Manhattan, NY
Artfuckers
Operation Ajax
The Last Word . . .
Delray Beach, FL
New York Theatre Ballet
Posts Tagged ‘last word’
So You Want to See a Show
Friday, February 23rd, 2007Last Word Pictures
Sunday, February 18th, 2007It occurs to me that I never posted pictures of The Last Word as a set, so here they are.
. . .
The Last Word . . .
Directed by Alex Lippard
Scenery by Michael V. Moore
Costumes by Kirche Zeile
Sound by Gabe Wood
Photographs courtesy Carol Rosegg
“Good staging, good set, good everything.”
Friday, February 16th, 2007Thank you Mr. Teachout.
The unsung heros of the stage
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007I know a lot of people, often actors, who say that their job is uniquely difficult because of the live performative quality of it. They are the ones working in front of an audience. And it is true. As a designer you never have to worry about that. By the time there is an audience in the theatre, your job is done. But there is another person who performs a play or dance or opera. The stage manager.
The job of the stage manager might not be as glamorous as that of a performer, or even designer, but they are integral and essential to the proper functioning of a play. A bad actor can ruin their performance, but can easily be boueyed by their fellow performers. A bad stage manager creates a snowball effect that can destroy otherwise wonderful performances and design elements.
When sound or lighting cues occur in the wrong place or a followspot suddenly turns off on the lead singer, the entire delicate and carefully constructed world of the show falls apart. If the orchestration of scenic moves and lighting cues is less than flawless all the hard work that went into it is ruined and for naught.
A good stage manager is essential to the creation of these little worlds we put on stage. They make it seamless. They make the delicate appear strong and the thin appear solid. Their energy dictates the energy of a production more often than the director. A calm and collected stage manager can make the most temperamental of directors easy to work with. But this power works in reverse and even a room full of calm and organized people can stumble over each other when the stage manager is not in total control.
Working on Artfuckers has been wonderful because not only is the whole creative staff fun and easy to work with, but the stage manager is top notch and has everything well organized and running smoothly. Last Word was a breeze as Marci, the stage manager, who I have worked with once before, made everything go calmly and quietly. And this was in a situation that had a lot of potential for tensions with many intense personalities.
It is an interesting position to be in since the job of the stage manager is to make everything run smoothly and it is human nature to rarely notice that which runs smoothly. As a result these people are rarely given the praise they deserve. Yet without them lighting cues would not happen properly, sound would never work as it should, scenic elements would be out of place and props would be missing. Actors would not be called to the stage in time to be cued for their entrance. In short, the production would fall apart under its own weight.
We are only in the second day of tech for Artfuckers, not even all the way through the show and Eduardo has asked me to light his next play he is directing. Another production at Theatre for the New City called Paula. It sure is nice working with people you trust. They can offer you a show and you do not even have to read the script in advance to know you want to accept. I will of course read the script for the show, but I trust his taste to know I will have a good time working on the show.
I have work booked through July and with the exception of Operation Ajax and one assisting gig, everything this year is with people I have previously worked with. There is something really nice about that. It means I am not being hired only on reputation, or having seen my work on another show, but that my work and process are valued enough to be brought back. That I am valued as an artistically creative force in the construction of a work for performance.
Working in a collaborative medium like theatre or dance, the final product is only part of the picture. The process is as much the work as the product. And for me, who leaves the shows on if not before opening, the process is paramount in importance. I do not sit back and watch the shows for weeks or months on end. I am around for the technical rehearsals and then leave the show in the trusted hands of the stage manager. Thus it is very important to me that the people I work with are both competent and pleasant to be around. And of course doing artistically interesting work.
The show itself is, to me, something wholly different. I feel less ownership over the product as I do the process. Once the show is open it is someone else’s. The lighting is a gift. A gift from me to the director and producer and performers that they might share with an audience. Once the show is open it already feels more like a portfolio piece than a living work, because my work is done. The performance is alive and the dialog between the design and the performance is very much still in effect. But the evolution of the design, the construction of the contextual world of the play is done. It becomes a daily negotiation between the mutable and the unchanging. As the lighting, one of the most mutable of media, becomes fixed for the performance to resonate against.
Appropo of what?
