Light Cue 23

The music of light fascinates me. Watching a sunset is like listening to a symphony. When I first wrote that sentence I mis-typed “Watching a symphony is like listening to a sunset.” I believe the latter is a more true statement. Light and music are, for me, so intertwined I find it difficult to separate them at a conceptual level. They operate upon the same or at least radically similar pathways for me. I would probably have become a sound designer if I played instruments or could compose music. So I compose with light.

I do not think it is true sinaesthesia, but when I hear sounds I most certainly do see colors. Listening to music is like watching a light show. But so too is listening to poetry. Or Hearing Shakespeare. Or Beckett. The musicality of language brings it into focus for me. The words and rhythms determine the colors and intensities. Poetry expressed visually.

I spent a number of years consumed with the idea of visual story telling, at a literal level. Creating visual essays of a sort. A language that must be parsed and close read to be comprehended. It was an interesting series of exercises I set out for myself. I am glad I did them. But they ultimately fell hollow. Some of the work was quite beautiful, but, in general, undramatic. The lighting became episodic. Not in that wonderfully Brechtian way where each episode makes you engage further in the story by filling in the missing pieces, by filling you with a sense of wonder and excitement. No. Just pieces. Perhaps others can do this successfully and for them it is their life project. Not me.

John Cage has been a major influence on my thinking in the last few years. His ideas around composition based in chance operation in particular. I have done a number of projects based around chance operation. One piece I lit about a year ago had the lighting based entirely on chance. A a star field fallen from the heavens. Navigated by a solitary dancer. The light fading and pulsing in a random sequence. Brightness and dimness, darkness and light, left to chance. Some nights it all fell into perfect synchronicity, sometimes perfect counterpoint. Often a mixture of the two. Always a surprise.

The basis for my interest in chance operation goes back to before my encounters with John Cage. In 2001 I moved to New York city to begin graduate school. On the second day of classes, the skies tore open in violent flames. The skies. The sky. That beautiful azure blue sky. It was a perfect fall day. Low wind, cool but not cold, and that brilliant blue sky day. Who would think the background to tragedy would be something so beautiful. That blue sky day.

This kind of juxtaposition has been very strong in my visual thinking. Juxtaposition rather than opposition. Opposites are not necessarily interesting. After all, then it merely becomes a fight. Night is bright and day is dim. Its easy. It works. Once. Twice if you are clever. But opposition is so . . . twentieth century. It feels like the breaking down of those old conventions and oppositions is a project that has already been done. Or can be done by other, older designers. There is no room to play there. There is no dance. It is a formalized system of rules that one must follow. It just happens to be rules set out on opposite day.

Lighting is about directing the audiences eye. Its analogue in film is the Director of Photography. The DP not only adjusts lighting, but frames the shot, determines the focus and a million other details the audience is unaware of. So too does the lighting designer. Foreground and background on stage can operate just as it does on film. Where to look, and how to see when you do look. The lighting designer literally provides a vision for the piece. It is the lens through which all else is viewed.

So what is the vision in our contemporary world? Is it more MTV jump cuts and flashing lights? More dialectics and visual argumentation? How do we see? How should we see? Art, for me, is a view of the future seen from the now. It is the purity of its nowness that determines the purity of its vision. A visual poetics of possibility.

If we no longer need to live in opposition perhaps we can now afford to live in parallel. Simultaneous divergent viewpoints. The beauty in the tragedy and the tragedy in the beauty. A world where everything is true because everything is sympathetic. Can this be done solely with light? No. But no great work is done alone. And theatre certainly has never been done by one person alone. At the very least there is always an audience. It is always a relationship. A Network, as my friend Zay likes to say. That spirit of connection and interconnectedness is the contemporary world. A chance encounter. A new song. Watching the sun rise over the mountain range.