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Color Theory Basics – Hue

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Our discussion of color theory begins with a look at Hue. Hue is the most basic element of a color and what most people think of when they think “color.” Hue refers to the specific wavelengths of light which hit your retina and cause you to experience sensations like “red” or “yellow” or “green.” Because this is such a foundational element of color theory this post will be a bit long and involved. But it’s worth it!

While the colors of pigments and the colors of light are all the same, their relationships differ between mediums. Primary and Secondary Colors differ when discussing pigment or light. The relationship of these colors, as well as what you can mix to make which colors, vary depending on what medium you are using. The first rule of color: Everything is Relative.

We have all been introduced to a color wheel at some point in our lives. The color wheel is a visual representation of colors and their various relationships to one another. To make a color wheel we draw a circle and then divide it into six even sized wedges. We fill every other wedge with the three Primary Colors; Red, Yellow, and Blue. With the remaining three alternate wedges we put in our Secondary Colors; Orange, Purple, and Green.

Primary colors are those which can not be mixed together through the use of other colors. Secondary Colors are a combination of equal parts of two Primary Colors. Thus Red+Yellow=Orange, Yellow+Blue=Green, and Blue+Red=Purple. The formula of combining colors follows to create Tertiary Colors and so on. The mixing of all these colors will affect both the Hue and the Chroma. Chroma is where the hue lands in a range of Gray to pure Hue.

Special Note: Modern printing techniques using Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (and Black) seem to indicate that this traditional view of color pigment relationships is incorrect. Cyan and Yellow ink, for example, combine to make Green.

With all that said, here is the traditional color wheel we all learned in elementary school art class:

When we mix all three primary colors together in equal parts we get Black. In theory. In reality you tend to get a dark brown and can actually create some wonderful variations in brown by slightly altering the proportions of the different colors used.

The behavior of light is very different. The primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue. While the secondary colors are Cyan, Magenta, and Amber (Yellow). With light Red+Green=Amber, Green+Blue=Cyan, and Blue+Red=Magenta. Not only that but an even mixture of all three primary colors produces White light. In theory. In reality one tends to create shades of Gray.

The lighting Color Wheel looks like this:

It is interesting to note that if we replace the traditional pigment color wheel with the revised one based on CMYK printing we discover that the Primary and Secondary Colors of light and pigment are not just different, but are totally inverted. We can use this to our advantage by turning brightly colored surfaces black with differently colored light as I will discuss below.

The effect of Hue variation on the color of Costumes and Scenery can be tremendous. By knowing the relationship between the Primary and Secondary colors you can create striking effects. What I call “Sympathetic Hues” are colors in light which contain elements of, but are distinct from, the Hue of a Costume or Scenic piece.

Let’s take the classic Woman-in-a-Red-Dress. When she enters at the top of the staircase we really want her to shine. As such we would use colors on the dress which are sympathetic to, or enhance, the dress color. In this case we could use a red like the dress. If we wanted two colors from opposite sides we could use a combination of colors like Magenta and Amber. Here we see the Hue of the light is making the intent of our collaborator (the Costume designer) stronger by reinforcing her bold color statement.

The drawbacks of this are that we could ruin the designer’s intent. This typically happens with heavily saturated light and delicate or intricate costumes or scenery. The color becomes so dominant that we lose the pattern, which may have been for a particular design purpose. One of our primary jobs is to make our collaborator’s work look the best it can (and how they intend it to look!). A deep understanding of color will allow us to do that.

Another drawback to such a broad statement would be the light on the performer. I don’t know many people in real life who have saturated red skin (or blue or green). So while the color might be the right idea for the dress, it might not be the right idea for the performer. The Woman-in-the-Yellow-Dress should not look jaundiced, for example.

A color whose position is opposite another color on the wheel in known as a “Complementary Color.” Complementary colors can create striking and dynamic effects when placed next to one another (or in lighting, when coming from opposing angles). This strength does a curious thing when a pigment is lit with its compliment. A Cyan floor, bathed in Red light, will appear Black to the human eye. We can use this to great effect by obscuring a scenic element until just the right moment of revelation. The risk, of course, is in destroying our collaborator’s intent by deadening the colors of their impeccably designed scenery.

Here we can see the relationship between compliments:

In addition to Primary, Secondary, or Complementary Colors we can also group Hue into one of three categories; Warm, Cool, and Neutral. Warm Hues include Red and Orange. Cool Hues include Blue and Cyan. Neutral Hues include Green and Magenta.

Warm, Cool, and Neutral are not absolute, but relative. In our example above, the red dress is treated as Neutral while a Cool Red (Red with a little blue, but not so much as to be Magenta) light might come from one side and a Warm Red (Red veering towards Amber, but still clearly Red) from the other. In this way we have the effect of complimentary colors (Blue and Yellow) creating a striking effect, while using only Hues which are sympathetic to the color choice of our collaborator.

