“One dimmer might not be working” and “Six dimmers are broken” are two very different statements conveying very different pieces of information.
Posts Tagged ‘tech’
In case you were wondering . . .
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007Settling In
Saturday, March 10th, 2007It feels like things are calming down a bit here on the work front for the moment. Future projects are settled for the time being. Still busy working, but all the crazy prep stuff is largely out of the way for now. The show in NJ is open and out of my hands. I was really done with it two days ago, but the choreographer wanted me around yesterday so I went to the opening performance to keep an eye on things.
Next week I am in tech for two shows. Stirring with Shalimar directed by my friend Shoni and then Firebird with New York Theatre Ballet. Both of these should be rather low stress, or so I foresee. Stirring is in tech from Tuesday to Thursday and the NYTB show Techs Friday. I then run the NYTB shows all weekend.
Monday, we begin focus for the show I am assisting on at the New York Theatre Workshop. All The Wrong Reasons is being lit by my friend Mark. It is in previews for eight thousand years. Ok two weeks, but still . . . I am there in large part to deal with the previews. Mark has to leave early. So I am there to be available to the director until opening.
I have never done a show at the Workshop, so I am looking forward to this. Plus Mark is a lot of fun to hang out with and we have not seen each other much since he was at NYU. It will be nice to reconnect for a bit. Oh yeah, and do a show.
Protected: Settling in
Saturday, March 10th, 2007It looks so simple the sky, just water and a single light source
Thursday, December 14th, 2006I know things have been a bit quiet over here, but I have been quite busy. Monday was load-in for Becoming Adele. Focus was Tuesday evening and then this morning we finished up a few odds and ends. We have an invited dress tomorrow night and then our first preview is Friday. The show is in good shape, which is nice since our first press has to come a lot earlier than we would have liked. But things seem to be progressing nicely.
Today the sound designer for Adele mentioned that this will be her 30th show this year. I reacted with a bit of shock until I realized that it will be my 24th. I guess the round number threw me. Still, 30 is a lot of plays to do in one year.
The set for Adele is backed with a big lovely blue sky. I am having a lot of fun manipulating clouds on the sky as we progress through various times of day. I have quite a few lights to deal with the various cloud scenarios, but it does not seem like enough. The more I do on the sky, the more it becomes clear just how layered a simple cloud is. The sky is so complex, I feel I could explore it for years and never get bored.
I had a meeting during my dinner break with the producer, director, GM and set designer for a small Off-Broadway play I will be lighting near the end of January. The play is called Last Word and will be directed by Alex Lippard who I have worked with before on Sake with the Haiku Geisha and Cupid and Psyche
This Friday is a bit wacky. The plot for Nutcracker got changed around this week, so I have to go in and restore our plot before the weekend shows. All this of course before a rehearsal for Adele.
And of course being the insane person that I am, I lit a conceptual Godot. I never actually saw a full run through. In fact I only saw part of act 1. But with that play that’s like seeing part of both acts. I will actually not have a chance to see it. We lit it without actors. A rather surreal experience, but somehow appropriate for that play.
I am eating the most awesome pumpkin pie right now that my girlfriend made right before she went out of town for a few days. The texture is just right and it has a lovely ginger kick to it that I really enjoy.
What's all that white stuff outside ? ! ?
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006It is snowing and cold outside. I have to walk to the theatre now for tech. I am really enjoying the warmth and coffee right now.
Everything is everything, nothing stays the same
Thursday, November 9th, 2006I am amazed sometimes at how different things can be in the theatre than what is discussed in design meetings. Many hours of discussion got pushed out of view as we rolled up our sleeves for the gritty work of lighting a play. We had our final dress rehearsal for Antigone this evening and it went quite well. I was honestly surprised by some of the solutions that ended up working for the piece on stage.
All in all it is a very handsome production. I could make complaints about low budgets and faulty equipment, but that is the nature of Off-Off-Broadway shows. In the end you make do with what you have and do the best job you can. Some things are frustrating, and there are certainly aspects that are not as fully developed as I would like, but I think the solutions we found to the limitations we had were quite successful and some were downright elegant.
The overall tone of the piece, that elusive thing that one can not discover until you are in the theatre watching light pour over a performers body and on to scenery, was unexpected. It is far more subtle than I had been envisioning, but I think it is the right way to go with this particular piece. The way the light moves has been a lot of fun to work out. The first section of the piece is a long series of small two person scenes. Instead of doing lots of little lighting cues every time someone enters or exits, we have a single twenty-five minute lighting cue broken up into many parts all that move at different rates to create a continuously evolving stage picture.
The subtlety of the lighting is something that I really had not fully grasped until we were in the space. Somehow, everything became softer than I had imagined. The violence and passion in the play was put into stronger relief as a result. The color palette was very contained. With two discrete exceptions the colors were a range of blues. This clean palette was a lovely change from the radical use of color in my last show.