Sunday, February 11th, 2007The reviews for The Last Word are starting to arrive. General consensus thus far seems to be superb acting that outstrips the body of the text. There are still several reviews yet to come in so we shall see how things fill out as time goes on. The design of realistic works tends to get little to no notice, and this is no exception.
On the plus side, Lippard keeps things moving at just the right clip for the play to make its points without wearing out its welcome. (The intermissionless show runs about 80 minutes). Set designer Michael V. Moore has provided an appropriately sparse and dingy office for the Henry-Len discourse. Equally appropriate are Lucas Benjaminh Krech’s lighting and Kirche Leigh Zeile’s costumes. Hail also to sound designer Gabe Wood for those wonderfully realistic computer noises.
These kind of works are truly where design and direction are best when invisible. To make anything that stands out too much would be intrusive and detrimental to the show. This play goes farther and perhaps begs the question as to the primacy of the text. The show is not strong because of the language. This is not unique to this play, but is none the less the case. The play is about the acting. The characters as embodied by these two actors are made possible through the direction, design and text, but in the final analysis these elements are fuel for something else and in no way the core of the thing itself.
For a bit of a tangent, the listing in the IOBDB has my name wrong, so now I have different listings in the archive under two different spellings of my name. It might be easier to not use my full name, but I like my middle name. I think there is a good sound and rhythm to the whole thing. Plus, I feel it is a little too biting without the use of the middle name. It also gives me something to complain about.
The lighting has only been described as appropriate. It’s good to know I did my job. Perhaps sometime I should do inappropriate lighting just to get notice. MacBeth in pink and lavender tones. Heh. Working at the NYU Dance department in graduate school we would light, between the two of us, over one hundred dances a year. When you do that much work you inevitably fall into cliche just to make it through. In addition, you begin to learn how the other person is going to light a dance. So we played a little game. We would challenge the other lighting designer to not use whatever we knew their reaction would be. “No blue backlight” or “No grey sky.” Sometimes we guessed wrong. Sometimes we caused the other to have a total train wreck. Many times though, we would end up with some very striking and unusual solutions to various problems.
It can be difficult to experiment in the professional theatre. On the one hand the work must be artistically interesting, so there is a degree to which one must push existing boundaries. At the same time, you are providing a service and a product to a client and thus the work can not be too esoteric. The design must be artistically satisfying as a designer, but first it needs to be what the client(producer/director) wants. The Last Word wanted to be a realistic space. The director was very clear that with the play we never wanted anything about the physical environment or clothing to feel “designed”. It had to flow naturally from the clear given circumstances of the text. For this particular piece that is the right and ‘appropriate’ course of action to take. It may be conventional in that regard, but it sure appears to be popular with the audiences.
Some works are more experimental by their very nature. This is true of both Ajax and Artfuckers. This weekend I am in tech for Operation Ajax and that work is far more abstract in nature than The Last Word. Navigating through these different and changing styles is truly exciting. While I might get bored only recreating the look of a fluorescent lit room, so too would purely abstract works begin to take their toll. The differing styles of dramatic storytelling, of acting and text and design all make for a fun and engaging body of work.
Naturalistic Illusions
Thursday, February 1st, 2007I have this theory about live performance and lighting design. Basically it comes down to the fact that any sufficiently strong performance can hold its own under worklight and in rehearsal clothes. This is not to say that design is unimportant, I think it is central to the theatrical experience, but the performance must be able to divorce itself from the rest of the play and remain strong and powerful.
Often elements of design are used to mask poor performances. I have heard more than my share of “Can we do something with the lighting, he’s really not holding the stage there.” Usually this occurs a few days before opening and so the reasonable response of “fire the actor” does not work. Thus something is done with the lighting to mask, or creatively augment, a poor performance. This does not point to the power of the lighting designer, rather it points to a poorly managed rehearsal process or a miscast actor.
From seeing this situation many times as well as having seen some truly amazing performances under bright fluorescent lighting I am strongly of the opinion that any true performance can and should hold its own under those kind of unforgiving lighting conditions. Even beautifully and darkly lit, a bad performance is still a bad performance.
I went back to The Last Word last night to check on it as I have not seen it since the final dress rehearsal. Plus, my friend Zay was coming to see the play. We went out for drinks after the show and got to talking about the lighting. He mentioned that he liked the subtle changes in the lighting and I responded that there was only one lighting cue.
