I am considering only using rap lyrics for my post subject headers for the month of November. Not quite the dedication of writing a play during the month. But its a goal. And goals are good things to have.
I write a fair bit about aesthetics here in this forum but I often feel as though it is a hollow pursuit. For one thing it feels like an awfully long monologue with little critical engagement. The other reason is that in freelance design, certainly lighting design, aesthetics as a formal entity take a back seat to a kind of philosophy of presence. The goal becomes not the execution or definition of some aesthetic pursuit, but rather a clarification of a way of looking at things.
Interlude: I am listening to Overture on Ice by Laetita Sonami, part of the “Handel’s Messiah Remixed”, and it is FUCKING AWESOME !
Back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .
These discussions of aesthetics, or this exploration of the aesthetics of presence are something that I am having trouble coming to terms with. At one level is the fact that I find myself unable to more directly engage my subject matter because it would involve criticism of my colleagues. This is something that I feel is a violation of the trust placed in a collaborative partnership. Its the same reason I do not talk about my relationship with my girlfriend in public. It is a unfair of me, I feel, as one part of a greater whole to violate that. Like Zay says, one must maintain the integrity of the container that holds any relationship.
The result of this is that I talk either in generalities or my writing becomes reductively self-referential. Neither of these is something that I am wholly satisfied with. I am very bad at documenting my work. As a result there is only a small subset of my work that I have pictures of. And there is only so many times anyone wants to look at a Foucault’s Pendulum or Flaming Pasties. So I post my camera phone pictures. Some of them might be nice, but they are snapshots not compositions, so they can only point around what I am speaking to not directly engage it.
My first true engagement with light came through photography. I love black and white photography and have spent countless hours developing film and making prints. I began in theatre as an assistant stage manager. My engagement with it was always lukewarm. When I first got into lighting I wanted to do music videos. I was attracted by the intersection between light and music. I found them to be far more similar than they are different. This was a wonderful discovery for someone who has loved music since he was a small child(even if my dad did play his records too loud!) yet could not play an instrument to save his life. I survived in the high school band through a determination built from my crush on the first clarinetist more than any interest or ability in playing music.
So light, as a perfect compliment to music, became my goal. I wanted to learn anything and everything there was to know. I photographed incessantly. I took every design and electrician job I could get my hands on. I lit theatre, dance, raves, anything that came across my path. I went to NYU to continue this study and exploration of light. Again I took on anything that came my way. I lit 12 dances for the dance department my first year and ended up their resident designer my last two years. I went out and saw as much performance as I could, averaging between one and two shows a week for my first year on top of a full school and work schedule. Needless to say I did not sleep more than three hours a night.
Since then I have been doing as much work as I can get my hands on. When I met Ken Posner, he was just getting off a phone call. He turned to me and said “I don’t even know what the show is, but I said yes. Always say yes.” Sounds like great advice, he was after all designing Wicked, one of the largest Broadway shows to date, at least from a lighting standpoint. So since then I have always said yes.
I would not say that was a definitive moment, as I was already going in that direction, but it sure strengthened my resolve. Say yes to every show. It can be good dating advice too. Somewhere there my goals shifted from an interest in exploring the intersection between light and music to taking every show I was offered. This is not a bad thing. I have developed interests that otherwise would not have come my way had I closed myself off to them.
The more I do this lighting thing the more I find myself drawn to the world of Opera. I think in Opera lies the perfect synthesis of my interest in intellectual minimalist modes of storytelling as well as an exploration of the intersection of light and music. Yet I am still in that tricky situation of being a freelancer and thus able to say yes and no to what comes across my plate, but unable to choose the work that I do.
