Antigone is open so with that behind me I get to start thinking about . . . Antigone. It looks like I might be lighting a one woman adaptation of the play next year. It’s funny how patterns show up in the work I get. Two productions of Antigone in a year. This current one is the fourth white set I have lit in 2006. Forever known as the “Year of White Scenery.” I am sure several of my collaborators would rush to point out that they are “Black and White” sets, but I am not up for quibbling with the details. It is also the Year of Fabric Sets, although unlike two of the others the fabric here is a wall and does not look like fabric, so perhaps it does not count.
The month of January is rapidly approaching and it is looking quite different than it was a few weeks ago. The Singspeil I was going to light got cancelled due to issues surrounding the rights to the piece and the adaptation the director wanted to do. There is also some question relating to two other projects as one of them had the dates shifted due to availability of the venue. As a result it now conflicts with another project. Getting this all sorted out is something of a mess and there really is no elegant solution.
Scheduling is such a difficult thing when dealing with independent producers. So often you get things like, “are you available around these dates to do a show?” But they can easily change by a week or months or get cancelled all together. Nothing is certain. Madness of Day as I mentioned earlier has been tentatively rescheduled for the spring, but without certain dates.
There must be a wonderful kind of comfort that comes with having a steady job. These kinds of issues do not come up. You just show up, do your work and get a paycheck. It’s nice, but tends to drive me insane very quickly. I get uncomfortable in the same space for too long. I like movement. I like movement as much I like returning to familiar places. This is why I love it when I get to work with the same or similar groups of people again. The sense of movement is maintained, but so too is a sense of continuity. It keeps things fresh.
The lighting for Antigone was composed with some sense of this. There were perhaps two dozen light cues, a lot of similar compositions returning, but the light was almost always moving. Sometimes the cues only reduced the light a small amount over ten minutes or more, or there would be a 25 minute subtle sunrise. Shadows were utilized as a kind of bass beat while the colors morph and transform over the actors bodies.
The world today seems without any purpose of finding value in political discourse. This reality is what so interests me in the text of Anouilh’s Antigone. In a world without meaning, a world of constantly shifting values, what meaning does, can or should a design for the play have? I find that question unresolved. And I think it is for the best. Linear thinking can not work nor can anything wholly arbitrary. Some synthesis of between the forms of meaning and the randomness of situations must be constructed. But what that is, can never be the same thing twice.
