Posts Tagged ‘minimalism’

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Total Commitment OR The spiritual affinity of Moss Hart and Jerzy Growtowsky

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

We shout with triumph when we discover silly misunderstandings in Artaud. The sign which, in oriental theatre, is simply a part of a universally known alphabet, cannot – as Artaud would have it – be transferred to European theatre in which every sign has to be born separately in relation to familiar psychological or cultural associations, before becoming something quite different . . . Yet he does touch on . . . the very crux of the actors art: that what the actor achieves should be . . . a total act, that he does whatever he does with his entire being, and not just one mechanical . . . gesture of the arm or leg, not any grimace, helped by logical inflection and a thought. No thought can guide the entire organism of an actor in any living way. It must stimulate him, and that is all it really can do. Without commitment, his organism stops living . . . In the final result we are speaking of the impossibility of separating spiritual and physical. The actor should not use his organism to illustrate a “movement of the soul”, he should accomplish this movement with his organism.
Jerzy Grotowsky, Towards a Poor Theatre

It might seem strange to associate Moss Hart with Grotowsky, but I think the two of them have a surprising amount in common. On my vacation to the Republica Dominicana I read Hart’s Act One. If anyone is keeping score with my “Gradschool Procrastination” series this fits right in. My second year at NYU one of my lighting teachers Allan Lee Hughes suggested I read it. Not a formal assignment, but as a supplement to my course work. Well, with the rigors of grad school the only supplement I would take to my course work was drinking. So it took me a few years to finally do that assignment.

Act One should be required reading on the part of any serious student and practitioner of the theatre. More than any book book of theory or technique, Act One touches on the very heart of the theatrical life. That life of total commitment. The life that one can not “come back to” because it so firmly stands outside the day to day world of the rest of humanity. This is no hierarchical thing. It does not stand above other fields. But rather it demands of its practitioners a tenacious madness that once lost is difficult to return to. Even the six months I took off from designing to be the lighting assistant at the SF Opera killed so much of the momentum necessary to keep up. I wonder what I have missed in this week.

The story that Hart tells is one of unwavering commitment to a dream. His whole being dedicated to the theatre, to making a reality what he could only see in his mind. His story is one of the transformation from a vague impression of wanting to be involved somehow, to the nitty gritty practicalities of producing on Broadway. While told in almost epic proportions, the kind of transformation he undergoes is the same for every serious practitioner every time we step into the theatre. Every time we face that dark blank four dimensional canvass of the theatre we must strengthen our resolve against the pitiless gaze of the stage.

Every play is new.

Every new situation demands that we find that reserve again. That we rediscover that place inside ourselves that allows us to tap into the currents and energies of a text and build from that foundation a living breathing thing out of voice and movement and form and fabric and light. Sometimes it is the easiest thing in the world and all the pieces fall together born fully formed out the head of Zeus. And other times we are like Sisyphus pushing the rock interminably up that steep hill only to fail at the last minute and return to the bottom once again.

In many ways the truest test of this is the Musical Comedy. The light and effortless way in which a musical must flow takes the determined strength of hundreds to pull it all together. The rigor demanded by Minimalism is one thing, but what is demanded by the Musical Comedy is something of a whole other order of magnitude. In this same way opera demands an expansiveness that continually pushes at the horizons of imagination.

In all these theatrical pursuits what is demanded is an unwavering spirit and dedication to the art. And that dedication to the art must be born not in the head or in the body, but in the soul. The work must wholly infuse the spirit of the artist to even have a chance. And even then the risk of failure is great. It is this understanding of dedication, this total submission of the self to the work that is the intersection of Hart and Grotowsky. They both know the sacrifice that is necessary and live fully in that place of total commitment.

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Methodical Thinking

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

A method for Lighting the Stage by Stanley McCandless was first printed in 1932. My personal copy is a 1984 reprint of the 1963 correction to the Fourth Edition that was first printed in 1958. I mention this only because this book was, and by many people still is considered a primary text for lighting design. Rather than being “a” method during all those years, it was considered by many to be “the” method.

