Posts Tagged ‘idi’

Inside the Design Idea – The Tender Land

Monday, April 5th, 2010

The Tender Land marks the second show I will be lighting for Berkeley Opera during their 2010 season. It is directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer with scenery by Chad Owens and costumes by Romy Douglass.

The Tender Land is set in the Depression-era American heartland. With this piece Aaron Copland has crafted a gentle look at life in rural America through one day in the life of our protagonist, Laurie Moss, a young girl on the cusp of being the first in her family to graduate High School whose dreams extend well beyond the fields of grain on her family farm.

The research for this piece centered around the documentary photography of Walker Evans. In addition to providing good visual research for scenic and costume elements, we took the tone of his black and white photographs as the springboard for our color palette.

The scenery, as you can see from the model shots to the left, consists of a few simple pieces evocative of the shape of various items rather than representational elements. These pieces are all painted white. Upstage, the cyc is tightly closed in and will be used as a projection surface and a lighting surface in Act 1 and Act 3. For the party scene in Act 2, the cyc will be covered with a blackout curtain.

The costumes follow in a monochromatic white palette but maintain the shape and form of period clothes. Thus we have very real people existing in a more abstracted space. The intent being to really bring out the humanity of the characters.

The form of the scenery, with its minimal structure and open use of space, brought to mind dance scenery. As such, I looked at traditional dance lighting angles to approach lighting the space. In keeping with the monochromatic white scenery and costumes I chose to be very sparing with my use of color. While I will use a pale blue for the outside night scene, everything else should fall into more of a sepia tone.

Act 1 is late afternoon on the farm. We are outside and see the edge of the porch leading to the house as well as one corner of the barn and a suggestion of the fence upstage. I wanted to provide some texture to the air as well as clearly give a sense of outside. Leaf patterns seemed an appropriate choice for this. My High Sides from SR all have patterns in them. Act 2 is later that night, inside at a party. For this, top light felt like the most clear indicator of place. We then have an interlude scene before Act 3 which takes place outside, as per Act 1, late at night, just before day break. For the external night scenes I have my High Sides from SL in L161

For general lighting throughout the piece I have a system of Head-Hi and Shin booms, as well as boxbooms for facelight. The boxbooms carry the lighting ideas of both the Hi Sides and the Head Hi Booms out into the front of house. The repertory plot in the theatre has many more lights hung than we are using, but we have a very limited load-in and strike schedule, so I planned for a minimum of lights initially, knowing that we could easily add specials as needed.

The systems are as follows:

  • Template Hi Sides in CLR with pattern R77774

  • Night Hi Sides in L161
  • Party Top Light in R302
  • Head Hi Booms in L203
  • Shin Booms in R05
  • Romance Shins in L201
  • Box Boom SR in CLR with pattern R77774
  • Box Boom SL in L161
  • Box Booms in L203
  • CYC in RGB from the top and bottom

Below is a look at the plot. As you can see there are many more lighting instruments available than I am using. Some of this is an aesthetic choice. I find that opera can often sustain, and in fact wants, a cleaner and more spare composition than do straight plays for example. The other aspect of this choice is time. With such a short load-in/load-out schedule, keeping the refocus to a minimum helps us on both ends of the show.

I hope you have enjoyed this iteration of Inside The Design Idea. Please leave thoughts or comments below.

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Inside the Design Idea – Den of Thieves

Friday, March 5th, 2010

When I first moved to the Bay Area after leaving New York I kept hearing about SF Playhouse. It seemed that in the time I had been on the East Coast this little company had gone from nothing to making quite a name for itself in San Francisco. Eager to find interesting work, I made a point to see some of their shows and was not disappointed. So, when Artistic Director Bill English asked me to light a play for them I was excited at the opportunity.

I need to confess something to my readers at this point. I don’t like reading plays. I enjoy rehearsals, and techs, and worksheets, and everything that goes into making a play, with one exception. I don’t like reading plays. Thus it was with my usual resignation of “Well, I have to get through this part in order to get to the fun stuff” that I picked up Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Den of Thieves and began reading.

The result? I had not laughed so hard in quite some time. The script is so outrageously funny that I had trouble getting through it, but this time for totally different reasons than a typical script read. I kept laughing so hard I had to put the script down repeatedly. The story revolves around a group of thieves in a kleptomaniacs recovery program. Then someone shows up with the perfect heist. Wackiness ensues.

