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From the Archives: Type Casting

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Note: This post first appeared here about a year ago. I hope you enjoy!

I had dinner last night with Rick Rose the Artistic Director of Barter Theatre. We talked about a range of things but early on our conversation was about actors and type casting. The discussion started around the idea that at a place like the Barter, being able to work in a variety of styles was necessary for being an actor there. We then went on to discuss how many actors who “make it” get type cast and only hired to do a small range of roles. They do them well and as time goes on they eventually are not acting per se, but rather playing themselves as whatever character their current role is. In short, the celebrity persona takes over the actor and over time the basic acting skills of inhabiting another persona atrophy.

Our discussion of celebrity actors led into a discussion of celebrity designers. I was saying how one of the things I take great pride in with my work is the ability to design in a variety of styles. I am not tied to a specific look and truly enjoy the freedom and play it allows. Rick made the point that many of the old guard designers working on Broadway have a very distinctive style and that they are hired to light the play in their style. That they are limited to that style and should they venture too far from it, run the risk of producers telling them something to the effect of “I did not hire to light it THAT way. I hired you for your style.”

I noted that my Lighting Design portfolio originally had a sampling of the range that I could do, but that recently I had narrowed the focus to show a singular aesthetic point of view with a few pieces here and there to give a feeling of range. After explaining this I said how I was getting a much more favorable response to my portfolio since doing that. Rick replied that when hiring designers, or actors for that matter, it was necessary to place them in a type in order to understand their work. In short, one needs to be cast in a type in order to get hired. Once done, one runs the risk of getting hired for that type and that type alone.

The balance is a difficult one when marketing one’s artistic work, particularly as an actor or designer. As a designer, you want to be able to work in a range of projects, but that very range as represented in a portfolio, can often be a detriment to your ability to get hired for anything. So by necessity you must cast your type and present that to potential clients; theaters, directors, producers, etc.

This is the paradox of working as a designer(or director or actor) You must artificially limit your range in order to get hired on enough projects to express that range you are capable of. It is a bit of a Catch-22.

This is one of the things I love about the Barter. Each of the actors there, while certainly having strengths in terms of types of roles or dramatic styles, can jump into any role or style at the drop of a hat. And do so willingly. As a designer it is a wonderful place to be. The range of shows they produce allow me to flex a wide range of dramatic muscles. Sometimes I am designing monochromatic shadowy plays and other times bright colorful pieces. But no two shows call for the same style or approach.

I find myself fortunate to work in a range of styles. At the same time, a glance through my portfolio might give the impression that my range is quite limited. It is true that there are certain styles I prefer over others. Yet I do not enjoy these styles to the exclusion of others. Far from it. And that is a very important distinction.

Having an aesthetic point of view is important and necessary in creating any work of art. Equally important is testing that aesthetic to ensure that it is always up to date and true to ones inner vision.

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Updating Style – The Balance of Revivals

Monday, September 14th, 2009

One of the great advantages that performance mediums have over the plastic arts is their immediacy. The work exists in real time and consists of a direct energetic exchange between performer and audience. The immediacy of the performance experience is typically mirrored by a design style that has direct aesthetic resonance with the contemporary world. When dealing with classics, like the Greeks or Shakespeare, the visual style is often updated in such a way that there are two parallel stories occurring for the audience. There is the story of the dialogue and the story of the visual world. Handling contemporary works and classics are often quite clear. There is a middle ground, however, that can be nebulous and murky; the revival.

Revivals, as I am discussing them, are shows anywhere from about ten to a hundred years old. They are old enough that they have already had a successful life as a contemporary work but new enough that they land within, albeit near the edges of, contemporary aesthetics. Revivals are very common in the three major disciplines of dramatic performance; theater, dance and opera.

Last week I posted Antony Tudor’s notes on the design for Lilac Garden, a revival of which I lit several years ago. With that piece we had the dual job of remaining faithful to the spirit of the original and at the same time making the work visually accessible to a contemporary audience.

Finding the balance between the aesthetic spirit of the original and the contemporary eye can be quite difficult when reviving a work. We are ultimately concerned with creating relevant and challenging work for our audience and as such make decisions that at times run counter to how the work was originally presented. Were our interest merely to recreate the work exactly as it was originally seen it would fail dramatically in terms of creating an experience fully embodying the immediacy of now.