In the world of the play, the room is lit with an overhead fluorescent light. The stage lights had to mimic this feel as faithfully and truthfully as possible such that the stage appears lit by fluorescent lighting yet is dramatically compelling enough to work as a play. The result was one carefully crafted lighting cue with enough texture and layering to allow for the shifting moods and currents of the play.
There is an interesting balance in the lighting of this piece. The overall level of brightness and shadowlessness is such that the performances have nowhere to hide. A poor performance will be seen right through. The lighting in this regard is unforgiving. On the other hand, it is a carefully crafted cue designed to hold and transform with the shifting dramatic currents. In this way it can, and I feel does, enhance a solid and true performance.
Lighting like this is interesting in its own way. It shares qualities of the performance under worklight conditions and the many beneficial aspects of dramatic lighting design. On one level all the lights could be characterized as “white light” and yet every lighting angle had a unique and distinct color that blend to create the overall effect. It is an exercise in subtlety and must be carefully crafted in order to maintain the illusion of realism. It takes quite a few spotlights of various colors and angles all mixing to recreate the feel of a room lit with fluorescent lighting.
Naturalism is not easy. But it must look easy. It only works when it is effortless. When the complexity behind the scenes makes for a visible product that one does not give a second thought to. Ones work must hide in plain sight. It must be invisible, out there in the open.
A good send off
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007Mother GOOSE! is packed away in a truck on its way to Arizona. I will not be going to Arizona, but my lighting will. My friend Ben is traveling with the company as a stage manager and lighting director. His job is to as faithfully as possible recreate my lighting for the Ballet. This means is in a few days my lighting will be up before audiences in two different states.
Sending a piece out on tour like this can be a tricky proposition. Not every venue will meet all the lighting needs for the piece. The result is that items must be placed in a hierarchy of needs such that the core ideas are maintained even when it is not possible to recreate the whole and complete work.
The same thing happens with staging as well. Some venues are bigger, some smaller. As a result the staging must expand or contract to meet those changing needs. Taking a piece on tour is a powerful reminder that the term “site specific” is a bit of a misnomer. All works are site specific. Every piece of entertainment, be it theatre, opera or dance is all dependent upon the specific site that it is located in.
Very often these sites are quite similar. All proscenium stages have a regularity to them. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Certain shots simply will not work in certain houses. Some places the proportion is such that the entire work needs to be restaged so that it feels right, even if it fits at a literal level. It can be a tricky balancing act.
The Last Word has its first preview tonight. My work with the play is done. I am going to stop in again on Wednesday to go over a few things with the stage manager about maintaining the design, but the work part for me is finished.
The floor was white tile, but the intent was to make it look old and dingy. That, for various reasons, did not happen until the night before the final dress rehearsal on Sunday. It is an interesting thing lighting a set that is still being finished. During tech we had our rehearsals and then in the evening afterwards were work calls to finish the scenery. What this meant for me was that there was a lot more bounce to the light during tech than there was going to be in the end. As a result I was forced to overexpose the lighting such that when the floor came down in value to its proper level, the lighting would look right.
I loved watching the show on Sunday. I had spent the few days before a little nervous that the value of light on the walls was a little to high relative to that on the performers. I had to keep reminding myself that the walls would get dim when the floor was less reflective. And it worked. I had guessed almost perfectly and the lighting looked exactly as I had intended when I watched the runthrough Sunday evening.
Photograph by Carol Rosegg
I have been up quite late the last few days working on various personal projects as well as tidying up a bunch of work stuff. Two shows I have coming up soon are fairly organic in their process. Of course that does not change the fact that lighting equipment must still be rented and dealt with.
It’s a busy time. I have four projects in the next three weeks. Artfuckers and Operation Ajax are full plays. Then I have a workshop of Ajax at Target Margin for two days. Also, I am assisting on a dance piece at The Danspace Project.
It is a bit intimidating, but somehow it all fits together nicely with days off for one coinciding with runthroughs for another. On the 8th is the official opening of Last Word. After the madness calms down I have a few days with no work in a theatre before I head south to Florida to meet up with the Ballet tour for a weekend of performances. Not Mother GOOSE!, they are performing a selection of their repertory for adult audiences in Delray Beach. And gauging by the weather here, I have a feeling that a Florida beach town will be a wonderful break from New York CIty.
