Posts Tagged ‘truth’

From the Archives: Lighting the Body in Space (Part 1)

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Note: This post first appeared in October 2006. I thought it was a nice compliment to my post last Monday

Something I have not spoken of in this forum, at least not much, is the relationship of light to the performer. Concept, space, time and story are all here, but what of the performer? First, before anything, we are lighting the performer. Be they dancer, singer, actor or DJ. The performer and their body.

But what is that body? In dance it is Body as kinetic sculpture. In theatre it is Body as language made form. In opera it is Body in the world. On the dance floor it is Body as extended psychic presence. How do we see these bodies? What are they and what do they mean? Do we see them differently?

Body. Literally it is a physical composition of living cells. It is organic matter. And it reacts to light in a particular and unique way because of that nature. One of the primary qualities of light that can assist us in doing this is color. Through the use and manipulation of color one can make the body appear dead or alive. Real or artificial. The control of and transformation of the skin tone of the performer is a vital and necessary aspect of the lighting designers job.

cabaret_pasties

In 1986, John Gleason wrote a series of articles for Lighting Dimensions magazine titled “What is the Color of White Light?” In it he explored the myriad variety and variation that commonly comes under the title ‘white light.’ This light refers to both the cold dead green of fluorescent lighting and the vital red warmth of a candle. White light is not a single thing, rather it is a variously aspected dynamic transformative entity.

Transforming skin tone as I mentioned above does not necessitate heavy use of chromatic color, although that too can be effective. Rather the very subtle alteration from a slight green to a slight red can radically alter our entire perception of a body in space. The line between life and death is thin and mutable.

wheel1

Angle too is a key element of this revelation of the body. The low side lighting so common in dance helps to bring out the sculptural nature of the human form. The angle of the light determines, by necessity, the angle of the shadows. Thus one is designing not only the light, but also the shadows on a performers body.

But then this performer exits within some context. They exist in some physical location, but also in a psychological space as well. So the surrounding environment must be lit to show them and their relationship to that context. As each and every element is added to the equation the frame of reference changes and the balance shifts. It is a constant negotiation. An ever shifting lens that must keep a narrow depth of field on the performer. The focus must always be clear. Sometimes that is difficult and sometimes impossible, but it must always be the first intent.

Medea with Chorus

How a body is revealed determines how we interpret their words and actions. Do we trust them or not? Are we looking for comedy or tragedy? Is it ok that we are confused? What is the nature of their soul?

Light does not and can not answer these questions. Light can be a lens through which these questions are asked. Light can make an action seem natural or forced, it can cause our initial impression to be one of trust or mistrust, confusion or clarity. The focus of the composition can in many ways determine the focus of the performance. Light can not hide a bad performance, but it can make a good performance great.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in design, theory | No Comments »

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in theatre | No Comments »

The Path to Relatedness

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

It has been interesting recently to re-ignite my interest in the writings of Martin Heidegger. What makes his work so fascinating to me is two primary things. First is his interest in fundamental ontology and phenomenology. That is, his work is concerned with human activity at the most basic level. Where many philosophers take issue with the absolute, god, reason, and so forth, Heidegger is concerned with walking through doors or using a hammer to build a chair. The second point of interest is the way in which his writings feel like a journey. He is the tour guide to the reader through the phenomenal aspects of human existence, again contrasted with most western philosophers who act as the supreme lecturer disseminating information to the lowly masses.

His thoughts on art and the poetic worldview are of specific interest to me. In What is called Thinking? he speaks of the essential nature of craft and art by exploring the work of a cabinetmaker in saying “what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.”

In art, this relatedness is essential to the work. It is a relatedness that is itself an entire world of being, and the artist must negotiate that being-in-the-world. Take for instance the play. The playwright must have a relatedness to language, a relatedness to story, character, theme, plot and so forth. Each one of those “related tos” are one strand in a web of relations that comprise the matrix of relations necessary for the play to be wrought.

Stepping away from the act of writing a script, or engaging in a play being wrought is the production as a whole. Every member of the collaborative team must needs have a relatedness to the other collaborators. No one person can act and create in a vacuum, certainly not if the intent is to create a true work of art. Instead a web of relations builds or is made manifest that allows the creation of the play to happen.

But returning to the more basic level, the artist must have a relatedness to the work. I, as the lighting designer, must have a relation to light. And that relatedness to light is what guides and shapes the way the light relates to the play. To the work as a whole.

David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish talks about this relatedness from a different direction. He speaks of the artist’s relatedness to creativity or, as he puts it, ideas. Through meditation he finds it possible to transcend the day to day confusions and get right to the heart of one’s relatedness to creativity. “Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution – seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together.”