I found myself thinking a lot about the recent election while watching the run. The character of Creon is a kind of Archetype dictator, a very harsh leader. The analogy to Bush does not take much work on the part of the viewer. Unexpectedly, I found myself filled with compassion for Bush. Perhaps compassion is not the right word but I felt that somewhere, I understood a little of why he does the things that he does. This is not to say that I think anything he has done is right. I would be hard pressed to find a single instance of that, but understanding is something I found.
It can be hard if not downright impossible to find any kind of an understanding or even a sympathetic listening to people of radically divergent viewpoints. And in a way that is what the play is about. it is about a willingness to listen, to deeply listen to the reality behind the stories we create for ourselves. Sometimes, like Antigone, we continue on the same path because it is the action we are interested in and not the justification. Sometimes we simply fall victim to another’s story.
I just finished rereading Siddhartha for about the third time. In a way that book is about learning to listen as Antigone is about the breakdown of communication. This communication is necessary in the theatre as a collaborative art form. But the theatre is only a microcosm of and reflection of the larger world. How do we communicate with each other in daily life? Can we? Is it possible to understand another human being? Or are we merely all living within the confines of our own personal stories?
I am not sure there is an answer to these questions. If there were, it would be difficult to imagine any need for art.
Evolutionary Aesthetics
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006The process for Windows has been quite interesting. Two and a half weeks in the theatre from load-in to opening(tonight). Twice as much time as I have ever had to work on a show. As a result there has been a lot of time to evolve the visual storytelling. The basic idea that we had from the start is there, utilize color transformations as a primary source of visual storytelling. When working in a situation as limited as the one we are in(only 44 dimmers) I have found that color can be a very useful means of differentiating time, space and psychology while still being able to clearly and cleanly light the performers.
The play is very complex from a lighting perspective. As the text utilizes dance and movement along with language to move through its ever shifting symbolic dreamscape there is a need for rather sophisticated cueing. Transitions from one image to the next occur in many parts with different lights moving at different rates. The light board we are using is not designed to do “Part Cues.” It can do them, but the programming for it is difficult and convoluted as that functionality was added on after the initial release of the software.
We have two main color ideas, a set of lightboxes as the back wall and an overhead system of color scrollers and then all the various conventional lights. All of these elements need to move and transform at different rates. I made a distinct choice with this show to use only colors I had never(or rarely) used before. A few of the colors I had used once, but most were wholly new to me. It made for some interesting surprises. The entire palette was composed of very soft colors, colors that recede from the eye, that try desperately to mix with other colors. The general effect of that was a very colorful palette that is perceived like clear light. Exactly the effect I wanted. The trouble came with the inherent difficulty then of giving a kind of sharpness and crispness to the images. I really had to work the color balance to make it possible. The colors all wanted to fall in a pile of mush, so it was quite some effort to make them stand up solidly.
Since the colors on the lightboxes were new, it took me a few days to really get the precise control over them I needed to mix the necessary colors for each moment. Once this happened I was able to start working out the crispness and softness needed in the various compositions. Since light, and color in particular, is inherently relative, if one aspect of the color is not under total control the whole stage picture begins to fall apart. But having so much time in the theatre I knew I could afford the risk of these difficult and troublesome colors.
Wrestling with the color palette was trouble enough, but we were also evolving the style of visual storytelling and making substantial rewrites to the script. There are lots of live color transformations, but we also had to find the moments of clarity. We had to find the light as well as the moments of darkness. While the initial color idea has held throughout, the final compositions are nothing like what I had expected. This is one of the wonderful things about the rehearsal process. You come to the table with a clear idea, but also with the flexibility to transform that idea into something else. Then you turn off the head, turn on the eyes, and flow with the play.
I always love the unexpected moments. Often I will include things in a plot that I have no idea when or how they will be used, but that I know will be useful. These hunches can turn into some of the most exciting parts of the technical rehearsal, as they become integral to the visual language of the play.
The production changes every time it is worked. Working one scene changes its relationship to all the other scenes and calls their composition into question. So those scenes change and again the whole is transformed. It is an amazing and fascinating negotiation. A play is such a fragile thing. Every single aspect of a production intimately tied to every other. It can be like herding cats to pull all the various elements together. Sometimes a single element can throw the whole thing off. Sometimes the evolutionary process never quite makes it to a new and complete species. In this case it is a workshop production and the script was only set a few days ago. As a result none of us have fully processed what this thing is. It is a wholly conditional situation. It has been difficult, but a lot of fun to work on.
I ran out of pen colors
Monday, October 16th, 2006
We have been in tech for so many days I had to reuse my black pen. Monday’s project is to get my cue list into the computer.