When I did finish the play I began thinking through how to light it. There is a sharpness to the comedy that demands to be addressed through light. No mushy recessive stuff here. Both colors and angles need to be crisp and distinct.

The first thing I saw clearly was that the air must feel colorful. Much like approaching musical comedy, the farcical nature of the piece demands a feeling of color everywhere. But that color must be carefully chosen to augment the crisp dialogue. I also knew that I wanted a very sharp look in terms of my approach to angle but was not sure how to achieve that.

At the first production meeting Bill, who was designing the scenery, came in with a corner set on a 90 degree angle (the US was the corner of a room with walls at approximately 45 degrees from that point). Upon seeing this I was immediately struck with my solution to the sharp angle. I would hang a two color system of diagonal front Head-Hi’s following the angles of the walls. Once this piece was resolved everything else fell into place.

Backlight would be a cool and a color changing system. Sidelight would be a pair of pipe-ends from each side. A bunch of scenery specials. Both the Act 1 and Act 2 set had windows, so light through the windows would be prominent. The nature of the comedy led me to choose to fill in the shadows with color. As such there would be a medium blue through the windows for the night scenes and a dark blue frontlight system to fill from front of house. A pair of FOH IQs would do any additional specials as needed. The final element would be a lot of practicals in each scene to really bring the world to life.

Lighting systems are as follows:

  • Cool Head His in L201+R132
  • Lavender Head His in R51+R132
  • Warm Diagonal Fronts in R302+R132
  • Low Blue Fron in L079
  • Straight CLR Front in CLR
  • Cool Backs in L202
  • Color Backs (the house scroll is a standard apollo rock&roll string)
  • CLR Cross Light in R132
  • Outside Night in R68
  • Outside Dawn in L201
  • Outside Sun in R318
  • Practicals are all CLR
  • IQs in R132

Below is a look at the lightplot:

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Inside the Design Idea. Please leave any comments or questions you might have.

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Inside the Design Idea – Orestes 2.0

Monday, February 15th, 2010

I find Charles Mee to be one of the most interesting playwrights alive today. His texts, often contemporary reworkings of the Greeks, are deeply profound insights into the contemporary American experience. Orestes 2.0 is no different.

Upon my first read of this play I was hit with a strong visual sense of the world. The first thing I was struck by was how bleak the world is. A desolate landscape where words like “possibility” or “hope” come across as cruel jokes at best. While that is the background of the play, there is a deep and almost perverse comedy element as well. The lighting had a difficult balance to strike. On the one hand we have this desolate place. On the other hand we have this big, broad, and perverse comedy. Exploring that tension is where the visual world gets interesting very quickly.

When I brought my ideas to director Jessica Heidt she was a bit wary of the bleakness and very eager to explore the comedy. Her concern, and rightly so, is that if the production focuses too strongly on that one aspect of the text, the delicate balance Mee has constructed will be lost. And it is in that balance that the play finds resonance with our contemporary experience.

Our research focused on post-invasion Iraq. Demolished palaces and military occupation. We looked at images of once grand palaces turned lounges for soldiers with fluorescent tubes bolted randomly to the walls and broken chandeliers hanging sadly unlit.

The space is a three-quarter round thrust stage. The set consists of a broken marble floor backed by a half demolished wall with three crumbling arches. Upstage of the arches is a CYC which might be a sky or perhaps a lake in the distance. This left the lighting unobstructed and gave me a large canvass to work with.

Solving the desolate landscape came first. It is the foundation upon which the action occurs. How would I approach this? Gray came first to mind, a sad and lonely gray. But there must also be a harshness. Something unforgiving as well. This led me to consider exploring soft diffuse sources contrasted with hard sharp ideas. The frontlight would be addressed with bounce light. I hung 9 Source-4′s with bounce cards to ring the stage, three per audience side, to give us facelight. Contrasting against that is a 3×3 grid of hard edged boxes that will allow us to delineate areas on the stage floor that we want to highlight. The facelight would be in a dominant daylight color and the boxes would be in a pale cyan.

This gave us our base for the landscape. Now on to the comedy.

Jessica was interested in my idea of heavy and saturated color invading the space. As such, I placed a system of color changing backlights using Source-4s with Seachangers. This would give me the ability to transform the space into any color needed for the many scenes. Further, several of the monologues have been converted into rock songs along with a dance number to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance so having color change options is necessary. Upstage, the CYC is being lit with a three color RGB striplights. This allows us to get a lot of color out on stage in any hue we might desire.