When I worked at San Francisco Opera we would run into this problem regularly. Pieces that had been sitting on shelves and in warehouses, literally for decades, would be dusted off and presented on stage. Sometimes the sheer force of history would be compelling like the Tosca which was a recreation of the original design that had opened up the Opera house in the 1930′s or the Traviata designed by John Conklin before his deconstructionist phase.

Many times the works would not stand up on their own and would need to be reconsidered. Colors might get updated from the greenish blues of the 1980′s to the cleaner blues used today. Heavy ambers, once quite compelling, would be exchanged for crisper warm tones. Intensities would be brought up to more accurately match an eye that is now used to brighter stages.

In each of these cases a balance must be struck between the design as it originally was and the production as it reads today. Similarly, these issues come in to play with new productions of older plays all the time. The South Pacific I am currently assisting on is one such example. The designs by Michael Yeargan and Don Holder at once contain the spirit of the show as it was written and pay homage to an older aesthetic viewpoint. At the same time their designs land firmly within the contemporary visual language we speak today.

This balance with the visual language is a significant contributor to the success of the show on Broadway. Creating a design that is not just a contemporary look backwards but rather a fusion of styles gives the piece its power and allows it to neither fall into the trap of museum curiosity nor pure commentary. Some aspects of the show which, given what we know about the world today, sound foolishly naive become accessible. The design at once frames the piece and gives the audience a way in to a different world. It is true to itself and is true to that historical world on its own terms.

This world into which the work gives us access is not the “world of the play” so often discussed by theater makers. It is the world in which the play was written. The visual style orients the audience towards the work in such a way that it can see through the gloss of time and access it as the deeply critical and risque work that it was when it opened.

Variations on this theme exist in all works that were created in a different time. Being sensitive to not only the work and text itself but the orientation of the audience to that work is what makes a design successful. We create the visual framing devices that allow the audience to see the work for what it is and give them access to a text that may land far afield of their own native experience. Our work as designers opens wide the doors through which an audience may directly engage with the energy of the performance. Our work constructs the conduit through which that energetic exchange exists.

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The Style of Composition

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

“There are a million ways to skin a cat,” or so the saying goes.

I was thinking about this the other day in regards to visual style while in my studio designing a lightplot. I was thinking about it because as I was devising the lighting scheme I noticed that I was engaging in a somewhat new process. I don’t mean the steps I take to create a plot, but rather the inner creative journey.

At its most basic level there are three ways a three dimensional figure can be lit, from the back, from the side or from the front. These can be expanded upon ad nauseum as they are in various lighting methods but in the end those are the options. Light from above and light from below ultimately fall into one of these three categories while diagonals are at most a combination of two of these and ultimately do not function independently from the three core directions.

These three directions each serve a distinct and critical role in defining the form of a three dimensional object, specifically the human form.

Light from behind defines that object as distinct from its background and contextual surroundings. Body as existential entity.

backlight

Light from the sides defines the physical form itself. Body as sculptural object.

Crosslight

Light from the front defines the features. Body as emotional subject.

frontlight

Nearly every show I light has some version of these three elements. Depending upon the compositional needs of the piece one may be highlighted over another. Dance, for example, traditionally focuses on sidelighting while theater often focuses on frontlighting. But these traditional rules of thumb get broken to truly create art.

I used to hear designers say some version of “I always use such and such a color backlight” and would be fairly shocked every time I heard it. After all, isn’t every show unique and distinct from every other show?

Making what could be generic responses specific is what differentiates craft from art. Taking that one step further, it becomes important to have those “generic responses” be a function of the piece at hand rather than conforming the design of a particular piece to some platonic ideal of angle and color that does not approach the nuance of the specific work in front of you.

Sometimes that specificity is a function of the demands of the venue or the scenery or some other physical constraint. Other times the choice is wholly artistic. Some designers choose to fight the venue and make the space conform to what they have determined is necessary. Others use the space as a guide to figure out how light best moves in this particular voluminous space. Neither one is right or wrong, but which approach is taken determines so much about the final design, and often tells us much about the designer.