The specifics of the book are uninteresting to anyone but a specialist, so I will glaze over them for the moment. The basic idea is this. Light, in any setting is motivated by some source, i.e. a lamp, the sun, a fire, etc. Thus, any object that is hit by that source has essentially two sides, a light side and a shadow side. McCandless then divided up the stage space into a grid of acting ‘areas’ and into each area would focus two lights, each coming from the front on a 45 degree angle. One would be warm, perhaps a pale amber, and one would be cool, a blue. Which was which depended upon where the lamp or window or whatever was placed. This is a very efficient means of lighting a stage space. You cover the entire stage and you can control the relative brightness or dimness of different locations on stage. If you have six areas, you need twelve lights. Clean, simple, done.

Much of what was going on in McCandless’ thinking had to do with problem solving for a much less advanced technology than we now have available. Power and control were two of his main concerns. In those days there simply was not enough electricity to power more than a few dozen lights. And controlling them was an insane job taking several electricians operating large panels of levers. Then and now is like comparing a mid-century computer and the latest laptop. One is large, bulky and slow, the other small, fast and efficient. For his time it was an amazing and progressive way of dealing with a very real situation. And this is a situation many people still find themselves in in the ‘indie-theatre’ world, where power and control are the first concern and art the second. The Method is a great way to turn minimalism by circumstance into minimalism by design.

The real tragedy of McCandless’ legacy is that too often his writing is taken literally, that one must light a show from the box booms with amber from one side and blue from another. If you want an old fashioned look, then this is certainly the source to begin with, but I would hope that our aesthetic sensibilities have evolved past the 1930′s. What I find interesting about going back to texts like this is to try and extract the essence of the idea, the motivation behind the specifics and then attempt to apply it to a contemporary setting. This is what I was getting at yesterday,

Both McCandless and Carson’s work is concerned with a kind of economy of volume. That is how to fill a stage both efficiently and beautifully. While the final product could not be more different, in many ways they stem from the same origin.

While we were working on Norma at the San Francisco Opera, Heather turned to me and said with a wry smile, “See, that’s how you light an opera for less than $12,000.” Both of these designers are interested in an economy of volume. They want to fill the space elegantly and beautifully, minimizing waste and maximizing the dramatic story telling. Their motivation is the same, where they differ, truly, is a matter of aesthetics. McCandless is looking for some replication of reality, while Carson’s concern is the idea. Her work tends to be very intellectually engaging and cerebral. It is very abstract, but the light follows very clearly defined rules of movement and transformation.

The conventional American style of lighting a play is in many ways an evolution of the McCandless idea. However, rather than a reworking of the initial impulse, an economy of volume, it has been a modification of the ‘area lighting.’ The stage is broken up into many little areas and a lot of little spotlights are pointed at those areas from various directions and in several colors. Virtually every theatre in the U.S. is equipped to light a show based on some variation of this idea. It is a very effective means of lighting a stage, but in many ways it feels like its aesthetic usefulness is coming to a close. I certainly do not envision seeing a broadway show radically diverge from this model any time soon, but something about it feels increasingly out of place in the modern world.

My fundamental problem is that it looks at the performer as an object. As little more than a moving prop that talks. The actor moves, the light moves, simple and easy. Yet, there is so much more available to light than mere illumination. Film understands this. The great cinematographers use light as a dynamic storytelling device in ways that are almost unthinkable in the theatre. There is a fallacy among a lot of people in the theatre that ‘if I can’t see their eyes I can’t hear them.’ Yet, Marlon Brando was heard throughout The Godfather while cloaked in shadow for most of his screen time. A cursory look at the Noir genre shows the almost limitless potential of light as storytelling device.

Revealing the actor to the audience is the primary goal of lighting. Yet how that revelation occurs is something that must be answered uniquely at every moment. A character is not simply illuminated. They are revealed. They are revealed existing within a given psychological and physical context. The are revealed through someone’s perception. They are revealed in relationship to some one or some thing. The performer does more, much more, than simply stand here, then there. They live. They exist as a complex matrix of thoughts and feelings and action. It is that whole that must be revealed, not just the deed of crossing the stage.

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Parabolic Hyperbole and Minimal Lyricism

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem.
–Aristotle, The Poetics

One gets the sense reading Ajax that Sophocles was trying to break free from the conventions of the Dramatic Literature of his time through the bifurcation of the story he was telling. Ajax at once falls too neatly into two different sections for a dramatist as skilled as Sophocles to not be doing this intentionally. Further, the work feels like a mirror, or perhaps a parabola, extending infinitely in either direction from the event of the death of Ajax.