Two sidelight systems and some cool PAR bakclights fill out our full stage ideas. We then have several ideas of light scraping across the scenery to pull out the textured walls as well as help lend a degree of realism to the painted scenery. People upstage of the arches are lit by booms with a Head Hi and a Shin.

The research image of the fluorescent bolted onto the wall really stuck with me. As such I asked to add two T-8 fixtures to the walls. In addition we will have a pipe added 3′ below our, already low, grid to hang three large scoops pointed out at the audience just downstage of the wall. Add a small handfull of worklights and we have a good array of practicals to play with contrasts between realism and theatricality.

And contrast is the name of the game here. Contrasts in color, quality, and angle of light; as well as contrasting reality with theatricality.

The system breakdown looks like this:

  • Bounce Fronts in L201

  • Top Boxes in R4315
  • Clear Cross in R302+R119
  • Cool Cross in L161+R119
  • Front Spots in R3208+R132
  • Color Backs in C-M-Y-G
  • CYC in R68, LHT139, and L106
  • Cool Backs in L281
  • Scoops and Worklights in CLR

The grid, as mentioned before, is very low at 13′-9″. All lights will be overhung to give a clean grid line with the exception of the bounce lights (which have to underhang to work properly) and the low pipe with scoops. The intention there is to allow the lights that we are meant to see be very visible while those just lighting the show are more or less out of the visual field.

Here is a look at the lightplot:

I hope you have enjoyed this installment of Inside the Design Idea. I would love to hear your thoughts or ideas in comments below. Thank you for reading.

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Inside the Design Idea – Don Giovanni

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Don Giovanni with Berkeley Opera is a radical exercise in minimalism. The stage is a standard black surround; black floor, a series of black legs and borders all framing a white CYC. An upstage set of legs against the CYC is also white in order to make the space visually continue further offstage. Upstage just in front of the CYC are four steel framed boxes faced with milk plexi and topped with clear plexi. Downstage on the floor is a 4′x8′ mirror which serves as Don Giovanni’s personal island of narcissism. For the second act we have a single hanging streetlamp that flies in.

Minimal.

The director, and artistic director of the company Mark Streshinsky, was interested in creating a very spare environment wherein we could focus on the performers and the music without the distractions of all the scenery which can often get in the way of the basic storytelling. The lighting too wants to be in a similar spare vocabulary. A few simple and distinct elements will reconfigure and move through the piece.

One last design element worth noting is projection. In addition to the statue of Il Commendatore a few scenic moments will be treated with projections (on the CYC and white masking legs) to locate us in specific places throughout the piece.

One thing that will really help sell the minimalism of the piece is the performance style. Mark is doing a lot of work to keep the singers from “acting” and has placed the performance within a very naturalistic idiom. This sets the characterization against the setting, and the inherent absurdity of Opera, in a powerful way. By making the people real it allows the design to really push the edges of what is needed to tell the story.

Don Giovanni is a dark comedy. Often the nasty and despicable character of Don Giovanni, and his misanthropic sexual exploits, can overshadow the comedy. But the comedy must be treated with a very steady hand or the weight of Giovanni’s actions can be lost. It is a balance. And no simple task. Especially for a piece which begins with a near rape on stage.

As I thought through the piece, it was the darkness that first struck me. Most of the piece takes place at night. Further, we start with a rape and end with our villain being dragged into Hell. Not exactly the lightest of material. This led me to want to approach the piece with cool colors and a lot of shadow. Sidelight would be the name of the game. Sidelight and silhouette. Aside from being stylistically wrong for the piece, with the use of projection it made no sense to bother with front light. There are a few moments where we will want to see faces clearly, but those should be distorted, so the choice was made to place a series of floodlight footlights at the downstage edge of the stage. Some boxbooms will allow us to fill out the faces a little more for the wedding scene, but other than that we are lighting from the side and overhead.

Since our venue has a repertory plot, and my paperwork consisted of channeling their hookup, I will not be including a lightplot for this iteration of Inside the Design Idea. I will, however, give you a list of systems and colors. So here we go:

  • High Sidelight in L161

  • Head Hi Booms in L202
  • Shin Booms in L201
  • Backlight in CLR
  • Backlight in L161
  • Footlights in CLR
  • Diagonal Footlights in L201
  • Plexi Lightboxes in CLR
  • Blue CYC in R68
  • Clear CYC
  • Red CYC in L106

We load in and focus this evening. The show opens next week. See here for more information.