One final word on Complementary colors and light is worth noting at this point. If you have a single source of light, say the sun at midday, which casts a shadow, the color of the shadow is the complementary color of the light. While this can be hard to see with something so subtle as sunlight, try it some time under a Sodium Vapor (Orange) street light. The shadow should have a faint tinge of Blue or Cyan.

This color effect can be used to the designer’s advantage in myriad ways. One could simply exaggerate the shadow color on stage through a hard directional light in one’s chosen Hue and a soft diffuse light in the shadow color. Alternately this idea could be employed by choosing opposing colors of Head Hi booms.

One of the most famous uses of this color effect is in the lighting method outlined by Stanley McCandless in his A Method of Lighting the Stage in which he suggests using Diagonal Frontlight in complementary colors from opposite directions. His “warm” and “cool” area lights could easily be made more specific using this knowledge of the shadow color of a light.

Hue is a foundational element to our understanding of color but it is by no means all there is. In later posts I will be exploring Saturation and Chroma, Missing Color Syndrome, Dominant and Recessive Colors, Color Correction, Gray, The Effect of Lamp Type, and Additive vs. Subtractive Color Mixing.

Stay Tuned!

I hope you found this post useful. Please take any new ideas and start experimenting. There is a lot more to cover on Hue alone and I may do so in later supplements to this series.

Was this useful to you? Please let me know what you thought in comments. Or leave any questions you may have and I (or other commenters) would be happy to answer.

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Year in Review – 2009

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

The New Year is my favorite holiday. It is wholly arbitrary and I find that delightful. One day out of the year the whole world celebrates together. Along with celebration is reflection. 2009 has been quite a year over here at Light Cue 23.

In the world of extreme emotions, my grandmother died and I hung out with rock stars.

We discussed the business of being a freelance lighting designer:

A lot of pictures were posted about:

We explored lighting angles in depth:

Over at Parabasis I was a guest writer with a series titled A Designer Prepares about my design process:

I explored my lighting process in depth through an exploration of a few specific projects:

I wrote about how I approach text:

I explored the relationship between a recession and aesthetics.

I tried to understand the nature of revolution in today’s world:

I wrote about networks:

I made a visual resume.

I spoofed my own blog with 5 Tips to build your blog audience and why my blog will never be popular.

I talked about boredom and the color gray

I discussed dance on my blog and in a guest post at On Stage Lighting.

I wrote about how to approach lighting for the floor and the balcony.

I discussed the relationship between New York and the rest of the country.

I argued that “good enough” isn’t and how type casting can be a good thing.

There was a lot more written this year and you are more than welcome to peruse the archives. This is just a sampling of some of my favorites. All in all it has been a good year over here. How has your year been?

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If Brecht were alive today he would be twittering about Kanye

Monday, November 16th, 2009

One of the things that interests me about Brecht’s theoretical project is his focus on creating work that resonates strongly with contemporary audiences. The world as he knew it was one firmly rooted in “the scientific age” of modernist utopian possibilities. He saw theater as a tool to open up fracture points in contemporary society in order to make possible a transformation in class consciousness.

He writes in A Short Organum for the Theatre:

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

Brecht’s work, to my reading, has always concerned itself with the extremes of society, the revolutionary consciousness and potential on the one hand and the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces on the other. But as he says in the above quote we must concern ourselves with the contemporary reality. We must use the system as it is, and through an exploitation of its fracture points, transform it into a more perfect world. He makes this second point more explicitly, a little earlier, when he states that “[t]he theatre has to become geared into reality if it is to be in a position to turn out effective representations of reality, and to be allowed to do so.”

Theatre, for Brecht, was to be an Event, in the Zizekian sense, an authentic experience which fundamentally alters the experience of events not only after its occurrence but alters the experience of the past as well. The theatrical Event was to be of such a magnitude that one’s whole orientation to the social experience would be fundamentally and irrevocably altered.

So what does this have to do with tweeting about Kanye West?

What I was thinking about specifically was the extreme of contemporary hip hop embodied in the radical political critique espoused by groups like Dead Prez or BDP (KRS-One) on the one hand and such acts as Kanye and Fergie on the other. Bling bling capitalism juxtaposed against social revolutionaries mediated through contemporary performative/artistic experience. How does Kanye’s Golddigger intersect with KRS-One’s Love is gonna get cha(Material Love)? But of more interest is the question: how does the technology through which these songs are experienced interact with the audience?

What twitter does, in a similar way to other social media like blogs, facebook, myspace and so forth, is to blur the distinction between life, audience, and performance. When surveillance is total, and everyone is on camera, then everyone is an actor. So then we have the consumption of culture as a performative act. We tweet about the song we are currently listening to and fold the performance of the song into the performance of subjectivity on-line in a way that presents it immediately as commodity and reifies the subjective performance.