The death of Ajax is like a node where all the events from the first half flow to and all the events of the second half derive from. Blanchot does everything Sophocles wishes he could do. Yet in a way Sophocles does attain to this degree of effort. Ajax’s death is marked by the words of farewell a lover might give their beloved. He bids farewell to the sun and the earth, his father and his wife after asking forgiveness and pity from Zeus and the Furies. It is a ceremonial farewell spoken with words held as in religious ceremony, only to end the speech with a mildly ironic turn of phrase, “These are Ajax’ last words on earth: whatever else I say only the Dead will hear.”

Yet if we remember, we are but phantoms, “we’re counterfeits, we mortals, we’re shadows, blown on the wind.” Even in the certain actions of Sophocles we are uncertain, for we are but shadows. The madness of Ajax that brought us to this place of dramatic revelation could be continuing still. All action is become suspect. We know no more than Blanchot’s narrator if the ground we stand upon be true. The uncertainty of life continues to the uncertainty of death. The Hero turned base scoundrel and madman is persecuted by his own mind in life only to find exoneration and vindication in death. His worst enemy in life becomes his savior in death.

Unlike Blanchot’s Madness of Day where the destination is of far less importance than the journey, or Antigone where we watch two unwavering characters act out a battle of will, Ajax takes us on a journey that can only lead to despair and yet we do not. We can not despair. For Ajax was not a hero until vindicated in death. In life his deeds of the utmost bravery were ignored because of the clever words of Odysseus. His vengeful anger at this oversight triggered a madness that reduced him to little more than a common criminal. His suicide was neither noble nor redemptive. It was a cowardly act perpetrated by a man cornered in desperation. At the moment of his death he was no hero. He was the opposite of hero. He was in fact the most miserable character that could possibly be.

The very force of his fall was also cause for his restoration and redemption. His plight so extreme, he could only be raised to the highest of heights allowable to a mortal man. He is the opposite of Blanchot’s narrator, who through his too human suffering can go nowhere but back to where he began. Another aspect of this tension is alluded to by George. It is the play between poetry and prose, between literality and metaphor, madness and clarity that gives power to these works.

Ajax appears to achieve escape velocity from his prescribed fate and arrives in death a Hero. In mirroring his fall from grace, by showing us the opposite action in the second half of the play we are constantly reminded of the fall as we watch the ascent. In this way the two events, that lie upon a temporal spectrum, are compressed into a single experiential moment. Life and death and rebirth exist at one and the same time. We are able to see the Hero walk across the stage only after his mortal self has been taken from our world. Ajax is become immortal as Blanchot’s narrator becomes eternal. All of time and experience are compressed into this single moment, and for that instant, we too are forever.

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Across the Mirror – Madness, Mortality and Ajax

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Maurice Blanchot in his Madness of Day destroys the Aristotilian category of the primacy of Plot, along with most every classical value ascribed to dramatic storytelling. He does within literature what many so-called post-modernists do about literature. He creates text that falls in on itself. Action and character and episode shift in a never ending play of signification. It uses its own mass as a kind of grounding and never finds a level space on which to stand. It ends where it began, nowhere and everywhere.

A man.

Lost to himself.

Insane.

Alone.

This could be Ajax in the postmodern world. There is no set plot or rather there is no linear narrative. The various dramatic episodes flow neatly and smoothly one into the next in a powerfully organic way. Every death is a rebirth. Every reversal of situation reverses again and every recognition becomes once again hidden. The plot, in its own way, is actually quite clear. What is kept from us in any fixed way is place and time and point of view. Blanchot paints for us not a hospital room or a prison cell, but a true landscape of the mind. The transitions between events are at least as compelling as the events themselves. It is the connections and the distortions that are of interest, not the step by step series of locations.

Our speaker confronts the disaster of their own Being and finds himself lost in clouds of thought. Self and purpose obscured by the many shifting currents of the mind. Blanchot’s narrator is the perfect answer to Ajax and his righteous rage. We see this when he says, so simply, “When I die . . . I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying.”

Blanchot weaves a tapestry that speaks in the space between Ajax’s words. It is a vital stillness that holds us captive. A meditation on the inevitability of Human experience. It is a coming to terms with the madness and absurdity of life. The complete insanity that is the modern condition. One becomes the other.