Please let me know what you think about this look inside the design of Don Giovanni in comments.

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Inside the Design Idea – Everyone Intimate Alone Visibly

Monday, December 28th, 2009

When Ben Levy, Artistic Director and choreographer for LEVYdance, contacted me about lighting his most recent full evening piece I was excited. We have worked together before and not only do I enjoy his choreography but I enjoy him as well. We have a good working relationship and appreciate each other’s aesthetic approaches. When we sat down to discuss the piece and he told me the general concept my initial reaction was that this was unlightable.

To many “unlightable” would be a place to stop, turn around, and go home. For me I saw it as an opportunity to look for new ways of approaching dance lighting. Why was the piece unlightable? Let’s look at the layout a bit. The work takes place inside a 30′x30′ square space bounded by 10′ tall screens which hang 4′ above the ground. On these screens are projections. The audience sits on all four sides in two rows thus creating a 20′x20′ dance space. On the floor of this dance space is more projection.

Because there are four walls traditional low angled side lighting was out. Because of the projections there could be no light on the floor or walls (light washes out the projection). Because the audience was so close and we could not have light in their eyes there was no high side/front/back light available. The only thing left were downlight pools but that would not have worked aesthetically for the piece. What to do?

As we talked more about the piece it became obvious that A) the projections were not on all the surfaces at all times, B) there were times when the projections could be, at least partially, washed out by the lighting, and C) we could light into the audience’s eyes on occasion when used judiciously. In addition to all that the walls do not make true corners but have 4′ openings where the “corner” would be. Lastly, because of the immediate proximity of the audience very little light could go a long way towards illuminating the performers.

One of the ideas with the piece (reflected in the video) is that the dancers are, at least initially, controlled by the space or there is a direct dialog between performer and venue. It opens as a kind of video installation with audience mingling about looking at images on the four screens. At some point the video fades out while our dancers get in place. Once in place a new reactive video begins which illuminates any movement in the dance space. Since this is not your typical dance show I knew that attempting to force “dance lighting” into this space would fail. I had to approach the space on its own terms.

This freed things up a bit and led me to look formally at the space as an object in which action occurs. I saw the open corners as alleys through which light could move. I saw the screens as walls off of which I could bounce light to illuminate our performers. Taking that idea one step further I chose to add bounce cards in the air which I would light to give a soft glow to the space. That idea of bounce light caused me to think of juxtaposing hard and soft sources in addition to varying the lighting by direct and indirect sources.

The light plot is a formally organized system of lights that creates an ordered geometry in the space. By giving myself control over each of the lights I could turn on all of a given system to create that formal geometry or only part of a system to throw the formality off balance as dictated by the needs of the choreography.

The video images are low-res black and white with one notable exception. As such I chose to follow the lead of the projections and keep the lighting in that same color world of gray tones. The video, music, and choreography run the gamut of soft and tender to harsh and severe. I wanted the quality of light to follow that same range and looked for a variety of options through which to achieve that.

The systems I used were as follows:

  • Daylight Fluorescents in CLR
  • Head Highs in L202
  • Overhead bounce in L201
  • Screen bounce in L201
  • Downlight pools in L202
  • Downlight Specials in L201
  • High Cross in L281

The Fluorescents make “corners” at the corners of the dance space. Booms are placed in each corner outside the screens with two lights each; a head high (for an alley shot across the space) and a low unit (for the overhead bounce cards). Three Source-4s and a Fresnel hang just above each screen; the Fresnels are for the screen bounce while the Source-4′s make up the high cross system (individually controlled and sharp edged to make boxes that the dancers can move in and out of). The downlights are a 3×3 grid of Fresnels. The downlight specials are for a special moment at the end and are hard edged Source-4s.

Here is a look at the light plot:

This show has a very controlled color palette ranging from 4300° K – 5700° K. Despite such a tight range of color the quality of light varies radically from sharp edged focusable lights to diffuse flood lights to indirect bounce light. Most lighting for live performance uses color and angle as the main story telling devices. In this case I was largely limited to variations on top light and had to look to the quality of light for variation. It is a sensibility common in television and film but rarely encountered in live performance.

The show tours to DC and New York before playing in San Francisco. On the road this design will be modified slightly at each venue as the equipment will vary. While some venues will not allow for the precision of hard eged vs. soft edged I should be able to maintain the direct and indirect sources with full integrity.

What did you think of this post? Let me know in comments.

