Posts Tagged ‘time’

It’s all in the timing

Monday, June 7th, 2010

I have a lot of friends who are freelancers. Obviously there are my friends who are designers and directors. I also have a lot of friends in the tech industry; programmers, web developers, graphic designers, and so forth. While we all work under the title of “freelancer” what this means in practical terms varies dramatically.

One of the key differences between being a freelancer and being an employee is that a freelancer is typically given a deadline on a project but is not specified when and where they are supposed to work. In exchange for this freedom of working, there is the uncertainty of when and where new work will arrive to fill in the gaps. The employee takes on an imposed work schedule and place of working for the security of a steady paycheck.

For those of us who work in live performance, the realities of our work is more of a hybrid. While the prep work can be done on our own schedule, the real work of lighting the show happens in a prescribed time and location that we have no choice over. At the same time there is no guarantee of ongoing employment. Should we not find work we have not been employees and are thus not eligible for unemployment insurance and other benefits that regular employees have. This is why I am strong proponent of building a solid financial foundation to your freelance career.

These unfortunate realities are outweighed by a love of the work. If that is not the case I would encourage you to find alternate means of employment immediately. For those of us who love the work enough to overcome these concerns we must put our focus on scheduling and picking projects that make the sacrifices worth it.

I have been offered several pieces to consider designing for next year. It is very flattering to be asked to light these rather interesting projects. 5 operas, 3 plays, and a couple of dance pieces thus far. While this is nothing approaching a full year’s employment, from the perspective of mid-June the year before, it is exciting. And all the projects are interesting. A rare occurrence to be perfectly honest.

I have been finding myself wanting to design more opera recently and the universe appears to be providing for that desire. Next month I will design my third opera of the year. There are a few more potentially happening before the year is out, but no signed contracts yet.

I find it fascinating that while I have been asked to light these rather interesting projects, there is no guarantee they will happen. It is the nature of freelancing. The companies could get into financial trouble, I could get an alternate offer for the same production schedule and have to balance out the two possibilities weighing artistic and financial considerations, or any number of other temporal concerns might arise.

The life of a freelancer is never easy. Even when all the projects are compelling there can still be scheduling and timing issues. When production schedules overlap you need to find a balance between satisfying all of your artistic collaborators, making a living, and creating good work. Being a freelance designer can be like putting together a 3 dimensional jigsaw puzzle where there is no guarantee that the pieces actually fit.

Last March I received more offers than I could take. At least three projects I was asked to design had perfectly overlapping production schedules. Even after eliminating the impossible, I ended up with a schedule where I was lighting a circus show during the day and cleaning up a play in previews at night.

This summer is rather light on the work front giving me a nice stretch of time to relax. I have an opera and a few special events to design. While I appreciate the time off, a luxury often passed up by many designers, I can only hope that I will not face the opposite problem when the projects start coming in and I find myself with five offers, all of which open the same weekend. I have been in that position before and it is not fun.

How the future shapes up is all in the timing. The only control I have over my calendar is the power to say no. Nothing about freelancing for live performance is easy. But I can’t think of another job whose payoff could be greater as far as I am concerned.

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Timeless Transformation

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

I had a brief tech this afternoon. My friend Trebien Pollard is presenting a piece at the Dance Sampler this Saturday at Symphony Space. The piece is a 12 minute section of a larger full evening work we will be presenting at the Joyce Soho this July.

Tech was very fast as is so often the case in the dance world. The evening consists of 16 works by as many choreographers. It can be quite an interesting evening. As a result each group is allowed 45 minutes to tech the piece. That gave us just enough time for me to write a dozen light cues and then run the piece twice. Organization is critical in these situations as there really is no time to lose.

What is funny about is that I did not get a chance to actually watch the piece(and will not be able to as I will be with the NYTB show that evening). I find there are two ways of observing a piece. One is how I look when I am working on it and the other is after it is done reflecting on the work I have completed. When I have only done the former, I do not consider it having seen the piece. My eyes are so concerned with the formal aesthetics of the thing that I often moss out on the sensory enjoyment of the work.

Trebien and one of the dancers Liz, and I all went to graduate school together. From there and since then I have probably lit around ten pieces of his. Its nice to have that familiarity with a work. You are able to understand the textures of the piece better. The general aesthetic is in place and then you can work on the details.