The text moves imperceptibly slow. It creeps along. Holding your attention fully in the moment and when you step back to see where you are, a surprise awaits you. ‘How ever did we get here,’ one must ask. For place is not a static thing in this world. Time too. The end is in the beginning and we feel ourselves moved along inevitably like an ant upon a mobius strip. We become locked inside this story that is not a story. “A story? No. No stories, never again.”

This kind of text calls for a precision and a stillness that can only be found within the cleanliness of minimalism. That solitary speaker, alone, must not be over exposed. The words are too full, they go mad in the fullness of day. Only in the half light are they safe to be spoken. The memory that falls through our narrator’s hands like water must not get burned out. It is a fragile and delicate thing. Soft. “That was the truth: the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all reason; it assailed me irrationally, without control, without purpose.”

Blanchot’s meditation on mortality and madness must be handled with poetry. Prose is dangerous. Literality deadly.

The text must be allowed to breathe. The still and fragile morning air must be able to contain both the finality of life and the possibility of death. For in this stillness “a vast solitude opened . . . and the entire world disappeared inside it.” The text lives in the madness of day “and outside it there is nothing.”

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The Holy Theatre

Sunday, June 11th, 2006

[I]t is the ceremony in all its meanings that should have dictated the shape of the place, as it did when all the great mosques and cathedrals and temples were built. Goodwill, sincerely, reverence, belief in culture are not quite enough: the outer form can only take real authority if the ceremony has equal authority – and who today can possibly call the tune? Of course, today as at all times, we need to stage true rituals, but for rituals that could makes theatre-going an experience that feeds our lives, true forms are needed. These are not at our disposal, and conferences and resolutions will not bring them our way.
The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and the critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony – whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals – but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. . . . And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep children good.
-Peter Brook, The Empty Space

When I lit Medea there was a profound air of the Holy Theatre about it. The space we performed in is a national symbol of Puerto Rico and holds within it a very strong spiritual energy. Every day we rehearsed, as the sun went down, building light cues into an all enveloping darkness. The fortress stands apart from Old San Juan, which itself stands apart from bustling modern San Juan. As the sun went down, we were so far from the lights of the city that the fortress became like a black hole, with every photon disappearing into nothingness. When we would stop for weather issues and cut power to the dimmers one might as well have been blind.

The darkness was palpable. The lighting, while very minimal, had to be incredibly precise. Lighting the show was like carving out of wood, and you could feel the push back that the darkness gave to every lighting instrument. El Morro did not want the light there. In order to get to the performance space, the audience had to cross a vast open field and then descend hundreds of stairs to get into the belly of that stone beast. It was like watching people on a pilgrimage, entering by the hundreds to see in a totally new light a place they had all been to many times in the heat of day.

Being deeply involved in the rave community in San Francisco in the late nineties gave me a special appreciation for the possibilities of the Holy Theatre. One group in particular would hold events in a fully functioning Episcopal Church. Their aim was specifically to use dance as a means of spiritual expression and exploration. The dance events would contain members from age eight to eighty all dancing together all night long. There would be, in a similar fashion to many Japanese cultural activities, an opening and a closing ceremony. These simple meditations would help ground the community and focus the energy for a brief moment on a single activity.

While there were similarities with the Techno Cosmic Mass these events had no particular spiritual path they advocated. Rather by drawing upon any and all traditions a kind of cross cultural dialog was set up. In much the same way that theatre can draw upon various socio-historical traditions from which it creates the universe of the play so too did these events create whole worlds, galaxies and indeed universes to explore. But these events, like any religious ceremony, ultimately act as catalyst to ones own life work. “In any event, to comprehend the visibility of the invisible is a life’s work. Holy art is an aid to this, and so we arrive at a definition of holy theatre. A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make its perception possible.”

I was looking through my copy of Century the other day. After a while I got this strange sense that I was looking at the same image over and over and over again. Sure there were pictures of joy and celebration, but it seemed more than anything there was war and violence and destruction. The killing instinct appears as strong today as it ever was. The violence and the existential depression that must exist to cause such violence feels like it is at an all time high. This coincides with the time of greatest achievement in human history. We have technological advances beyond anything even dreamt of a few hundred years ago. And yet we remain unsatisfied.