I like to challenge myself regularly by paying attention to ruts I fall into and questioning them. Sometimes it will be with color, so I try to use a new color or color combination on every show I do. Sometimes it will be with angles and how I build the sidelight or backlight systems. Sometimes it will be with the quality, whether the light is hard or soft or broken.

This recent plot I set up several different challenges. In every area in fact. And while I have no idea if the final outcome will look startlingly new or more of the same, the internal process of creating it was quite a ride. Do I really need sidelight? Why use that color? Should I light that directly or indirectly?

Having a style is a wonderful thing. But there is a risk that an effective style can soon become a rut. Without an engagement in the work and a critical eye to the creation, one can find themselves explaining how they “always do such and such.” Yet with the right degree of criticism, that “always” can become incredibly freeing.

Breaking light down to its most basic elements allows the designer to really focus on the compositional approach for the particular piece. It allows us to look at a show scene by scene and determine whether or not we need backlight, for example. If we do, what is that? Are we lighting the actors from behind with spotlights or lighting the scenery from the front? If a spotlight, is it from straight behind or diagonal? One big light or a bunch of smaller ones.

The options are at once simple and infinite. Even when talking about clear backlight, there are literally thousands if not millions of permutations as to what that actually means in practical terms. Straight back, angled, hard, dappled, direct, bounced, the list goes on. Clear might even be a general term to indicate very unsaturated colors, yet still for all intents and purposes be clear.

Thus it is possible to always use such and such a color backlight and yet never repeat the same choice over hundreds and hundreds of shows. There are, it seems, a million ways to hang a light.

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Type Casting

Friday, February 6th, 2009

I had dinner last night with Rick Rose the Artistic Director of Barter Theatre. We talked about a range of things but early on our conversation was about actors and type casting. The discussion started around the idea that at a place like the Barter, being able to work in a variety of styles was necessary for being an actor there. We then went on to discuss how many actors who “make it” get type cast and only hired to do a small range of roles. They do them well and as time goes on they eventually are not acting per se, but rather playing themselves as whatever character their current role is. In short, the celebrity persona takes over the actor and over time the basic acting skills of inhabiting another persona atrophy.

Our discussion of celebrity actors led into a discussion of celebrity designers. I was saying how one of the things I take great pride in with my work is the ability to design in a variety of styles. I am not tied to a specific look and truly enjoy the freedom and play it allows. Rick made the point that many of the old guard designers working on Broadway have a very distinctive style and that they are hired to light the play in their style. That they are limited to that style and should they venture too far from it, run the risk of producers telling them something to the effect of “I did not hire to light it THAT way. I hired you for your style.”

I noted that my Lighting Design portfolio originally had a sampling of the range that I could do, but that recently I had narrowed the focus to show a singular aesthetic point of view with a few pieces here and there to give a feeling of range. After explaining this I said how I was getting a much more favorable response to my portfolio since doing that. Rick replied that when hiring designers, or actors for that matter, it was necessary to place them in a type in order to understand their work. In short, one needs to be cast in a type in order to get hired. Once done, one runs the risk of getting hired for that type and that type alone.

The balance is a difficult one when marketing one’s artistic work, particularly as an actor or designer. As a designer, you want to be able to work in a range of projects, but that very range as represented in a portfolio, can often be a detriment to your ability to get hired for anything. So by necessity you must cast your type and present that to potential clients; theaters, directors, producers, etc.

This is the paradox of working as a designer(or director or actor) You must artificially limit your range in order to get hired on enough projects to express that range you are capable of. It is a bit of a Catch-22.

This is one of the things I love about the Barter. Each of the actors there, while certainly having strengths in terms of types of roles or dramatic styles, can jump into any role or style at the drop of a hat. And do so willingly. As a designer it is a wonderful place to be. The range of shows they produce allow me to flex a wide range of dramatic muscles. Sometimes I am designing monochromatic shadowy plays and other times bright colorful pieces. But no two shows call for the same style or approach.

I find myself fortunate to work in a range of styles. At the same time, a glance through my portfolio might give the impression that my range is quite limited. It is true that there are certain styles I prefer over others. Yet I do not enjoy these styles to the exclusion of others. Far from it. And that is a very important distinction.

Having an aesthetic point of view is important and necessary in creating any work of art. Equally important is testing that aesthetic to ensure that it is always up to date and true to ones inner vision.