This is the world we are in. The “scientific age” has been passed by for the “information age” and we are no longer gears in the machine but statuses in the social group blog. So the audience/actor takes the stage and incorporates cultural commodities into the performative feedback loop. The subjective experience of identity shifts along the audience/actor continuum and becomes complicated as that experience gets mediated through various technologies. Is a retweet performative? Has the subjective experience then become another cultural object to be consumed or does it still contain the potential inherent in performance? Has the subject/object dichotomy been pulled out of the either/or world and brought into the light of both/and?

Brecht makes it clear that “[n]ot everything depends on the actor, even though nothing may be done without taking him into account. The ‘story’ is set out, brought forward and shown by the theatre as a whole.” I would argue that this extends to contemporary performative technologies.

While Brecht set out in his day to reconceive Theatre and Opera into a medium appropriate for his contemporary world I could easily imagine him shifting the very stage from the physical world to the digital world. Perhaps his performances would only appear in Second Life or as episodic narrative released via twitter.

Despite all this conjecture, the question still remains: how might these technologies be utilized to exploit fracture points in contemporary culture in order to unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses? Or to look at it a different way: is the very search for those points of fracture, and the desire for social revolution, an idea tied up with the modernist notions of a bygone era? Have the differences been so radically folded into one another that we no longer have such dichotomous existence but rather the uneasy experience of both/and?

I certainly don’t know the answers to those questions but I would love you to retweet this piece if you enjoyed it.

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Dirty Money, Starving Artists, and the need for new myths

Friday, November 6th, 2009

One of the most pervasive identity myths that haunts art worlds is that of the starving artist. There are countless examples in popular culture of this archetype including a very good opera about the subject. While the idea that a true artist suffers and through suffering art is born might have a degree of romantic mystique the truth of the matter is that all suffering creates is suffering. The archetype of the starving artist, and her condemnation of anyone who achieves any degree of success as “selling out,” does little more than provide limited solace to an otherwise unpleasant existence.

Archetypes are powerful things. Consciously or not, as beings in the world, we emulate strong and powerful archetypal roles. Not to get too Jungian but I see it as far too common to deny. Personality is performance. In the performance of personality we model our ‘character’ off of good actors (in real life or literature and pop-culture). The starving artist, through its romantic appeal, is a popularly recurring figure. Sadly this figure does more of a disservice to us in the long run, in the same way as the alcoholic writer generally creates alcoholics not writers.

The starving artist type gains value, to a greater or lesser degree, in the idea that money is somehow dirty. There is an air of superiority, by those who don the starving artist type, placed around obscurity. It is as though anyone whose work could be understood by, and thus appreciated and paid for by, more than a select inner cabal of followers is somehow flawed. Because popular/successful is read as bad, money, as a tangible proof of popularity of ones work, is also treated as bad or dirty. There is a belief that the work itself becomes sullied by making money off it.

This is as common in the performing arts as it is in any other medium. Many theater makers working on a small scale will deride the “commercialism” of Broadway plays or the work produced at regional theaters. Rather than examining the work itself the funding for the work comes under attack. Rigorous critique is replaced by a more general barrage against slick stagecraft and well rehearsed acting. Taken at their root these critiques are really about money and the relative access to, or paucity of, its presence in making the work.

While it is true that throwing money at a bad play will not make it better it does not follow from there that all plays with good funding are bad. It is true that people throw millions of dollars into producing total crap while others spend next to nothing to make a true gem. At the same time, those true gems, with a fully financed producer, would potentially become even greater while the well financed schlock would remain schlock.

The archetype of the starving artist and the myth of dirty money have created a false dichotomy between “uptown” and “downtown” theater. Between “indie” and “commercial” plays. Being poor does not inherently make one virtuous and even Jerzy Grotowski conceded that poor theater costs a lot of money. High budgets do not make one good or bad. Powerful authentic art can exist with no money or all the money in the world. But this is not the point. The focus of our critiques should center on the quality and effectiveness of the work itself rather than its funding.

So too our personal narratives would do well to be reoriented away from the damaging myth of the virtue of the starving artist and back towards the rigorous and devoted artists and craftsman. Even a cursory look at the Renaissance shows us that powerful and lasting works can be created from well funded origins. There are many people in pop-culture one might look to who are wildly successful and still maintain a high degree of artistic integrity. Danny Elfman comes readily to mind as one such example as does his regular collaborator Tim Burton. Many artists have made the transitions to the big leagues without sacrificing their artistic integrity.