Perhaps Neitzche’s victory in the death of God is in some way the cause. I am certainly not advocating the fundamentalism that runs rampant in the Middle East and Middle America. After all, that feels to me more the desperate acts of the faithless rather than a true spiritual movement. The abuse charges against Catholic priests do not point to a social structure that is healthy, no do the repressive tactics of the American Taliban. That someone would even consider treating a woman as pre-pregnant only points to the perverse objectification of the female body by a sick and desperate mind.

No the death of God is not to be found in the churches for God was never, or rarely ever was, there. God, or more precisely the spiritual center of Human existence can not be found in a building or a statue. Those may serve as technologies for aiding one in locating their spiritual center, but it never is the center itself. And that is where God died. Not on some mountain top or in some cave, but in the [heart-mind] of every man and woman who is unwilling to truly look inside themselves. It is in the silence between our breath that we discover our true natures.

Rumi said that only when the Mosques have been smashed to pieces can the dervishes come out and dance. The Buddha said to kill the buddha in the road if you find him. Perhaps in order to regain our sense of the sacred, to once again find our collective spiritual souls we must toss our golden calves back into the furnace to be forged anew.

Perhaps the theatre must die to be reborn. Perhaps we must die to be reborn capable of the tremendous duty the Holy Theatre calls us to do. We must cleanse ourselves of the dirt of conflict so that we may face the challenges of modernity with open [heart-mind]‘s capable of anything we put our effort into. Perhaps the old temple of theatre, the gilt balcony and red curtain, are not enough to hold what we must do. Perhaps we must re-envision what it is that we can and must do and then search for the houses of worship in which to create this theatre of the future. The Holy Theatre reborn and given new life by a generation willing to step beyond the daily cycle of violence and aggression and truly step into a future of peace. A Holy Peace. With mankind living as a single organism in harmony with the Earth. A New Humanism and a New Optimism for this new millennium.

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A bit on process

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

Josh and I get into quite an exchange here about how to get to the center of a text. I think we were talking about nearly the same thing, but a variation in words confused the issue. Damn language always getting in the way of communicating. Anyhow, I don’t intend to join the ranks of theatre bloggers discussing process these days, but a few things came up that are worth expanding upon.

Josh asked for an explanation of what I mean by a central idea, and while I feel as though we reached a fair degree of accord on the issue I think it would be worth it to look here for some insight on my process. I find discussing things like abstraction abstractly is very difficult. It’s like balancing a house of cards on the back of a bull. Part of the reason why abstraction works is that it is highly specific and context dependent.

So in this example we can see how a kind of thesis/antithesis=synthesis model can be visually applied to a text. This was the central idea that I worked with in terms of organizing the lighting. And it works in the microcosm of the scenes and the beats of the staging as well as across the dramatic arc of the work as a whole.

Of course that is not all I was working with. It helped me to have that in mind while figuring out the lighting, but it was just one component of the final product. I find it is also necessary to look at the formal volumetric qualities of the space you are working with. In the case of Haiku Geisha it was a cube. While here it was a long catwalk. How you carve dramatic space out of an essentially empty volume depends upon what that space is initially. Often the geometry of space is as influential as the text.

And sometimes it is all intuition.

Truly it is a combination of this and more. It is the dynamic of the group that determines what the product will be. Because sometimes intellectualizing a show will only drive you farther and farther from its core. Sometimes a text can only be approached with reasoned intellect. Dance for me is often highly intuitive and emotional. Intellectualizing it can work in a few limited circumstances, but more often than not it requires a trust of ones emotional Being. However, there are choreographers like William Forsythe who are intensely intellectual. Or playwrights like Beckett who maintain that it is only the shape of language that concerns them. Yet both these artists create highly emotional works that must be approached at some point from a strictly emotional level.

One of my criticisms with a lot of Modern Art is that it is so cerebral that it looses the human emotive quality I find so powerful in other genres. I love Modern Art, but I feel a balance must be struck between the intellectual and the emotive self. Perhaps this is the designer in me speaking. I must be able to operate as an artist and emote and create beautiful things, yet these things must work in harmony with a group vision.

An artist who I think truly exemplifies this harmony of emotion and intellect is Antoni Gaudi. He creates these fantastical forms and surreal landscapes. Yet, the mathematics that go into the underlying structures is astounding. Beneath every one of his whimsical towers is a precise engineering mind that has worked out all the structural geometry necessary to make it work. This is a way of thinking very similar to another Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

This idea of a whimsical environment having a skeleton of reasoned intellect goes back to my discussion about the relationship between abstract visual representations of a more literal dramatic text. A rigorous precision is necessary for an authentic abstract work.