The lighting is much simpler than I had hoped, but it was all we really had time for. As much as the individual cues are important, with dance especially I find the timing of the thing, how the light moves and transforms, to be of even greater value. Thus getting in the two runs rather than building as many cues as possible was of more value. Fewer light cues of greater integrity are in the end a better way to go almost all of the time.

I have worked with choreographers who seem to think that the job of the lighting designer is to write light cues. That is we are to create as many different looks as possible and to have the lighting for a piece change every time there is a minor transformation in the movement phraseology.

I tend to take the almost extreme opposite view when it comes to dance. Unless there is a need for the lighting to change, I do not like to make changes. The piece must demand a transformation in the environment before I write a cue. I think this is a good way to look at any performance, but I find it to be of most crucial value in dance.

Dance is to theatre as poetry is to literature. Even while the poem may be quite complex, they are very delicate things held together by there merest intonation of a word. The presence or absence of a single word or phrase will either make or break a poem. So too can a single misstep make or break a dance.

I remember an article I came across once in an old copy of Lighting Dimensions Magazine written by Jennifer Tipton about lighting dance. In it she speaks to the use of color and how there is often an idea that wild and saturated colors can be used in dance, because it is dance. She goes on to explain how this is a misunderstanding and that while there may well be times where the use of heavily saturated colors can be appropriate there is nothing inherent to dance that makes that exception as opposed to theatre or opera.

Taking this same line of reasoning I explored it in relation to the movement of light and discovered a similar truth. Most of our life and our experience occurs under a constant, or very slow moving light. Perhaps we are under the fluorescent lighting of an office or outside under the slow moving gaze of the sun. Either way we do not have many and wild transformations in the lighting environments we find ourselves in. Even in a night club the environment is a static one even thought the physical lights themselves may be moving and blinking, the quality of the environment remains the same.

Given this, and given that dance, and other performance mediums, are an extension of our daily experience, why then would we consider the movement of the light in a dance to exist in so radically divergent a state as it does in our lives? The light should be heightened, certainly, as dance is a heightened form of reality, but heightened or no, it is still woven of the same thread.

When the light finds a need to change then it can and must change. But to do so arbitrarily is just that, arbitrary. James Turrell explores this in many of his works especially his installations like the one at PS1.

The sun is constant. It is everything around us changing that makes it appear to transform. There is a quality of mutable consistency to natural light, and even the artificial light we engage with, that is so often lacking in lighting for performance. That stillness is so necessary to allow the stories that must be told to come alive.

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Posted in dance, design, theory | 6 Comments »

Sacred Space

Friday, April 6th, 2007

What is it that makes sacred space? It seems to me that sacred space is bounded on the one hand physically by some symbolic entrance, a gate of some kind. It is further bounded temporally by some ritual that bookends the time spent in the space, a prayer perhaps.

I attended my first Seder last night. It was quite an interesting time for me. As I am not currently drinking alcohol, due to a dietary fast I am undertaking for an upcoming meditation workshop, I could not imbibe the four glasses of wine. I did substitute these for grape juice, and figured that would be fine within the symbolic construct of the evening. It seemed to work out alright.

I had a wonderful time. What fascinated me most was how something so common as a meal, a dinner, something we all do every day, could be transformed into something wholly other. The room became transformed as we descended from mundane time to sacred time. Perhaps it was just a contact high from all the alcohol, but it sure felt as if the energy in the room shifted as we delved into and then out of Mitzrayim.

Sacred space exists as a potential all around us in our everyday lives. It is a way of looking, a way of being in the world. It is a conscious, and sometimes not conscious choice, of being in a deeper more significant place than we inhabit when going through life blindly and without reflection.

A very common space I find myself in that I would designate as sacred space is the rehearsal room. There is not worship per se and quite often people in the theatre tend towards atheism. None the less the space created is a sacred space, or rather can be.

At its best and brightest the rehearsal room exists as a place where one’s very mode of being in the world must change. The demands exacted upon one are of a fundamentally different character than the mundane interactions of buying a cup of coffee or reading the news that make up much of our regular daily lives. The rehearsal room is a place, safe from the demands and concerns of the outside world, where deep and profound truths can be discovered amidst the piles of text and ideas that infuse a play with its foundation.