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Posted in dance, design | 3 Comments »

Inside the Design Idea – The Sisters Rosensweig

Friday, December 25th, 2009

I wrote last week about a few projects I am working on that have embraced an aesthetic of minimalism in their productions due to budgetary issues. But how do these ideas arise? More importantly how do they develop into a final product? I have written generically about my design process but I thought it might be fun to explore a single project more in depth to see how these ideas make it to the stage.

I was approached by Aaron Davidman, Artistic Director of The Jewish Theater – San Francisco, to light his production of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig for their 2010 season. I had never read or seen the play so my first read for this production was my first time ever through the play. I had no preconceived notions of what it was about or how it “should” look. So I sat down with the text and began to read the play fresh.

Upon that first read I was struck with how important time is to the play. It takes place over a 36 hour period and all the action occurs in the same location. It is almost Greek in its unity of time, place, and action. As a lighting designer time of day is a central concern when working through the text. While location is important it is not central in the same way that time is. Even when the work is highly abstracted there needs to be some unity of expressing a changing time of day. Because time plays such a central role in the storytelling of Sisters Rosensweig I became instantly curious about how to provide that.

The script calls for a rather elaborate setting inside a well furnished apartment. While the action takes place in this well furnished apartment what is more central to the dramatic storytelling is that everything happens in the same room. I proposed to Aaron that we consider setting the play on a rather minimal set and utilize lighting conventions borrowed from the dance world to approach the piece. He readily welcomed the idea and we set out with our scenic designer to craft this world.

I find that audiences respond quite favorably to naturalistic plays happening on abstracted settings. When abstracted in the right way, such that the core storytelling elements are highlighted, the abstraction makes the reality of the characters resonate strongly. One trouble that can arise in naturalistic settings is that the characters get lost amidst the scenery. While it is a perfect approach for film, strict naturalism can impede an audience’s ability to process natural dialog. Abstract minimalism takes the benefits of abstraction even further and gives the audience a clear focus on the actors. After all the audience pays to see actors not well executed scenery, beautiful costumes, or fancy lighting.

As we developed our setting for Sisters Rosensweig we were very careful to create a space and develop ideas that will always keep our focus on the performer. A white rectangle set against a black floor to bound our room filled with a few simple furniture pieces, a staircase, and a chandelier all backed by a large and expansive sky. The sky, truly a white cyc, will be variously lit to show the passage of day into night and back into day. The performers will be clearly and cleanly lit and set against this shifting sky.

Through a clear focus on the performance we will create a visual space which can ebb and flow along with the emotional moment of the play. Each of the seven scenes take place at a slightly different time of day. In order to show these transformations the cyc will be lit variously from the top and bottom in a range of colors from morning pastels, to cool gray midday clouds, to nothing late at night. A shifting sun will illuminate the cyc variously from the sides as well as low and center on the horizon for an evening sunset.

While the sky will be changing behind us, the performers will be lit in cool shades of gray. Keeping the light on the actors in a tight color range of 3400° K – 5700° K will provide a clean and crisp look appropriate for both the sharp witted comedy as well as the darker moments of the piece. This color palette also evokes the cool light of London wherein the play is set.

Here is a breakdown of the lighting systems:

  • Two color Backlight in L201 (for daylight) and CLR (for the chandelier)
  • High Crosslight in L202
  • Head Hi Crosslight in CLR
  • Diagonal Frontlight in R3216
  • Scenery specials in L202
  • Cyc Top in L281, L161, and L119 as well as GAP508 templates in L201
  • Cyc Bottom in R53, L161, and R68
  • Cyc Sides in L025, R68, L201, and L193
  • The center sunset is a fresnel in L176 and the morning sunrise templates are GAP228 in color L101

All the actor lighting is done with frosted Source-4 Lekos. This will allow me to make shutter cuts to the white performance space and keep as clean a look as possible on the stage. The CYC is lit with various FarCycs, Mini-Strips, Fresnels, and PARs.

As of this writing the lighting paperwork is all finished and sent off to the master electrician and production manager. I have seen an early run through of the piece and have some basic cueing ideas although that will get fleshed out in later meetings with the director. We load in the lighting and scenery at the end of December, focus the lights, and then walk away for a few days over the New Year. When we come back in January we will begin lighting rehearsals.

Doing a post like this which goes into the specifics of a design for a show is new for me (I typically stick to theory). How was it for you as a reader? Would you like to see more of this?

Drop me a line in comments and let me know what you think.

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Posted in design, theatre | 5 Comments »

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