Poverty is only romantic with distance. It is time to retire the Starving Artist as a myth of a bygone age. A romantic notion, well fit for literature, and hardly worth modeling one’s life after. The reality of the starving artist too easily winds up starved. We need new archetypes for a new millennium. Archetypes that empower us to live strongly and courageously as artists in our contemporary world and beyond.

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The Structural Failure of The Idiot Savant

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Richard Foreman is known for his signature visual and performative style. If you have seen any of his works you should be familiar with the pieces of string, barriers, dotted lines, bits of fringe, voiceover, ambient soundscapes, lighting instruments pointed at the audience, and more. Each of these elements are used by Foreman to create a specific effect in the audience. Some are there to create a kind of aesthetic distance between the audience and viewer(string, barriers). Other elements are there precisely to overcome that distance and bring the energy of the stage into the space inhabited by the audience(voiceover, lights pointed at the audience). One is simultaneously drawn in and pushed away from the work. That tension gives his works a singular quality and contributes to their almost indescribable power.

What must be remembered when experiencing one of his works, and yes experiencing is more accurate than mere viewing, is that every element of the performance is present for a very specific reason. Nothing is mere decoration. Each aspect of the production works with (and against) every other element to become a cohesive (if not fully understandable) whole. Foreman’s plays are complex psychological machines which manifest for the audience a wide and complicated emotional spectrum.

Many elements that go into a Foreman production have been appropriated by various avant garde theater makers and others exhibiting nothing more than a derivative quality. For once the element is used without concern for its precise role in the work, but rather for surface effect, its power disappears. Foreman is very careful about this and will readily change or cut something that is not working to full effect.

Most of his works have been produced in his long time theater, the Ontological-Hysteric, in St. Mark’s Church. That space is small with a rather low ceiling. As a result the force of his works are direct and powerful. In producing Idiot Savant he has moved from his usual space to a larger theater at The Public. In this space not only is the audience seating area bigger but the stage itself is far deeper and has a much higher ceiling.

While Foreman’s traditional elements are employed in Idiot Savant there has been a translation of sorts in order to make them work in the same way in this larger space. More string than usual as well as a larger focus on designing the audience area in addition to the stage space has had to happen. Every element scaled up properly to this new space except for the lighting. The lighting designer, rather than deeply exploring how Foreman uses the various lighting elements in his plays and making sure they scale to the new space, simply hung those same instruments in the larger theater. The result is a structural failure of the lighting plot that, despite vigilant efforts by Foreman, has not been fully solved.

The lighting designer put together the physical lighting plot and then left Foreman to his own devices for a month to actually light the play. Foreman made numerous changes, structurally, the the plot, taking what was largely unusable and moving them around to actually provide some function and value to the play. Many of the ideas from the original lighting plot read as derivative attempts to achieve a Foremanesque aesthetic in contradistinction to the hardworking elements Foreman typically employs.

Being the true master that he is, Foreman has done a miraculous job of lighting the play to a rather striking effect. After all, in the hands of a master, art can be made from nearly anything. While the work looks good the lighting lacks a certain vitality inherent to much of his previous works due to the oversight by the lighting designer in terms of accurately translating the ideas into the larger theater. While getting bogged down by details such as specking several variations of virtually identical floodlights, the larger conceptual design problem failed to be solved.

What Foreman has done with such a severe structural handicap is admirable. But the sad reality is that the work fails to live up to its true potential. The beauty of the rest of the work (scenery, costumes, sound and staging) which was accurately translated to the larger space is met only half way by the lighting.

The inherent failure of the lighting design in Idiot Savant comes from a lack of foresight on the part of the designer to translate the ideas behind Foreman’s lighting work into a system that would achieve those same results in the larger theater this work is being performed in. Foreman’s use of lighting instruments pointed at the audience creates powerful psychologoical effects. Without properly scaling them out of the Ontological and into the Martinson what we are left with are merely superficial tropes lacking the power and vitality that his work both demands and deserves.

This lack is striking precisely because the rest of the work is so powerful. The vitality and immediacy of the play makes it stand out as a work worthy of this great master’s final homage to the stage. His directorial mastery is shown to powerful effect and anyone doubting his approach to performance would do well to see this piece and reconsider those opinions. All that said, the failure in the lighting design leaves one wishing his collaborator had been more invested in creating an accurate translation of the work rather than merely copying and pasting ideas without getting behind their authentic essence.

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From the Archives: The Aesthetics of Control

Monday, October 19th, 2009

This piece was originally posted in January of 2008.

Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.
Martin Heidegger, What is called Thinking?

Heidegger’s concern with beauty here has its essence in Humanity’s relation to its own quest for self knowledge. The quest to understand the Self, that true and unwavering quest is itself the essence of Beauty. He calls this unique human essence Dasein, that which is concerned with its own being. Beauty then, is the clear and unadulterated understanding, or quest for that essence.