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Specificity, Realism and Myth

Sunday, May 14th, 2006

Dorothy makes a case for realism in theatre. OK, that is an unfair reductionistic characterization. What she argues for is specificity. That a specificity of language is necessary for an efficacious emotional authenticity. And to this I think there is a great deal of truth. I am not wholly sold that it need be linguistic, but the impulse towards specificity is a key element in creating powerful theatre.

In Dorothy’s comments section George sites Jo Mielziner designs for Death of a Salesman and Streetcar as an example of that kind of linguistic specificity existing within a context of abstraction. And I think that makes a very important point. One of the great benefits of abstraction is that, done well, it heightens the language. By creating a visual background that forces the human form to the center of our vision it also forces us to look, to truly look, at the words that person is saying.

The scenography in a production operates as a kind of framing device for the human form. The question is not so much which approach is correct, as it is which approach is correct now. The kind of specificity that Dorothy wants to see more of applies not just to playscripts, but at the production level it applies to design work and acting as well. Josh makes the case for an strong basis in the scansion of Shakespeare texts. Knowing the precise rhythms of a text and the words precise meanings is necessary for a truly believable performance.

Director Lillian Groag does a lot of rigorous text readings in her operatic work. This is uncommon in the opera world, or rather not as common as one might hope. There is such a premium placed upon the proper singing of the notes, that getting into the meaning of the language is often left to the sidelines. This is unfortunate as one can clearly hear, in a recording say of Maria Callas, when the performer know precisely what they are singing. And then, as in the case of Callas, the exact notes allow room for dramatic interpretation.

The key point here is precision. A rigorous precision. This is not a merely decorative interpolation. This is rigorous dramatic interpretation. Abstraction works when it comes from a place of profound understanding. Minimalism by Design can be a strong and powerful means of heightening the emotional veracity of drama. But it must be honest. Simply dressing everyone in white and placing them in a yellow box is not enough. There must derive from the text some central idea that leads to the abstraction.

The specificity of abstraction is what allows modern settings to become mythic centers of transformation. Our collective gods have died. We live in a secular world of blank realism, although this is being challenged more and more each day. To return to the theatre its potential as the house of myth and religion we must give to the audience a work so specific that it enters their unconscious. We must open doors to worlds beyond immediate ego experience by creating realities so honest they become like dreams.

What engages is a larger than life emotional authenticity that grabs us by the shirt collars. And this can be done by a business man in a tired brown suit. Because the simplistic can easily take the form of the mythic in our contemporary age. The simple becomes the mythic when it enters our collective dream.

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Evolutionary Minimalism

Sunday, May 7th, 2006

Reading about this performance of John Cage’s As Slow as Possible got me thinking about ideas surrounding minimalist performance.

Time often becomes the key factor of analysis. Time and its necessary corollary, transformation. In 4′ 33″ for example the only limiting factor is time. It is a work whose content is not prescribed but whose formal structure is inviolate.

In a theatrical setting minimalism takes on a slightly different form. It dilates the temporal space around action and impels contemplation of the deed.

The removal of extravagances and flurries of activity gives one pause to consider the core simplicity of action. A single gesture. A single word.

Taking pause to allow total contemplation of a single thought can be quite powerful. In a world of MTV editing one can often forget the power of single pointed attention.

As Saul Williams says “When a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.”

The space contained by 4′ 33″ reveals time as a binding agent of consciousness. The transformation and evolution of thought coexists equally in the mundane and the profound.

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Technology and Designing the Metanarrative

Friday, April 21st, 2006

In thinking about creative consciousness we must understand the context in which it arises. This has been approached in fiction writing extensively in the work of Grant Morrison. From the blunt exercises in Animal Man to the complexly subtle role of Barbelith in The Invisibles to the oblique synthesis that occurs in The Filth. In all of these, in different ways, is an object of creation attempting to come to terms with its own birth.

Thinking of a work of art as a living being might put some people off but I feel it is a more accurate model than to look at it as a mere object. After all a work of art engages in a complex network of social, economic and cultural forces. When The Mahagonny Songspiel premiered at Baden/Baden in 1927 it caused riots to break out. This then is no passive object, but a dynamic and forceful actor engaging in the cultural dynamics of society. Works of art do not simply send out energy, they also take it in and can become part of a larger cultural feedback loop.