Exhausting to say the least
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006Last night was a benefit for the Gotham Stage Company, the producers who did last springs successful Sake with the Haiku Geisha and are producing this December’s Becoming Adele. The evening was written by Randall David Cook, who wrote Sake and was directed by Jason Eagan.
The situation was one that I have dealt with many many times. It is called a “One Off.” Arrive at the theatre early in the morning. Begin writing light cues as fast as possible and then do a show that evening. Quick and dirty. Of course the expectation is still there to have a high quality finished product. So the result is one of pure craft. One does not have time to think or judge or guess. Rather one’s past experience and snap decisions are quite literally all you have time for. I finished writing light cues right before we began the dress rehearsal and the rehearsal ended right before we had to open the house. Spending my Monday off in another tech might not have been the best idea for my overall sanity, but it was a nice evening and I am glad to have participated.
On top of all this I was operating on very little sleep. No sleep, no time, and no room for mistakes.
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So this morning I am sitting dutifully at my computer dealing with a pile of emails relating to future shows and scheduling and so on and so forth when the internet suddenly goes down. After dealing with some other new apartment issues I left and am now in a mid-town cafe writing this. The emails, having been composed prior to leaving the house, are all sent. And I have rehearsal for Windows soon.
Windows rehearsals have been going well. It is about the opposite of the benefit/one-off schedule. We have teched through the show, done some good slow detail work through act one and have a run through tonight to show Eduardo, the artistic director of INTAR, where we are. The show opens next Wednesday the 18th. So a lot of time to really get some nice detail work in.
It’s funny. I wonder how many people in the average audience would notice the difference between the lighting in a show done in four hours and a show done in two and a half weeks. Its a question I may never know the answer to. I do believe that lighting, in many ways, works best as action painting. That the initial, off the cuff subconscious response is somehow the truest. One does the drafting well ahead of time to arrange the palette, but the composition is, and can only be, done real time. I firmly believe that time must be set aside to get the real detail work done, but as for the overall shape, I think it works best to adopt an attitude similar to that for spontaneous prose. Much like a blog post, write in half an hour, spell check, find links, publish.
And now to tech.
in/visible art
Saturday, October 7th, 2006I see very little purpose to art that does not in some way make visible that which is otherwise invisible. At a literal level this might apply to my love of lighting design, but at a deeper level it is even more true. Approaching a text as a kind of hypothetical, one can see many avenues an eventual production could go down. The Greeks have been performed in everything from Togas to business suits to both at the same time. How the characters are clothed, how the performance space is designed/chosen, how the scenes are lit, are all responses to the initial question the text asks. Sometimes these aspects of production respond in the form of an answer and sometimes another question. Sometimes both.
The idea of revealing what was otherwise unseen is important to keep in mind. I had a wonderful moment in tech the other night. We were lighting the last scene of act one, and after we had got through it we took a break. The lighting for the first act roughly takes on an arc of colorful to clear light. The focus shifts in the lighting from an awareness of its chromatic nature to light as the compliment of shadow. I spoke with the writer/director about it and she said she was very pleased, but had never intended the scene to be, as she said “black and white” but that for her it helped anchor a scene that is heavily imagistic and can easily run the risk of falling into caricature.
It is not as if lighting alone can create an idea that is not already present. The language of light does not work that way. Light is more akin to the photographers lens. It does not create a situation. Rather, it frames a scenario and through that framing reveals and places focus upon something that might otherwise not be noticed. It can make the unconscious conscious. The invisible visible. It exists in that space between presence and absence, being at once a wave and a particle. It rides that liminal space and therein lies its power.
As Peter Brook says in The Empty Space, “to comprehend the visibility of the invisible is a life’s work. Holy art is an aid to this, and so we arrive at a definition of holy theatre. A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make its perception possible.” That perception of the invisible is central to the nature of light. To guide and focus attention such that the multiplicity of the layers of reality become perceived at once. The expansion of visual consciousness is an essential aspect to an art form like theatre where one has multiple vectors of sensory and mental stimulation through which to negotiate.
I am not sure that light ever gives an answer. The more I think upon it, the more it seems to me to be a medium devoted to questioning. Light asks fundamental questions about the nature of the subject it illuminates. What is this thing? Why is it here? And what does it do? But it asks them in the form on a statement. And herein lies some of the mystery to me of the nature of light. It is a question masquerading as a statement. The wave that is also particle, asks something new every time it states a response to a question.
In many ways light is the forward movement behind action in the dialectical process that is the creation of a work of theatre. At least for the visual component. Light synthesizes all the visual elements, setting, costume and staging, to create a new thesis. And light is a thesis that demands an anti-thesis. By its very presence it creates its opposite in shadow. The same with color. Take two identical lights and color one of them pink, then other looks green. Light is wholly relational and never exists outside some context. It can not be seen without something to bounce off of. Invisible itself, it makes visible the otherwise invisible.