Rehearsal rooms have their own set of rules and laws that govern them. In the best cases they are places of free creativity where an unspoken rule is in effect that what occurs in the rehearsal room stays in the rehearsal room. Without adherence to this rule no true work can be done. With the constant threat of the outside world at the doors of the rehearsal hall, how can one truly fall into the mindset needed for total exploration?

It is a delicate thing, the creation of sacred space. Safe space. Building trust with a group of people such that the real and difficult work can begin is no easy task. The seder, quite early on, asks everyone present to wash their hands and through washing the hands, wash away that which they desire to leave behind. The speaking of these words and the letting go of these shackles brings the group together in a common endeavor. We are not simply eating a meal(or waiting to eat a meal) we are now all striving for the liberation of not only ourselves but of everyone at the table. We become collective seekers of the nourishment of wisdom and liberation.

Everyone born into this planet must walk a solitary path. We each are presented with various roads and must choose which, if any to take. And while these journeys and decisions must be made and undertaken alone, while the path must be walked with our own feet, it can not be accomplished without the aid of the community. Be that community a group of dinner guests, a sangha or a rehearsal hall filled with willing collaborators, the goal is the same; to assist everyone present to discover the truth and find the path of liberation. The liberation of truth from its many bonds.

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Drafting Day

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

I have been drafting the lights for Windows for a good part of today and yesterday. I don’t think I have written much if anything about drafting here, but it is certainly no less important to the design process than anything else.

Since many of my readers are not lighting designers, I will take a moment to define relevant terms.

Drafting: consists of the technical drawings that lighting and scenic designers draw up to communicate the physical aspects of the design to the technicians. A lightplot gives very precise information to the electricians about what kind of lights go where, how they should be controlled by the lighting control system, how they are plugged in, what color they receive or any accessories, like color changers, patterns or iris.

Worksheets: The working drawings executed by a lighting designer to determine the precise angles of the lighting instruments. These show where the individual lights go and become organized as part of a whole lighting system. They are then translated into the lightplot.

I know a lot of designers who do not enjoy drafting or doing worksheets. They find it the tedious work that one does before the fun design work. As a result they often do not take enough time in this part of the process and often run into major problems once in the theatre. It is possible to have every move one makes in a theatre be determined prior to entering the building. This is important because time is of the essence. It is possible to work out on paper everything necessary to do the lighting designers work. The only surprises should come from errors, like scenery not built to the proper specifications.

I love doing worksheets. It is a wonderful negotiation with the scenery. It is a fun process of discovery in terms of how the light moves in this particular scenic world. Every good set contains within it the lighting. Much of the work of a lighting designer is to find the lighting inherent to the set that most effectively aids the storytelling of the play.

The set for Windows is fairly straight forward. Two scenic walls that bring some interesting angles into a generic rectilinear stage space. Upstage are a series of lightboxes. We are planning on using color as a major storytelling device and these lightboxes will be a key element to that aspect of the visual storytelling.

One of the major challenges to this design comes neither from the scenery nor from the complexity of the text. At least not at first. The lighting grid, as is the case all over New York, is very low, less than 12 feet from the stage floor. The irony of small, specifically short, spaces is that they require a lot more lighting instruments to illuminate the space than do larger spaces. One could conceivably light a warehouse or a spanish fortress with fewer lights than one needs for a small New York stage.

On top of this, the play has many locations and it flows in and out of memory, so even the same location might not be the same place. This necessitates a wide breadth in terms of the lighting palette. As a result, one must be rather precise with the drafting of the lights. And as precise as one is, there are sacrifices to be made. One must guess what the staging will be like and all one can do is hope the guess is correct.

Spending time on the drafting outside the theatre means more time can be spent in the theatre doing the composition. The fun work. Drafting the lights is like a painter laying out their palette. One chooses not only colors, but also if one will use oils or acrylics for the subject at hand. Is one using traditional brushes or perhaps a palette knife? Changes might happen mid process, but the lighting designer, like the painter, wants the majority of these decisions to be made prior to beginning the composition.

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Where did it all go?

Monday, September 18th, 2006

If there is something there is never enough of in the theatre it is time. Money comes in a close second, but truly time, as they say, is of the essence. The issue of time is often compounded by the issue of money. Due to the cost of people and rehearsal space and so on and so forth, rehearsal processes are shorter than most of us would like them to be. For those of us whose work can only be done in the theatre, these constraints can be deadly if not managed properly.