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Style is always in Fashion

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Style is always an interesting aspect of creating a play. I mean there are “Style Plays” where the content is the style. There are plays set firmly in a certain genre, where the style of the piece is integral to the story telling. And then there is the more ambiguous aspects of style where it is an aid to storytelling but rather than being integral or inherent is more a matter of illuminating certain aspects of the piece that may not be so readily apparent.

Lovers and Executioners is interesting in terms of style. The play itself does not fall evenly into preconceived notions of genre. Originally written contemporaneously to Mollier it has some structural elements that resonate strongly with that kind of theatre. The use of rhyming couplets for example. The plot however, feels a lot more like a Shakespeare play. Take into account that we are using a modern translation and it becomes a contemporary reworking of a classical story.

So already there is a lot going on there in terms of style just in the language. This is true emotionally as well. The play really runs the gamut from nearly operatic melodrama to hard emotional realism. It is playful and cruel. Soft and hard. In the end quite an emotional roller coaster.

Josh and I, and the rest of the design team, have been working to create a visual world that allows the audience access to all these components. The set is a series of painted flats made to look like dimensional scenery. It is a very classic style with a fairly modern sensibility. Depending upon the staging it allows for very real moments to be played as well as some truly high comic and melodramatic moments as well.

In working through the lighting for this piece it was necessary to find the right balance of realism and theatricality. Even in the most real moments on stage it is necessary to be very clear that we remain in the world of a play. We are never trying to hide that fact.

Further, we wanted the lighting to have a semblance of the classical just as the scenery does. To that end we have components that are very modern and fit right in with the currents of contemporary theatrical lighting design. We also have components harkening back to the classical time the play was written, like footlights. Further, with all the fights and other choreographed movement I was interested in injecting the piece with a dance flavor so much of the lighting has been thought through from a dance perspective and worked into the light plot in that way.

A big concern with this play was that because the visual style is so important to what we are doing with the piece it is as necessary to light the scenery and clothes as it is the actors faces. A balance had to be struck that would at once afford us clear visibility of the actors but also show off the clothes against the set. And the set against the action. This may seem obvious, but finding what this balance is can often be a bit of a trick.

We go in for focus tonight and it will be nice to see all these pieces come together. I am really looking forward to lighting this play over the next several days. It is such a wonderful and delightful visual world to inhabit it should be a lot of fun. Plus being reunited with Josh who I have not worked with since 2001 has been a lot of fun.

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Fashionista

Saturday, July 21st, 2007

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Visioning the Cyber Monk

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

Revisiting a story I worked with less than a year ago is an interesting process. Antigona is a VERY different play than the Antigone I lit last November. Where Anouilh is concerned with the futility of action, Wanatabe explores the burden of duty. Reducing the performance to a single actor really helps to focus and condense the storytelling and illuminate the themes in the story.

The Gandhi quote from yesterday further illuminates these ideas of duty and justice as they relate to the play. The idea of non-co-operation as not only not in conflict with ones duty towards a government but is in fact an active part of ones duty towards it when the government acts in violation of its duty toward the populace.

Wanatabe’s Antigona explores the duty one has to act in the face of injustice. It is a sharp and precise text. Where Anouilh is like a clouded morning fog that slowly dissipates, Wanatabe strikes right to the heart of the matter. Visualizing these two texts, the differences becomes apparent at first hearing the words. Sharp lines and shadow beg for presence with the words of Wanatabe. It is cruel and harsh.

Wanatabe brings the text back to its ancient and classical roots while at the same time propelling it into a wholly contemporary setting. It becomes in a way timeless, or rather out of time. The Narrator exists like an archetype or a god divorced from time, like Cain marked for eternity and cursed to wander the Earth forever in debt to the God he disobeyed.

There is nothing old about the Anouilh text. It is so fully of its time that in many ways the text can not escape its historical predicament. There is no movement in the text that allows it to propel past the historical incident of its first writing. It can exist as an entertaining and fascinating exploration of an historical time, but at least in our current historical setting it does not and can not achieve escape velocity.