When he takes up the issue of art it is most often through poetry. Or poetry as the essential in a poetic understanding of the world. But it is that larger poetic understand of the world that is key. When Keats claims that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all // Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” he is speaking here to that same essential mode of being, that poetic worldview. But is this “truth” the truth of the poem, or the Grecian Urn for which the poem was written. Or was the Urn itself a mere tool for which the poem may express some larger understanding of the world?

These questions are inherent to the making of art. Surely one can make a piece of art, be it a poem, a painting, photograph or piece of theater and be unthinking in that action. Such a work may even point to some aspect of truth. But such unthinking works rarely tend towards that poetic essence whereby some larger truth is found and some deeper understanding of the Self and its relation to the world is made manifest.

In Architecture of Authority, Richard Ross explores the poetic beauty of post-modern fascist architecture in contemporary culture. In this book he is exploring spaces that, rather than being pure in themselves and allowing the person experiencing them to create their own relation to the space, force a particular mode of relation onto the individual. Prisons, courtrooms and psych wards are explored, but so too are a Chelsea gallery and Montessori Preschool.

In fact, his work calls into question the very idea that fascism and control are mechanisms and tactics perpetrated by individuals at the upper echelons of power. Rather they are ubiquitous throughout culture and humans, at every level of culture and development, create spaces wherein the control and manipulation of their fellow being can occur.

Through his lens these spaces of torture and control, of confinement and terror, become at once beautiful and horrifying. It is as though he has seen the essential truth of the politics of control and captured it here in his book. But more than that, the aesthetics that underlie these spaces are the same design sense that one finds in Ikea furniture, or the structure of an Ikea store itself.

His work begs the question wherein does this Beauty lie? For to most of us, I would presume, a prison is not a beautiful space. Yet Ross captures some essential beauty in his photographs. It seems then that the beauty lies not so much in the thing itself but in Ross’ unique relationship to contemporary fascistic control. Beauty is that which is contained in the worldview of the observer, in the relationship and continual dialog between observer and observed.

The photograph is a visual representation of the relationship of the photographer to its subject. The beauty lies not so much in either of those, but rather in the energy created through this relatedness. For a worldview can not exist in a vacuum, it must, by its very nature have a world to resonate off of, to shape and be shaped by. So too can the world not fully exist in an existential sense without a viewer to complete the relationship. A world is a container and that container is empty without that which it contains.

The world, to return to Heidegger, conceals that which exists only in relation to the viewer, to the subject. But that which exists in the relationship between the viewer and the subject is in turn concealed by the subject’s own subjectivity. Just as the manner in which fundamental particles are measured in physics causes their very nature to change, so too does the subject’s subjective viewing of the world cause that which would be revealed to withdraw once more into concealment.

The world is a collaborative space. It takes the work of every man, woman, child, animal, plant and fungus to make it what it is. The aesthetics of control have pervaded our society so deeply that the same clean lines of the new chic apartment, or commercial play, are those same lines found in the jail cells of the Guantanamo detention facility. We have already bought in to the aesthetics of control. What we have not yet given up fully is our relatedness to that world.

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Ten Thousand Shades of Gray

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Walking to the theater the other day between rain storms I looked up to see the sky filled with clouds and the morning sun fighting its way through. The effect of this stopped me in my tracks as I gazed upon this wonder of natural light. The sky, ten thousand shades of gray as varied as all the colors in a rainbow, caused me to reflect upon my feelings regarding light and color and texture.

When I first discovered lighting design it was color that drew me to the medium. The ability to make something shine brilliantly or nearly disappear based solely on the color of light applied to it fascinated me to no end. I went to NYU for graduate school in large part because there was a heavy focus on color and color theory. Robert Wierzel, whose work was a major motivating factor in my choice of school, uses heavy saturate colors in a lot of his work. I had also heard of Curt Osterman’s color lecture which alone is arguably worth the price of the degree. By the end of my three years I had certainly got what I paid for; a deep and rich understanding of the interactions of color.

In addition to studying with these masters of color I pursued study on my own through reading and exploring Joseph Albers’ The Interaction of Color and Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Beyond mere study, I conducted numerous experiments in the light lab late at night and in theaters whenever I was working on a show. The 100+ dances I lit in my time at NYU gave me ample opportunity to construct and test hypotheses regarding color interactions. Further, I would use new colors and new color combinations on my shows in an effort to expand my understanding of color. In short, the last eight years have largely been devoted to a deep study and analysis of color.

Seeing that sky with those glowing clouds made all those color explorations fade into the distance. A whole new orientation to light was opening up as the sun revealed itself slowly and carefully through the cloud cover. Shades of gray.