As a lighting designer, no matter how much preparation time I put into a project, I am limited by the time the lights are hung and plugged in properly to the time the curtain rises for the opening. Ultimately it does not matter how much time there is, it is incumbent upon the designer to get their work done by the opening. This is the importance of craft. In very time constrained situations, like festivals, one rarely has time to put little more than craft into a project. The Art, comes second. The lines between the two are not so rigid as that previous sentence may make them appear, but it does make the point.

The craft has to do with the construction of the light plot and its focus, the Cue structure and the composition of each individual lighting cue. A lot of this just comes from experience. The more light cues one writes, the more quickly one can execute a wide variety of visual images in a very compressed time situation. The first pass through any piece is largely based on craft. At least the way I work. I will sketch in the structure and look of a play, or dance while the performers and director are rehearsing. Thus, when we get to a run-through of the piece I can chisel away at the cues and refine them based upon the dramatic moment. The first pass is a rough draft. As someone once said to me, “the first time through a piece there are only five intensities for a light, 30%, 50%, 70%, Full and Off.” Detail can always be added, but the basic compositional sense needs to be in place first. And in theatre, the composition is four dimensional, as it moves and transforms through time.

When I say it is a rough draft, I do not mean that there is not attention nor intention behind it. Quite the opposite is true. In fact, this may be the most important time a lighting designer has. The first time through a piece gives the designer a sense of how the light moves through the play and the space. Ideas that came up in meetings are found to not work for one or another reason, while new and even more exciting discoveries are made. This time is important and crucial to the design process. Let me say that again,

The first pass through the lighting of a play is crucial to the design process.

I have been involved in too many situations where not enough time was given to the lighting of the play. All that happens is the production suffers. It is often the case that there is such an eagerness to get out of the rehearsal room and on to the stage that the lighting time becomes curtailed. It is fine if a director or producer wishes to do this, but they must understand that it does negatively impact the final product that is presented to an audience.

Festival situations are a beast unto themselves and I am not speaking to them here. But when a play is being produced independently it is necessary that the producers allocate enough time to make the whole process function. It is unfair to actors to place them on an incomplete stage just as it is unfair to ask a theatre artist to work with you and then bind their hands.

The lighting designer too has an obligation to the people we work with. We must get the work done. First, before anything else. We must get it done and done well. But we also must keep an open and healthy environment in the theatre. By the time time a play gets to technical rehearsals everyone is often a strong mixture of exhausted and terrified. Long days of work on something that one has no sense of how an audience will respond can put one in quite a state. The lighting designer, being a kind of fresh air to the process, coming in near the end, can often help keep the spirits up and help carry a show to opening. Like money is to time, one’s attitude and personality in the theatre is a close second to the work one does on the stage.

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It's funny, in a not funny kind of way

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

We open at 8pm. We were supposed to begin tech at 8am. There is no lightboard. Time is always such an interesting concept.

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Space/Time Continuum

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

I wrote yesterday about treating a playscript as a kind of proposition rather than a definitive statement. The example used was of Charles Mee’s Big Love. I took that play for an example of a text that leaves space open to the imagination of the director, actors and designers. The thought was, however, incomplete. Just as it is important to leave a text open, so too is it necessary to leave a production open to the imagination of the audience. It is important in a design to not follow the narrative literally or, to be more precise, it is important to find those moments where the design can set itself against the text. As Mee says, “It should not be a set for the piece to play within but rather something against which the piece can resonate.”

The idea that the setting is “something against which the piece can resonate” indicates a kind of amplification. A chorus sung by word and image. Constructing a context wherein the actuality of the text is taken to a new level far surpassing what the text lays out on its own. Further, it is possible to open up the text in ways that are not possible with more literal interpretations. But whenever and however this is done, it is best done as a kind of question. It is deadly to design a piece in such a way that it says “this is what the play is about.” Then we have a monologue. Then we are in a classroom. The imaginative potential of the Theatre becomes lost is a sea of didacticism.