What is Wanatabe’s narrator? Our discussions have revolved around such postmodern notions as simultaneity. We looked at the text as a kind of zero point along a long and ever changing spectrum that extends both forward and backwards in time. Cyberpunk and Steampunk both became areas of exploration for locating the visual style of the play. A visual style that embodies this collision of temporal locations and events is critical to this text.

We are also exploring other texts like Dougals Rushkoff’s Testament wherein a classic story is revisioned into a contemporary setting, telling both at the same time.

And that of course feeds back into the idea of the Narrator as archetype. Contemporary society does not have a narrator per se. Rather we have a weakened form as the rock star or the pop musician. The storyteller translated through 20th century capitalism only to land as the commodified preacher of the 21st century.

Relocating these ideas back to the play we have discovered our narrator to be a kind Cyber-Monk. The rockstar storyteller of a retro-future running parallel to our own world. A perpetual beggar wandering the earth in debt from her lack of action and failing her duty, cursed to wander the Earth and tell her story to everyone who can listen.

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Rounding Out Design Style

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Link

The problem is, of course, complicated. First, there is the corruption of the word “design” itself, as it’s generally applied to an Apple object. What distinguishes your iPod from your brand-x MP-3 player is not design: that brand x machine also is distinguished by design. By bad design. What is unique to Apple is more accurately called “style”: a clear signature vocabulary of forms and materials, superabundant to the mere requirements of function, that convey a certain sensibility, atmosphere, association, vibe. Of course, all those rounded corners may aid in manufacture and structure, but they also say in a comfortingly Jetsonian way: “I’m from the future, and so are you.” It’s the familiar tension between Modern and Modernist, in which a particular high style is mislabeled as “design,” and a corrupted understanding of the phenomenon of design is misrepresented as an additional “feature” of an object. The danger here is the implication that design can be reduced to a characteristic of an object, and not the animating spirit behind all its characteristics in total, (and, thus, the notion that an expensive detail that can be dispensed with by the practical-minded).

But Aesthetes and Moderns beware, it gets worse. The good design of the iPod is not to be found in the high style that shapes its material form, but in the inspired interface between that physical object and the information design and the software embedded therein. Consider the clickwheel, that sensually pleasant disk that is the latest addition to a very short list (keyboard, joystick) of powerful attachments between embodied and virtual information. Turning and depressing that clickwheel aligns different functions with charming simplicity and deft complexity, and has a fluidity to it that approaches some organic ideal for the choreography between man and machine. (And, of course, all that software in the machine is generally functional, friendly and fantastic.) But the great functional elegance of this intersection between hardware and software has been all too easily confused and conflated with the ostensible elegance of the hardware itself — and irritatingly designed Apple hardware gets a pass.

What’s wrong with Apple hardware, aesthetically speaking? To closely examine the details of even the newest and coolest Apple product, the iPhone, is, eventually, to be reduced to tears. First impressions of a deft and considered modern object dissipate. To be sure, like the clickwheel, the iPhone’s multifunctional pressure screen is a lovely intersection of information design and ergonomics. But god and the devil are always in the details, so let’s get fastidious about them.

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Changement de style changement de theme, changement de rime, calme, saine et sereine

Monday, November 20th, 2006

A busy day, and I need a break. I have three lightplots I am working on today. One is for a Nutcracker, one is a full evening dance piece I am lighting up at Williams College and the other is an opera plot. Both of the dance shows use repertory light plots, so getting the paperwork in order is a matter of adapting the existing plots to what I need, rather than conceiving the whole thing myself.

I have done the Nutcracker before, so it is fairly easy. The venue has made a few changes to their repertory plot so I have some adjustments to make, but all in all it is quite simple. The other dance plot is very extensive, designed by my friend Matthew Adelson, and will be quite simple to adapt despite the complexity of this multi-scene, multi-set full length work.

The opera plot is just a matter of prep work today. I have to the end of the week to finish it. It is a remount of a previously produced work, so while more than a simple “cut and paste” it is only translating the plot to a new venue. Not a big deal. I have done quite a lot of this kind of thing, translating a plot from one space to another. It is generally easy going work as this one looks to be. Some architectural oddities might change things a bit, but I don’t foresee any big problems.

. . .

