal aesthetics of the thing that I often moss out on the sensory enjoyment of the work.

Trebien and one of the dancers Liz, and I all went to graduate school together. From there and since then I have probably lit around ten pieces of his. Its nice to have that familiarity with a work. You are able to understand the textures of the piece better. The general aesthetic is in place and then you can work on the details.

The lighting is much simpler than I had hoped, but it was all we really had time for. As much as the individual cues are important, with dance especially I find the timing of the thing, how the light moves and transforms, to be of even greater value. Thus getting in the two runs rather than building as many cues as possible was of more value. Fewer light cues of greater integrity are in the end a better way to go almost all of the time.

I have worked with choreographers who seem to think that the job of the lighting designer is to write light cues. That is we are to create as many different looks as possible and to have the lighting for a piece change every time there is a minor transformation in the movement phraseology.

I tend to take the almost extreme opposite view when it comes to dance. Unless there is a need for the lighting to change, I do not like to make changes. The piece must demand a transformation in the environment before I write a cue. I think this is a good way to look at any performance, but I find it to be of most crucial value in dance.

Dance is to theatre as poetry is to literature. Even while the poem may be quite complex, they are very delicate things held together by there merest intonation of a word. The presence or absence of a single word or phrase will either make or break a poem. So too can a single misstep make or break a dance.

I remember an article I came across once in an old copy of Lighting Dimensions Magazine written by Jennifer Tipton about lighting dance. In it she speaks to the use of color and how there is often an idea that wild and saturated colors can be used in dance, because it is dance. She goes on to explain how this is a misunderstanding and that while there may well be times where the use of heavily saturated colors can be appropriate there is nothing inherent to dance that makes that exception as opposed to theatre or opera.

Taking this same line of reasoning I explored it in relation to the movement of light and discovered a similar truth. Most of our life and our experience occurs under a constant, or very slow moving light. Perhaps we are under the fluorescent lighting of an office or outside under the slow moving gaze of the sun. Either way we do not have many and wild transformations in the lighting environments we find ourselves in. Even in a night club the environment is a static one even thought the physical lights themselves may be moving and blinking, the quality of the environment remains the same.

Given this, and given that dance, and other performance mediums, are an extension of our daily experience, why then would we consider the movement of the light in a dance to exist in so radically divergent a state as it does in our lives? The light should be heightened, certainly, as dance is a heightened form of reality, but heightened or no, it is still woven of the same thread.

When the light finds a need to change then it can and must change. But to do so arbitrarily is just that, arbitrary. James Turrell explores this in many of his works especially his installations like the one at PS1.

The sun is constant. It is everything around us changing that makes it appear to transform. There is a quality of mutable consistency to natural light, and even the artificial light we engage with, that is so often lacking in lighting for performance. That stillness is so necessary to allow the stories that must be told to come alive.