I seem to be preoccupied these days with matters of ethics. Today I discovered something that was a little strange, and certainly raised some alarm bells in the ethics department. These issues were drilled into my head in graduate school so perhaps that is why they are so much to the forefront of my thinking.
Issues of aesthetic ethics are very important in a collaborative medium like theatre. I was taught that it is important, as a lighting designer to show off your collaborators work as it is. This can mean a number of things, but in simple terms it means providing visibility of the actors, scenery and costumes. Everyone involved in making these things put in a lot of hard work and if they chose a specific shade of green, then the audience should see, if only once in the course of evening, that precise shade. There are exceptions of course. The set for Windows was about translucency and transformation. If I had not caused it to change colors and transform continuously I would not have been showing it off as intended.
As Uncle Ben says “With great power comes great responsibility.” Light has the great power to hide as much as it can reveal. This makes showing off our collaborators work as it is, our responsibility. We must stay true to the collective vision and intent of the work as a whole and not traipse off into some myopic self-indulgent hole to hide as cruel dictator.
Sometimes this happens. And it is very unfortunate. I know a number of lighting designers who have sent their work out on tour only to find the person responsible for maintaining their design had taken it upon themselves to alter it totally to their own will. Of course this is not only disrespectful to the designer, but also to the director or in a recent incident involving my own work, the choreographer. Reconstructing someone else’s work is a job that requires a high degree of professional and aesthetic ethics. It is necessary to maintain a strong sense of ethics because you always have to make small adjustments and compromises. The work is always changed. To do so unnecessarily and intentionally is unfair to everyone else involved.
I lit a Nutcracker two years ago that was originally designed by someone else. I took great pains to reconstruct as faithfully as I could their original work, even though I did not agree with many of the choices aesthetically. My like or dislike was not the issue. It was not my work. Last year I was unable to work on the production. This year, I have been asked to work on it again.
Looking over the old paperwork I found two VERY different lightplots. One was the information I had been given and one was the paperwork from last year. I thought perhaps the choreographer had reconceived the piece since I last worked on it, but just to check I asked him. It turns out that he did not initiate the changes and that in fact he found out about it only when he arrived for the dress rehearsal, far too late to make any changes to the piece.
The lines are sometimes blurred, but it is important to keep in mind what work is really who’s. It is important to keep inmind how much one can really alter the work of another. Only by strict vigilance and respect for the integrity of another’s work can this system called theatre function. It is central to the successful functioning of any social system that the other people in that system be respected for what they bring to the table. It is true in theatre just as it is in politics.