I am finding myself dissatisfied with the writing style on this blog. I do not wish to change blogs and screen names as I have in the past. I think it is more useful to me to transform this identity. Some of my issue is that I feel the writing takes on a self centered and pretentious tone that I am uninterested in. It is something that is largely a function of the written word, so I my well be scaling back on the volume of my writing.

Another and perhaps more fundamental issue is that I feel the need personally to focus more on intake rather than output. Or, to be more precise, I wish to focus my output more directly and completely on my artistic work, leaving this space as perhaps more of a catalogue. We shall see where it leads, but a change is much in need.

. . .

I had two very pleasant theatre experiences this past weekend. On Saturday I saw Rumania Kiss me!. The costumes were done by my good friend Oana Botez-Ban. A truly fantastic costume designer. We have worked together quite a few times and it is always a pleasure. She brings a wonderful wit to her costuming. Her work can be highly abstract yet deeply grounded in the dramaturgical needs of the text. Truly one of my favorite designers to work with.

The other show was Temptation directed by Ian Hill. Lia and I went to go see it Sunday and had a wonderful time. The play was wonderfully conceived. The actors were fantastic and the scenery intersected with the text in a way that it felt almost out of place until the final moment of revelation when it all came together. Fantastic work, I must say.

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Its not where you’re from its where you pay rent

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

In response to my last post I got a comment from Josh arguing that essentially what I wanted has always been the case. That the theatre must be viewed as a context that places the human form in contextual relation to an environment that is at once an expression of the contemporary worldview and a map of the future.

His argument is that The Globe is just such a space. That the theatre itself is a map of the Elizabethan worldview. I in no way dispute this fact. In part because he knows a hell of a lot more on the subject than I do, but it does not answer my question. My concern is what is that thing for a modern contemporary audience. As I state in reply to his comment:

My question is, what is the contemporary equivalent of the Globe. My hunch is that it is reclaimed decaying or abandoned spaces. But that might also just be my own aesthetic. But there is something directly relevent to transforming an otherwise decaying space into something new. It happened with the Medea I did in San Juan, the Seven Deadly Sins in Oakland, and about every warehouse party I have lit. There is something so profoundly NOW about these experiences, something I can not put my finger on but I know exists.

That is the context I am talking about. Like I said “Perhaps a blank stage with worklight is the most contemporary thing we can do.” But what and where is that stage? That is the critical question.

The belief that the living theatre today is found in dead and decaying spaces is more than a hunch. The more I think about it the more I come to realize that the moments of “Immediate Theatre” that I have experienced have all been events in these kinds of spaces. Not necessarily something decaying, but a space that is transformed into a living vital thing. This might be a theatre piece in a former Spanish fortress turned museum piece or it might be an all night dance event in an Episcopal Church but either way it takes a space that has become calcified and gives it new energy.

rust

This kind of renewal is something that too much theatre ignores. Within certain aesthetic criteria, Queen Coziah might not be the ‘best’ piece of theatre. This is not something I believe, but I could see someone making this case. The play is quite engaging for its intended audience. And there is an amazing kind of energy one gets from the priests performing in the rhythm section, or the woman cleansing the space with sage before the performance. The death of God only holds any weight when one was once a believer. This is why Cioran is such a powerful writer. This is also why the arguments of so many atheists sound hollow. They can quote Neitzsche backwards and forwards yet never feel the pain of losing faith.

There is an amazing power to be found in spaces that have died. Spaces whose original purpose has fallen to decay and only the outward structures remain. These spaces contain so many possibilities. They contain the ability to hold more beauty than their original intended purpose could ever hope to hold. Like the Rewind Concert at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. Here it occurred in a double fashion, a space transformed and an artform transformed. The classical music concert mixed like a DJ set inside a former Synagog.

receeding skyline

It is certainly likely that the issue is not about found spaces per se but rather the kind of intent thinking that often occurs when engaging in these spaces. Especially for ‘theatre people’ working in a space that is not a theatre is a huge leap on its own. That leap causes one to go back to the original and fundamental questions about what we are doing and why we are doing it. All shows should work this way, but they do not. The trick is to find out how to keep the spirit of the novice alive when doing Ibsen in a Proscenium space with realistic scenery. What is basic and essential here? Why is it on a stage? Why should we care about what is going? All variations on the age old question ‘What does it mean?’

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