Art is a kind of communication technology of the soul. It provides a conduit for the ideas locked inside one self to manifest in the world and be transmitted to another. If we were to try and understand what this process looks like, we might get something akin to this:

In The End of the Moon, Laurie Anderson talks about her time as NASA’s artist in residence. In one section she mentions how the coloration of nebulas that we see in NASA photographs is arbitrary and used not for any scientific purpose, but rather to make the images beautiful. At which point she asks where does the line between art and technology lie.

I wonder if such distinctions really are appropriate any longer. Certainly a degree of discursive clarity is useful, but as hard and fast delineations it seems to lose its usefulness. If the first recording of the human voice was a song, where is that line? It seems to have been blurred from the start. As a lighting designer I must constantly interface with technology. All my paperwork and drawings are done on a computer, correspondence via email and so forth. My use of the computer is so extensive that I recently turned in a lightplot via email and got reprimanded for having it late because they wanted a hard copy. I had not printed a plot, except for archival purposes, in well over a year.

The fetishization of technology runs rampant in the design world. The future of design is often looked at from the perspective of what new technologies will emerge rather than from a formal aesthetic place. And while one can and does certainly lead to the other, I fail to understand the fetishization of technology for its own sake. I am a solid advocate of new technologies, but I feel they must be predicated on serving some function. In The Design of Everyday Things Norman makes the point that the pace of new technology development can lead to poor design choices by sacrificing functionality for ‘features.’

Design is about making choices. If you are designing a telephone, you must design it for an end user who wishes to make calls, transfer calls, place people on hold, etc. And you must make those functions clear and easy to do. Designing lighting you must above all remember that theatre is a medium of story telling. It need not be easy for the audience, or literal or even based in language. But it is a story. This is where Minimalism by Design comes in handy. One can maintain a clarity of focus on the essential story. While it is not necessary to have this in order to create a powerful work, it can be quite effective.

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Economics by Design

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

Matthew Freeman makes some good points about the role of the playwright in small low-budget theatre. His argument is that the economics of small theatre in the US should not dictate the visionary style in which the work is written. The comments derail a bit from this central theme, but the idea is a strong one and important for both writers and producers to consider.

Within the context of low-budget New York theatre he mentions there is an obvious kind of aesthetic limitation that might silently be placed on a work. Large cast with a small number of props and set pieces, perhaps adhering to the unities to avoid costume changes etc. etc. While this is easily producible, it may not be easily successful. Limiting ones vision creates a constricted work and usually leaves a piece with a tension that is not useful. A tension of a piece unduly contained and not fully expressive of the writer’s intentions.

In my post a few days ago I talked about the merits of leaving a design open to the imagination. The context for that was a discussion surrounding a show I just opened where, with our very limited budgets and resources, we attempt to create a vast and expansive world. This can be done by clearly and cleanly choosing what and where elements will exist. How to construct a visual vocabulary that allows for locations as diverse as an open glade, a valley, a mountain top, a balcony, a bedroom, a graveyard, etc. etc. Creating a space where all these things exist in an emotionally true way with very limited budgets is no simple task. But it is doable, and as Freeman points out, should allow the playwright freedom to write their vision, not a cliffs notes version there of.

I love minimalism. I think there is an expressive potential in a minimal aesthetic that rarely exists in larger productions. It can operate to focus the attention down to the cleanest expression of the idea and the emotions in the play. However, there is a difference between minimalism by design and minimalism by economics. The former, like the Opera of Johannes Schaaf, is a beautiful meditation on the power of simple forms. The latter, is an artistically destructive way of thinking.

I have lit plenty of productions where I had a very limited number of dimmers at my disposal. You can see one now if you want. But the challenge with these situations is to think, not of the limitations but, of the possibilities. By reaching beyond your means, you can stretch out the resources into a fuller design idea. You will always be limited. Even in large scale opera at a certain point there is limitation. But the power of an expansive visioning of the piece, of seeing potential and possibility in every aspect of the work, is needed now. This is part of the New Optimism that must guide theatre in this new millennium. As my director for Cupid and Psyche said, “we may be laying in the gutter, but we are reaching for the stars.”

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