I have loved gray as a color for a long time. I would often refer to it as my favorite color but then fall back into more saturated color choices when it came to designing a show. That morning something shifted. The sky opened and in that moment something in me opened as well. The feeling was one of recognition. Recognition of something that had long been close by yet just out of reach. Recognition that the illusive something I had been chasing after for many years was now within my grasp.

Prior to studying lighting design, I had been doing black and white photography for several years. In photography light and color is all shades of gray. The focus is on shade and shadow and angle. Color, by virtue of the medium, is not part of the equation. It might seem obvious that such an interest in photography would lead to a design sensibility oriented towards gray. Instead there was a long journey through the world of color. This detour through color has been an invaluable experience in terms of approaching gray with the richness of its full potential.

No two grays are the same. Some are pushed a little to blue, others to green, and still others to red. The color distinctions I have from these years of experimentation give great insight into how each of these grays interact. Further, two nearly identical shades of gray serve radically different functions depending upon what angle they come from or whether they are soft indirect lights or hard directional lights.

Exploring light only through shades of gray forces the work to be more rigorous. This is true with any tightly controlled color palette. Because the variation in terms of color is so slight the focus comes down to changes in angle and brightness alone. When an identical cue is put up on stage in amber and red instead of blue and green it can cause a bit of a sensation. The effect, however, is largely superficial.

A space must be revisioned to be completely transformed. The shadows must change, the hidden must come into view, we must shift our focus. Angle and intensity changes shift our understanding. Color can do this used broadly over the entire spectrum of hues. Color also does this contained within the narrow spectrum of gray tones and does so more effectively because the work the color is doing is more subtle and thus leaves the audience to their experience of the work rather than conscious of the design.

The possibilities contained within this tighter palette are very exciting. Orienting my work towards shades of grey will allow me to bring a new rigor and depth to the stage. I look forward to seeing what this new aesthetic sense will bring.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate

Monday, August 31st, 2009

When Heather Carson called me up and asked if I would like to assist her on Richard Foreman’s latest show I jumped at the opportunity. Heather’s lighting sense is unique in the theater world and Richard has functionally created his own genre of theater. The opportunity to watch these two theater artists at work together was one I could not pass up.

Most theater lighting in America follows a familiar pattern. The designer hangs many little spotlights (the current vogue is the Source-4 by ETC) just about everywhere they can pointing towards every possible place an actor might stand so that they can be lit variously from the front, the back, or the side. The system is rather rigid and for the most part much of the work looks the same. This is not to say that the work can’t be quite beautiful. On the contrary, part of this system’s popularity is its success in creating a wide array of beautiful imagery. It can do a lot, but it can not do everything.

This mode of working represents only one way of seeing. It is a manifestation of a worldview firmly rooted in 20th century mechanistic production. It works well for the entertainment industry because it follows the rules of industry. It is easily mass reproducible on a large scale and utilizes uniform parts that may be quickly and simply exchanged one for the other. Any 19 Degree Source-4 will produce the same quality of light as any other.

In short it is a kind of artistic assembly line. Assembly lines can be amazing. After all we would not have the ’57 Chevy, one of the most beautiful objects created by humanity, were it not for the assembly line. As beautiful as these works are they represent a single way of seeing. A ’57 Chevy, for all it’s assembly line glory, is fundamentally different than a Duesenberg which would have the body and interior individually crafted by master coach builders. In the same way, the mode of seeing represented by Heather and Richard is of a fundamentally different order than the standard assembly line production style of the American theater.

With Richard the lighting is an aesthetic world unto itself. Rather than merely sculpting actors, the light collides with the world of the play in sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly ways. It is a narrative subject deserving of its own metaphysic, much like character and dialog is in traditional plays. Heather brings to the work a deep inquiry into the ontology of light itself. Her work is concerned in large part with the very Being of Light and the Being of lights. For both of them the lighting is not presented as an answer to a problem per se, but rather as a line of questioning in search of discovery.

Enter the Public Theater, one of the great New York producing organizations, a leader in the non-profit theater world. They do the standard American style of theater producing as good as anyone. Not only do they produce a large volume of work they welcome aesthetic risk into their operation. Richard Foreman, while a leader of the New York avante garde, is quite risky for a large cross-section of the New York theater going audience particularly the more mainstream audiences who attend the Public. By bringing him in the artistic staff and administration is not only taking some risk with their audience they are saying that such risk is outweighed by the sufficient artistic merit of the work that Richard Foreman brings to the stage.

These two modes of working collide in a rather striking way when the theater making experience gets into the practicalities of where a light should point. During a lighting focus with Richard and Heather (they are both there and equal participants at an artistic level) each light is not simply turned on and put in its place in the assembly line. Rather the light is turned on and then considered as a subject unto itself. A dialog between them ensues. The light is not an answer to a problem so much as it is a doorway opening into a world of possibility. Because of this a lighting focus must be taken slowly with each light well considered, its possibilities noted and its potential use questioned.

