Tonight is the second and final night of Queen Coziah. The show is at FIT on 27th B/W 7th and 8th. Performance is at 8pm in the “C” building Auditorium.
Posts Tagged ‘queen coziah’
Drums are the Tongues of the Sacred
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006I am probably too tired to be writing at the moment, but I don’t have rehearsal until the afternoon tomorrow, so I think I can stand to be up for a few more minutes. We had our first tech rehearsal for Queen Coziah today. It went fairly well. We have had a variety of technical set backs that caused us to not get the lighting system operational until a few minutes into the rehearsal so there was a lot of lost prep time. But in the end it happened and we got to work.
The lighting for this piece is very simple. The venue demands it. There are very few dimmers, so control of the lighting is rather limited. Fortunately the play is, for the most part, rather straight forward. It takes place in the front yard of a woman’s house as she recounts the story of the non-violent workers rebellion she led and won. This is not a story well known in this country. I was totally unfamiliar with it prior to beginning my work on this project, but Queen Coziah is a historical figure whose non-violent protests proceeded those of the better known Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
The show is a musical. A very dance heavy musical. The band is composed of a number of drummers, flute, and guitar. Two of the musicians are priests, one a Voodoo Priest, the other a Santeria Priest. While there is an incantation to various Lwa during the play, it is by an actor and not one of the priests. Having such strong personalities can certainly make for an intense experience.
Writing light cues this evening I fell into a wonderful trance precipitated by the music. Relaxing into my seat and letting the music guide my cueing was a wonderfully freeing experience. It reminded me of years ago when I would light all night dance parties in an Episcopal Church. Just letting the rhythms of the dance take over and guide the light where it wants to be. You, as designer, become more a vessel than an agent of action. It is more meditative than active.
The play only performs two days, at FIT, this Wednesday and Thursday and our rehearsal time is limited. I think we will get some good work done on the piece, but it will not be as polished as I would like. However, the people involved area lot of fun and do some good work.
My thesis at NYU was a design for Wole Soyinka’s adaptation of The Bacchae. It is interesting how much of the research I did for that is coming back to me. I have a recreational interest in Comparative Religions and looking at the parallels between the Yoruba gods and their American analogues is quite fascinating to me. So much of it is a direct transplantation from one soil to another. Many of the names are similar if not the same. The use of a highly structured color symbolism is also there.
The lighting at times engages these aspects and at times pulls against them. I think that is the best way. I have found this to be a common current in a lot of work I have done recently. Exploring harmony and counterpoint with the dramatic action in relationship to a lighting environment that at once exists wholly inside that dramatic action and is simultaneously outside it.
I used to have an obsessive need to find the exact structural mirror to the action in the lighting. The lighting had to follow the pace of the drama minute to minute, second to second. After that I spent quite some time exploring chance operations and random events. Both of these felt to me to fall short of the mark. Light is nothing so rigid as to be all one or the other. I find it to resist rigid categorizations and often falls through the cracks in any external system one attempts to erect around it.
Meetings
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006I have a production Meeting in Williamstown, MA tomorrow for a show I am lighting in December. I have not, to my recollection been to Massachusetts before, so this will be an interesting first. The first time I went to Virginia was for a show. And doing a Ballet tour two years ago sent me to several states I had never before been to. I only know a little bit about this show. It is some crazy multimedia dance thing, that I should hopefully be able to report more fully on after the fact.
I had a meeting yesterday with the production manager of Ars Nova. Jason Eagan, one of the producers, directed the benefit I lit for Gotham Stages last month and liked my work enough to ask me to be put on their roster of designers. This looks to be a nice situation. They do primarily one off events with a full week of programming all year round, so I will get to fill in some of the down time between my projects with more lighting work. Its a small stage (16′X10′) but very well equipped given the size, so it should be a fun time.
I met last night with the director for Queen Coziah. This is looking to be a very interesting show, even if the lighting situation is very limited. The musicians are fantastic, one played percussion for Nina Simone and another is a voodoo priest. How cool is that! I am looking forward to hearing more of them. I do love me the drums.
I got my new business cards yesterday. The printing is not as dark as I would like. But in a way that is rather appropriate, a lighting designer complaining that they can not get a strong enough blackout. So I’ll take it as a win on the conceptual level.
Fair Trade
Saturday, October 21st, 2006Nothing, it seems, is ever certain in the land of freelance design. Madness of Day was supposed to open mid-November and has been postponed until the Spring. That show, which was to go on with the support of SVA, has had to reschedule due to problems with the venue, currently under renovation, not being ready in time for the originally scheduled performance dates. So the Spring it is. However, I have been asked to light a show, around the same time, that is happening at FIT. So one show at a TLA educational facility for another. Funny how things work out like that!
This new show is interesting. Set in St. Thomas in the late 19th/early 20th Century addressing events surrounding the Coal-Carriers Revolt of 1892, it is a play with music. Not quite a musical, but certainly not a straight play either. The action centers around Queen Coziah who was instrumental in the revolt. The lighting inventory at the space is very limited and I have to receive a budget, so I do not yet know what this thing will look like.
This play is particularly interesting to me now as I have recently moved to a predominantly West Indian Neighborhood. Aside from a local connection, the play looks to be a fun project to work on although it will only play for two days. What interests me a lot is the way in which the dialog, music and dance all intersect. The style feels derived from the musical theatre genre, yet the song and dance is wholly organic within the piece. It in no way feels forced, a fault I often find with musicals. Staging could always change that, but on the page it reads very well. And the dance elements are equally well integrated.
On another dance note, it looks like I might be lighting a dance show in Massachusetts in December. There are some details yet to be worked out, so it is not definite, but it would be fun to get out of New York for a bit. I have not worked outside New York City since February, when I assisted on an Opera in Chicago. This January I will be assisting on an Opera in Norfolk, VA where I worked two years ago. Its a great little town, with an amazing organic coffee shop that I can not wait to go back to. Oh, and this fantastic little breakfast place that serves up a mean plate of grits.
One of my favorite things about working in other cities is getting to experience the locality for a short time. Spending a week or two in another town and finding little local treats is a fantastic experience. Becoming a “regular” for a week and building little friendships with the coffee shop staff and so forth. Finding great music stores or just wandering unfamiliar streets. That, as much as the work itself, can be infinitely enjoyable.
Moving to a new neighborhood can be a lot like those different towns. Especially in New York City, where each neighborhood can be so radically different from one another. I recently moved from one Caribbean neighborhood (Washington Heights) to another (Flatbush). Yet the differences are striking. English and French are the dominant languages here rather than Spanish. The foods are very different too. There is a strong Indian and African influence in the food and culture as opposed to Spanish.
But it is still New York. Getting out of the city and experiencing these other places is important to my work. Living around and working with people from different places and backgrounds helps to expand my understanding of humanity as a whole and consequently improves my ability to read and interpret a text for the stage. I can not imagine anything more important for an artist than travel. I feel it is important as a Human Being in general, but truly essential to the life of art.