Lighting often should follow at least a rough literalism. Night is darker than day. Sunsets are warmer colors than high noon. Etc. etc. etc. I say “often should” because there are certainly instances where the opposite, or something else entirely is called for. The joke goes “When is a door not a door? When it is ajar.” Hahahaha! But this does get to an interesting point. When is night no longer night? When do we leave the world of day and night and enter into some other psychological or magical place? When do we start asking questions about where we are rather than simply accepting the given circumstances?

I think first to the American Musical Comedy. As a genre of narrative storytelling it truly is quite psychologically powerful. The rules of the world are given. We are in a place that is recognizable, perhaps it is a modern city. We see two people talking to one another and they speak in a language we understand so we follow their conversation until suddenly one of them can no longer use language to express what they are trying to describe. Perhaps the question inherent in the statement becomes too pressing. And all of a sudden, they burst into song and dance. The world is transformed. Colors pour into this world that we never see in nature. Songs are sung and people dance in a way that even the most severe psychotic cases would not do. The inner world of the mind has become manifest in the exterior reality.

And then.

As soon as it all began,
it stops.

And the characters leave us, talking.

These moments occur in traditional plays as well, though perhaps not to such a degree. Think the Shakespearean soliloquy. An escape from the mundane realities of the world into the mind of the character. Where are we in these moments? Is Iago’s night, the same night as everyone else’s?

Light, like music, intersects a play in the realm of time and rhythm. Sure, space and volume are a concern, but that is an intersection with scenery and staging. As far as the text goes, light is concerned with time. And rhythm.

The setting, the scenery, exists as a kind of thesis. A first interpretation of the play. A kind of affirmation. The play is. The play is what? Whatever this play is. The setting is a first postulate. A foundation. A thesis. The lighting operates as a response. An anti-thesis. It is not opposed to the original in a combative sense, but rather enters into a dialog with the thesis to negotiate meaning. In a similar way, the costumes set forth a thesis about the characters. The people in this play are such and such. And again the negotiation begins. But now we have the setting, lighting and costume. All this without even addressing the text itself. Merely how these elements act in relationship to the text.

When the text proposes itself as a question it allows these negotiations to take on a strong and dynamic character. When the design and staging of a play enter into dialog with the text as a series of open ended questions, it leaves room in the mind of the audience to complete the idea. In the final analysis the play as experience becomes complete through the negotiation of the audience with the production. When left as a question, or series of questions, the audience leaves thinking and talking. They leave engaged with the play. The Theatre can not answer any questions, nor can it solve any social or political problems. But it can provide the means for people to begin asking questions once again and perhaps to open the doorway to mystery and possibility.

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Evolutionary Minimalism

Sunday, May 7th, 2006

Reading about this performance of John Cage’s As Slow as Possible got me thinking about ideas surrounding minimalist performance.

Time often becomes the key factor of analysis. Time and its necessary corollary, transformation. In 4′ 33″ for example the only limiting factor is time. It is a work whose content is not prescribed but whose formal structure is inviolate.

In a theatrical setting minimalism takes on a slightly different form. It dilates the temporal space around action and impels contemplation of the deed.

The removal of extravagances and flurries of activity gives one pause to consider the core simplicity of action. A single gesture. A single word.

Taking pause to allow total contemplation of a single thought can be quite powerful. In a world of MTV editing one can often forget the power of single pointed attention.

As Saul Williams says “When a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.”

The space contained by 4′ 33″ reveals time as a binding agent of consciousness. The transformation and evolution of thought coexists equally in the mundane and the profound.

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Volumetric Time

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

Volumetric time.

This kind of language comes up quite often in design discussions. As convoluted as it may first seem, it is often the most direct means of getting to an idea. Volumetric time. Light is truly a four dimensional art form. It exists in space, yet equally it exists in time. It changes and transforms.

Last night I was at a party. There was a rather large dance floor and a good DJ line up. The lighting on the dance floor was very thin. Not minimal. Thin. It could not stand up to the music. It just barely filled out the space. A few flashing moving lights and some color changers. Generic party lighting. While the lights flashed a bit and moved back and forth there was no real transformation. Movement without change. No transformation.

Zay talks about learning as a process of tactic switching. In a play the protagonist ‘loses’ until they change tactics and then achieve their goal. This is an oversimplification of a more complex idea, but I think it makes the point. The lighting at this event consisted of a single, unchanging tactic.