We took two days to focus the lights. The first day went quite well, with a good humor in the room and the time taken to carefully consider each possibility. The second day a member of the theater staff who had not been present the day before attempted to change the mode of working. Rather than allowing the process to move along as it had been there was a request to shift into the traditional assembly-line mode. When that happened, the system broke down. Confusion ensued as the artists who had been more than comfortable became unable to work. Upon my initiative we returned to the slow and careful mode of working and were able to finish the process ahead of schedule.

Richard and Heather’s way of creating is quite foreign to many people who regularly work in the American theater. But it is how we deal with the foreign that truly displays our mastery of a subject. Successfully managing routine shows only that we are a slightly specialized machine. Adapting to difficult and foreign environments and situations, transforming your typical way of approaching a subject when all the given circumstances are different than you are used to, displays a deep and profound understanding of your field.

I remember several years ago assisting Heather at San Francisco Opera. Her style then, as now, was quite different from our standard fare at that institution. Yet we took every measure to ensure that the artistic integrity of the lighting could be maintained specifically by working with and within her aesthetic. Richard, to give himself the freedom to work in the manner he prefers, has been producing his plays with his own company for decades.

The proper roll of the support and technical staff is not to impose their way of working on an artist. It is to facilitate the work of the artist. Having been on both sides of that equation I am familiar with several ways of looking at this situation. That is the key issue that I have been trying to get at here. The assembly line mode of seeing is not wrong or bad or ugly. The assembly line mode of seeing is but one way of seeing. It is one language of theatrical production. To assume that it is the only way of seeing is a mistake.

When we are talking about making art the only mistake one can truly make is to assume they are right. Art is about questioning. It is about process. Rightness and answers are about finality. They are the end of movement and the closing of doors. If all you do is look for the fastest solution, you might miss a glorious question just waiting to be asked. Answers are doors at best and walls at worst. Taking the time to ask a question is taking the time to open a door, peek inside and discover what may be hiding there.

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The False Positive of the T.A.Z

Monday, August 17th, 2009

The concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone has been around for some time now. The basic premise is that it is possible to create a space outside the confines of everyday society and culture that allows for a more fully expressible aspect of self. A common example given of a TAZ in practice is the Burning Man festival that occurs every fall in the Nevada desert.

While the concept has some merit and certainly can be a useful tool for more extreme social experimentation than is allowed in every day human culture I would argue that the system itself creates a false positive in terms of results and at best does nothing to change the status quo and at worst reduces the willingness and capacity for people to engage in real social change.

Why would this be the case?

Using Burning Man as an example we see a system that purports to create an anarchist utopia where all social conventions have been questioned. A space where the economy of supply and demand has been replaced by a gift economy. Where imagination is limitless and possibility endless.

While this is a lovely vision, by creating a space wherein one can feel as if this freedom is true, it reduces the chance that most people who experience it will work towards such possibilities in the real world outside the festival gates. I am not saying that the experience can not be amazing and profound. What I am saying is that by creating a scale model of that possibility one need not manifest it in their daily lives since they know they have access to it, like clockwork, every September. I am of course leaving out that subset of the attendees who go only for easy sex and access to drugs. What I am talking about are those who do sincerely believe in the utopian qualities of the festival.

The reality of such spaces is that they exist by virtue of the economic systems we have in place outside the zone. Not everyone is equal or has equal capacity since we only have what we bring inside the zone which, again, is determined by where we are in the outside world. The very structures that gave rise to the abundance there are reinforced upon reentry to the real world. After all, we need to make even more money this coming year so we can have even better blinky gadgets to give away next fall.

Because the feeling of radical freedom has been met in this space there is little to no need to make that potential a reality. It is uncountable the number of people I have met who spend 360 days out of the year in buttoned down desk jobs only to “let their freak flag fly” during a week of adultery and debauchery that is made permissible by some idea that the rules are different in Black Rock City. While the actions may, from some perspectives, be permissible, the consequences of those actions remain beyond the confines of the event.

The irony of course is that far from freeing themselves from the confines of social structures and rules they are wholly adopting the rules and confines of a different culture. No true questioning has gone on. What has happened is the wholesale transference of one externally imposed value system with another. The rules are the rules and they will simply follow them even if the rules change. The freak who emerges from the desert is not the “true self” but simply a mirror of the same rule following self within a different context. Not only that, but they are probably more willing to accept the structures of daily life knowing they will have an outlet in the fall.

I do not want to deny that there is the occasional true transformation. However, I would contend that this is by far the exception rather than the rule.

This relates to performance in some very interesting ways.

First, what we create between the performers and the audience is a kind of TAZ. The rules of reality have been suspended as we all go into the collective hallucination of the performance piece. Be it a play, musical, dance, opera or music piece we are, for the duration of the work, transported, in spirit if not in body, to somewhere wholly other.