Previews Begin Tuesday
Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Tickets here.
Focusing on Last Words
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007Halfway through focus today for The Last Word I realized that I have never lit a realistic interior. I have lit plenty of interiors, but they have been in musicals or somehow highly stylized spaces. I have lit quite a few realistic exteriors, with Becoming Adele being the most recent. But the realistic interior is something I have only done as a theoretical project in various classes.
Realistic plays enjoy their own degree of complexity and challenge in a way that more abstract works do not. This play is set in a rundown office space with an overhead fluorescent fixture and light through the windows. The light takes the lead from the fluorescent and is cold and soft.
Focus went well today. It was a little slower than I would have liked, but the space is deceptively tricky. So it took longer for the electricians to move around the room than would be ideal. But we got done. I think it will look nice. The trick of course is to maintain the realism of the piece and still have it be dramatically viable. Really this is all behind the scenes stuff. The conversations we had were about relating the scenery to the costumes to the lighting such that we could create the drama in something that through outward appearances looks like nothing special.
This is part of my job that I find fascinating. There used to be an idea about design that if you noticed it, something was wrong. In today’s world that is hardly a rule. In fact many shows work precisely because a costume or a lighting effect is particularly noticeable and calls attention to itself. This is not one of those shows. This is definitely a place where if you notice it, there may well be some thing wrong.
The lighting is also very old fashioned. Well, it is actually a hybrid of old and new. This is perfect for the play itself which deals with generational conflict as a central device through the piece. The color sense is highly modern, very contemporary. Yet the choice of angles could be pulled right out of Stanley McCandless 101.
My thinking about the lighting for this piece has been very strongly focused on the architectural reality of the play. After all, if we design the room right, then all we need do is make that room make visual sense. The set is fantastic. It is just the right balance of depressing and gloom yet still light enough to let this very comedic piece work on the several levels it needs to.
We begin rehearsals in the space tomorrow. So far things have been fairly relaxed, at least so far as I have seen. This promises to be a pleasant experience. Now go buy tickets!
Upgrade
Sunday, January 21st, 2007I recently installed Camino on my computer and have been using it as my main browser for a couple of days. While it does not have all the supercool extensions of Firefox, it is a hell of a lot faster. So my time on teh intrawubs has been sped up tremendously.
One of the extensions it does not have is rss integration. I had been using Sage for Firefox, which is a very nice feed aggregator. As a result I opened a Bloglines account and easily imported all my Sage feeds. Overall the transition has been very smooth indeed. Although I do sorely miss my ‘undo close tab’ extension. Oh well!
Tomorrow is the lighting load-in for Last Word. The scenery went in today I am told and as there have been no frantic emails, I assume all is well. There was a small change to the scenery this morning. Nothing big, just a slight adjustment to the rotation of the walls. So the electricians are loading in the lighting and then we focus on Tuesday and begin the technical rehearsals that evening.
The run through the other day went very well. Travanti brings an amazing energy to the room. He is also at least as much of a coffee snob as I am so we had a great time discussing beans and brews around New York. I felt it my duty to help the out of town coffee connoisseur traverse the generally bleak landscape that is New York coffee.
This afternoon I saw a run of the first act of Artfuckers. It is looking good. Eduardo and I had a nice chat about the design of the piece. Because the play is set in the new York Art and Fashion scene, we are going to utilize an fashion photography aesthetic/vocabulary to light the piece. Fashion photography is one of my loves and there is such a wide range of styles and aesthetics within it, that to say “fashion photography” does not really narrow it down at all. What it means in this instance is using certain lights that are specific to the fashion/portrait photography world, like softlights and umbrellas. These we will combine with standard theatrical lights to create a lighting vocabulary for the piece.
It is interesting that a lot of fashion photography these days is highly theatrical. Not only does the lighting and styling create dramatic scenes, but the layouts ore often such that a whole story is told like fairy tales or Film Noir or something more abstract. Since there is already so much crossover into theatrical lighting the translation is rather simple.
And in the when it rains it pours department, I load-in and tech Mother GOOSE! at the end of the week and it runs through the weekend. Good grief!
