Manhattan, NY
Artfuckers
Operation Ajax
The Last Word . . .
Delray Beach, FL
New York Theatre Ballet
Posts Tagged ‘operation ajax’
So You Want to See a Show
Friday, February 23rd, 2007So underground
Monday, February 19th, 2007Guerrilla News Network says go see Operation Ajax.
Operation Ajax Pictures
Sunday, February 18th, 2007Operation Ajax produced by The Butane Group.
Directed by Noel Salzman
Scenery and Costumes by Arnulfo Maldonado
Sound By Duncan Cutler
Operation Ajax Opens Today
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007Directed by Noel Salzman
Scenery and Costumes by Arnulfo Maldonado
Sound by Duncan Cutler
Click here for more info.
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.
Superficial depths
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007Its been a lot of work the last few days and not much time for writing here. This is too bad as I find blogging to be both relaxing and very helpful in terms of organizing my thinking around the various projects I am working on. There has not been much here in the way of theory but I have a feeling that will be changing again soon. Life, however, remains unpredictable, so we shall see what we shall see.
I have today off from the dance piece I am assisting on so its time for the other two projects going on this week. We are loading in Operation Ajax. The theatre is very small and resources are incredibly tight, but I love the play very much and am excited to be working on it even if my role can only be, by necessity, very limited. It is a powerful piece of political theatre and somehow manages to make the simple conveyance of historical information dramatically compelling.
After that I have a runthrough for Artfuckers tonight. I am really excited about this one from a design perspective as I am trying some rather risky things with it. I am using a kind of light that I have never used before and really can only guess at its effectiveness. I am fairly confident that it is the right choice, but have nothing empirical to back that up. And that to me is exciting.
The play too is quite interesting. It is very contemporary and rides a very fine line that risks falling into a self-indulgent trap. I don’t usually go for the “poor little rich kid” stories, but something about the text, by being faithful and at the same time objectively critical of the characters allows them to both fully be themselves and transcend the specificity of their historical occasioning at the same time.
In a way what I find most interesting about both these texts is how they take a material, a content, and manipulate it in such a way that it becomes something else. ‘Depth’ and ‘superficiality’ are not absolute things, but are relative and contextual states of existence. One can achieve either through use of the tropes of the other. Depth can be found through exploration of pure surface, just as drama can be achieved through pure fact.
Somewhere in the midst of all this madness of work and so on I managed to send off my NEA-TCG grant application. So now it becomes a waiting game. This grant is highly competitive as only seven designers from all four design fields are selected. Further, it is only offered every two years, compounding the competition.
There are some things about freelancing that are very difficult. A major one being the need to accept every project that comes along in order to do silly mundane things like eat and pay rent. While there is something good and powerful in developing work by doing so much, it concentrates your energy, forces you to be precise, distinct and efficient it also leaves much to be desired. I sometimes take on more than I can or should reasonably do in order to make money and at times it causes the work to suffer.
It is too bad that arts grants and general arts funding is so limited in this country. It hinders the ability of artists to truly give back to their artistic community. Even though I am and want to be a professional artist (I have no interest in doing this as an amateur) it can not be purely about the money. It needs to be about the art before anything else. A balance needs to be struck, clearly, or the work falls into self-indulgence, but at the same time, when it becomes so focused on struggle, it becomes about pure product. For me at least, the art comes first. First after eating that is.
New Technologies
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007I recently installed Quicksilver on my Mac. It looks very promising. Already certain aspects of my computer use have sped up. There is a lot to learn in order to make the process as efficient as possible but I am loving the results thus far.
A while back I mentioned I was looking for an app that would allow me to tag and thus search for images on my desktop. Quicksilver allows for just that. Plus a million other things like quick-launching files editing, tagging and moving multiple files. Sending and attaching to emails. Oh my goodness! And I have only just barely scratched the surface. Best of all it is contained within a single application that falls to the background when not in use and is easily brought to use.
The ability to tag and tag search the images and non-text files on my computer is essential. Text files are easy. Any operating system can search text files. But most of what I work with is not textually based. Further I do a lot of visual internet research and have no interest in renaming all the files with complicated tags. I want metadata and I want it now!
And now I have it. How wonderful. It also means I do not need to use a mouse except for a few specific things, like drafting lightplots. But everything else can be taken care of with keyboard commands, which is so much nicer. Quicksilver causes you to stop thinking “what application do I need to open in order to do what I want.” Rather you think in terms of actions, “I want to do this” and it makes that possible. One less step. Fantastic.
Ajax went very well both last night and Thursday. While still very much a work in progress, the audience appeared very receptive and responsive to it. We learned many good and useful things about the show, what more it needs, where it is strong, what was strong that we should go back to.
This weekend I have runthroughs for both Artfuckers and Operation Ajax. Next week I am assisting on a dance piece St. Mark’s Church, and then the two plays tech one right after the other. Once Artfuckers is open I get a few days off then it is down to Florida to meet up with the NYTB tour.
Artfuckers has done a fun thing with the web presence for the play. They have made a MySpace profile for the play and all the characters. You know its cool, because its on MySpace. Ha!
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.
Three is a magic number
Saturday, December 16th, 2006Nutcracker, Becoming Adele, and Waiting for Godot all perform today. Three shows in Manhattan. That kind of trips me out.
Next year is beginning to shape up nicely. It has been so chaotic with dates moving and rights and funding disappearing then reappearing that I am only now getting a handle on what things look like. At the end of January I will begin working on a commercial Off-Broadway play Last Word written by Oren Safdie and directed by Alex Lippard. Alex and I met at the theatre a few days ago along with the producer, GM and set designer to do a bit of a site survey. As that gears up to go into previews I will remounting Mother GOOSE!.
February has the official opening of Last Word. Then a small play called Operation Ajax produced by The Butane Group. This is a great piece of political theater addressing the issues surrounding the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in favor of the Shah, all of course leading to the Iranian revolution and an Islamic Fundamentalist state.
This will be followed by Artfuckers at Theatre for a New City, directed, but not written, by Eduardo Machado. The play was written by Michael Domitrovich. It centers around the New York art and fashion scene. The play, given the characters, could easily fall into the “poor little rich kid” trap, but rather brilliantly does not. It looks to be a lot of fun. It is rather complex design-wise for all involved and should prove an interesting challenge. The costume designer is my friend Oana Botez-Ban who I have worked with a number of times before. I always have fun working on shows with her. Her costumes are so fun to light!
March looks to be dance month as I have three different dance shows penciled in for the month. There are still a number of things up in the air so of course some of this is subject to change, but it looks to be a nice winter by all counts.