At the same time the very trap of Burning Man and other TAZs also exist. We, the makers of the work, create this space and this experience for our audience and ourselves. But what happens next? What guarantee, if any, do we have that the ideas and transformations from within the work will in any way transition out to the real world and effect true social change?

This may not be a concern for most people who work in live performance. After all, there are plenty of people whose primary concern is simply to create a diversion. A little entertainment to take the edge off the stresses of every day life. But for those of us concerned with truly transformative works of art how do we proceed? How do we take the possibility and potential in the work itself and build from that the beginnings of alternative social structures.

How can we facilitate not just the temporary transformation of a few hundred audience members, but of society as a whole? Is that even the role that art and performance can play?

If it is, I would argue that we need to get beyond the TAZ and out into the very social fabric upon which the zone rests. The TAZ may provide us with a nice laboratory setting, but unless and until we are getting real world results, the efforts are nothing more than experiments on mice in mazes.

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Reading as Textual Archaeology

Monday, July 20th, 2009

I wrote over the last two weeks about how we approach a deep visual reading of a text. We must reach into the text past the surface to discover that place of danger which lies in the center of the work just out of view. As artists our job is to stretch our understanding and expand our reading in order to arrive at the very edge of possibility. From there we engage the text with the directness that art demands.

What we are doing is a kind of archaeology of text. Like Heidegger in the examples I provided in those previous essays, we must take the text as we have it and then go beyond the common understandings to discover the heart of what is said. The authentic meaning does not, nor can not reside in a surface approach to the text. In writing about the literal process that a designer goes through I was outlining an approach that makes possible a greater likelihood of discovering the authentic text as it exists in the Now.

One of my favorite plays by Shakespeare is Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have seen many productions of it ranging from very “traditional” to highly abstract. I recently saw one that, while perfectly serviceable, did little to nothing to truly elucidate any new meaning from the text. It was a lovely entertainment. The design, while rather attractive, did not further our understanding of the text, story or action. This is a common trap with well known works.

Finding a visual expression that is both authentic for the creators and deepens one’s understanding of the text is made doubly difficult by the weight of history that lays upon the text. We as theater makers are burdened by production histories that provide past readings everywhere we look. Thus we must work doubly hard to dig past all that and get back to the original essence. Sure there is a vein of theater that uses past productions in their performance as a way of commenting on this exact process, but that is something other than I am discussing here. And even then, it is done so as a means of more fully understanding the text and its place within history and performance.

As we shed layer upon layer of preconceived notions about a play and get down to the the very heart of the text we find image after image removed until finally we get down to nothing but words. There is one line from Midsummer that haunts me whenever I see it. Puck, replying to Oberon’s reprimand says, “Believe me, King of shadows, I mistook.” That line stands out like a singer in a spotlight on a darkened stage. As soon as I hear it, my brain attempts to make sense of everything I am seeing visually, from design to staging, from the point of view that the fairies are shadows and Oberon their lord, King of Shadows.

This should be obvious to anyone working on the play, yet far too often I see them not as shadows, but simply as weird or “other.” Far too common is it that the shadows, for they are referred to in that language several times, are some preconceived idea of “fairy” or worse, simply something strange.

Some months back I saw a very different production set more or less in a mid 1980′s club. Here the lovers were yuppies and new romantics while the shadows were goths and punks. In this production, while taking a very pop-culture approach, the central discord between the world of the mortals and the world of the shadows is not only clearly defined, but the very text itself is brought into being within our, roughly, contemporary world. The love quadrangle between Helena, Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander is immediately clear. We know who loves who and why. We know who’s parents are upset about said relationships and why. We also know who should end up with who and why. All this before a single line of dialogue is spoken. In this way, the text is revealed to us clearly that we may immediately and directly enjoy it.

This places a classical text before a modern audience in such a way that we may treat it much like the Greeks took their theater. For them, the stories were known intimately beforehand. Going into a Medea the audience would know who Jason and Medea and Creon were. They would know that the children of Jason and Medea would die along with his new wife and her father. What they did not know was how that would happen. They did not know through what action and more importantly through what language that would happen.

As we dig past previous performances of a text we are simultaneously learning and unlearning how a text has been understood in the past. We are learning history, but we must also unlearn assumptions about a text if we are to truly engage with it at a deep level. As textual archaeologists we must break through the rocks and brush past the sediment to get at the beauty of the fossilized remains.

Only when we have extracted the pure thing from out of its history may we begin to locate it in history once again. Seeing a text clearly and without the filter of past productions is necessary if our goal is the creation of great art. We must go beyond our ordinary waking world and traverse the dangerous world of shadows. For it is through encounters with our shadow is art possible.

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