So this lighting, while moving about, never changed tactics. But at a deeper level I think it never had a clear goal. While this was a party and not some intellectual theatre piece, the idea of having a goal is key. A goal. Or an idea. Perhaps this could be called a concept. ‘Dance floor lighting’ is not a concept. ‘Blue’ is not a concept. A concept need not be a complex or overtly intellectualized thing. In fact, lighting being a visual medium, I would probably argue that a non-linguistic concept would be best. One can get trapped in words. But it must be an idea that communicates a perspective on the piece, or event. I find that in non-dramatic settings a clarity of intent is even more necessary than in dramatic work. In the latter you already have a story to work from. In the former, you must visually become the story, or at least an act. When I do work like this it is necessary for me to come up with a very clear framework within which the light exists.

Time and space are very closely connected. Often, an unchanging space can transform due to the shifting action within it. This is the flip side of transformation. Knowing when to allow a space to evolve on its own without forcing it to move is critical to understanding volumetric time. Good paintings change as you look at them, so too can and should stage compositions. But that composition must be strong enough, bold enough to hold the action, to contain the event.

Light is a four dimensional medium. Without this understanding, lighting becomes static. It becomes decorative. There is nothing wrong with decorative lighting. It can be quite beautiful, but it lacks drama. With a clear idea that truly enters into dialogue with the action on stage, lighting can remain unmoving and yet change as the action on stage changes. This too is volumetric time. Perhaps this is temporal space. Physicists understand space and time to be less distinct then we often consider them. The same is true in terms of storytelling. It comes down to a matter of what tactic is most efficacious at the moment.

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Transition

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Twilight.

My favorite time of day. Especially in a city. The colors become richer. The sky gives a dim blue glow as if to foreshadow the darkness yet to come. Giving us a reminder that the sun will return again. If we are just patient. The lights turning on. Houses a glow of warmth, sodium lamps burning yellow, headlights moving with the green and red flashes of the streetlights. Twilight. A liminal space between night and day, day and night. An endless moment that suddenly becomes night. Lost in conversation you discover the sun to be gone. But when did it go?. A slight wind and low chill creep through your jacket.

I lit a play a few years ago where I set myself the challenge of exactly recreating, I think it was, four thirty in the afternoon. The play was ‘naturalistic’ and the director and producer were interested in ‘Naturalistic lighting.’ I feared I might get bored. What I love is the poetry of twilight. So I made the project truly difficult.

Four thirty in the afternoon. This task is more difficult than one might at first imagine. Four thirty. The sun is getting low in the sky but is still bright. The color is not really distorted. A little warmer than 5600 degrees kelvin, but negligable as far as perception goes. One source of light. A single light. One shadow.

Four thirty in the afternoon is not lit by a single light source. A single light, but not a single source. The sunlight bounces off surfaces. A blue wall it becomes slightly cooler, grass makes it a bit green, and so forth. But there is another source of light. The sky. Where the sun is a single directional light, the sky, much bluer, is a highly diffuse and soft source of light. This is all too obvious if you take the time to look, but many people don’t.

So I had to orient myself on stage. Decide where was west, thus where the sun was coming from. Then within the confines of the set, the edge of a house, had to determine the color of the bounce of sunlight off the house. Opposite the house were some trees and vines, and so on and so forth.

That is the prosaic answer. But where is the illumination of a rather poetic text? For that’s what it was. Finding the poetry in that kind of literalism is quite a difficult process. In a sense, it is easy to do this with abstraction. Harder with representational realism. It is subtle. Like working entirely with one color. You can not hide in sweeping poetic pronouncements. You must be clear. Specific. Achieving the poetic truth of twilight at four thirty in the afternoon is quite a feat. There is no rest. You must work constantly and diligently. The same or more as is needed to find the reality in poetic expression.

Over on his process blog, Director Josh Costello discusses the benefits of minimalist storytelling.

I said in the post that the lack of costumes and set decorations — the choice not to choose a period setting — never detracted from the story. What I should have also talked about is the way in which this type of minimalism can actually deepen the audience’s experience by encouraging the use of the imagination.

Yet minimalism for the sake of minimalism is like choosing an arbitrary period because it is ‘cool’ rather than directly adding something to the textual dialogue. Minimalism is a conceptual approach that finds perfection not when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away. Just as a misplaced word can destroy the purity of a poem, so too can a misplaced chair break the delicate balance of a stage.

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