Intuition can only exist when the artist has cleared the path for the relatedness towards the medium. If you are hungry you are related to food, tired to sleep, angry to frustration. Clearing the path towards that primary artistic relation allows the work to happen. To flow. It makes, as Heidegger would say, “the world fall away” and creation to commence.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in theory | No Comments »

The Aesthetics of Control

Thursday, January 3rd, 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. At 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.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in theory | No Comments »

Quote for Today

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot.”
~Morpheus, The Sandman

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Lighting the Body in Space (Part 2)

Friday, October 13th, 2006

Live performance, no matter what the medium, has one unique quality that runs through it. No matter the scale, be it a 3000 seat opera house or a 30 seat black box, the unit of measurement is that of the human form. The body. The average height of a human being is between five and six feet. Quite often the proscenium opening will be over five times that size. That space is filled with scenery and people, yet in the theatre we are often supposed to see one or two people at a time selectively. How does this occur?

composition

Staging is a key factor. One person in a group might be difficult to notice apart from that group. Yet if sixty people are looking at one person, we see the one person. The focus becomes clear.

Similarly setting and costume can help. If a room is green and the sixty people are dressed in blue and one is dressed in orange, we will pay attention to the one in orange. Again the focus becomes clear.

But often we do not want such gross generalizations of focus. Perhaps everyone in the crowd is talking to one another, including the one we want focus on. Perhaps even our body of interest is wearing blue. What then?

sidelight

Through subtle transformations of lighting we can guide the focus to the appropriate speaking body. Various visual cues can be given to help us see what we should be looking at. Color can be a useful tool, as can the angle of the light and the revelation of the sculptural form of the body. When one looks out over a great distance, objects that are close to us appear clear and in great detail. When they get further and further away they flatten out and begin to take on a blue/purple cast.

toplight

In the theatre we can use these principles of nature to guide our decision making. We can apply them literally to make various “naturalistic” effects. But more interestingly they can be applied dramatically to lend a sense of tension and urgency to a scene. Perhaps a scene deals with the conflict between two characters in different psychological spaces. What nature takes as two aspects of the same thing can be deconstructed and recombined to create a sense of visual tension that matches the psychological tension on stage.

lowside

We have a tendency to equate bright clear illumination with the truth. Or with a particular kind of truth. And shadow, consequently with with lies and deceit. Yet the body hides its existential truth in the artificiality of full shadowless illumination. The Theatrical Body is Language made form. That language needs its pauses and punctuation, its shadows, as much as it needs its nouns and adjectives, its highlights.

uplight

While yesterday I spoke about different performative forms having different notions of the body, in truth it is more a matter of balance. Richard Foreman‘s Theatre utilizes the Body as Kinetic Sculpture as much as Body as Manifested Language. William Forsythe‘s Ballet utilizes Body as Manifested Language as much as Body as Kinetic Sculpture. In the end the final composition of the text(aural, linguistic and kinetic) helps determine the final composition of the design. It gives us clues towards negotiating the various currents of visual storytelling, dramatic tension and focus.

compositionwithcolor

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in design, theory | No Comments »

Lighting the Body in Space (Part 1)

Thursday, October 12th, 2006

Something I have not spoken of in this forum, at least not much, is the relationship of light to the performer. Concept, space, time and story are all here, but what of the performer? First, before anything, we are lighting the performer. Be they dancer, singer, actor or DJ. The performer and their body.

But what is that body? In dance it is Body as kinetic sculpture. In theatre it is Body as language made form. In opera it is Body in the world. On the dance floor it is Body as extended psychic presence. How do we see these bodies? What are they and what do they mean? Do we see them differently?

Body. Literally it is a physical composition of living cells. It is organic matter. And it reacts to light in a particular and unique way because of that nature. One of the primary qualities of light that can assist us in doing this is color. Through the use and manipulation of color one can make the body appear dead or alive. Real or artificial. The control of and transformation of the skin tone of the performer is a vital and necessary aspect of the lighting designers job.

cabaret_pasties

In 1986, John Gleason wrote a series of articles for Lighting Dimensions magazine titled “What is the Color of White Light?” In it he explored the myriad variety and variation that commonly comes under the title ‘white light.’ This light refers to both the cold dead green of fluorescent lighting and the vital red warmth of a candle. White light is not a single thing, rather it is a variously aspected dynamic transformative entity.

Transforming skin tone as I mentioned above does not necessitate heavy use of chromatic color, although that too can be effective. Rather the very subtle alteration from a slight green to a slight red can radically alter our entire perception of a body in space. The line between life and death is thin and mutable.

wheel1

Angle too is a key element of this revelation of the body. The low side lighting so common in dance helps to bring out the sculptural nature of the human form. The angle of the light determines, by necessity, the angle of the shadows. Thus one is designing not only the light, but also the shadows on a performers body.

But then this performer exits within some context. They exist in some physical location, but also in a psychological space as well. So the surrounding environment must be lit to show them and their relationship to that context. As each and every element is added to the equation the frame of reference changes and the balance shifts. It is a constant negotiation. An ever shifting lens that must keep a narrow depth of field on the performer. The focus must always be clear. Sometimes that is difficult and sometimes impossible, but it must always be the first intent.

Medea with Chorus

How a body is revealed determines how we interpret their words and actions. Do we trust them or not? Are we looking for comedy or tragedy? Is it ok that we are confused? What is the nature of their soul?

Light does not and can not answer these questions. Light can be a lens through which these questions are asked. Light can make an action seem natural or forced, it can cause our initial impression to be one of trust or mistrust, confusion or clarity. The focus of the composition can in many ways determine the focus of the performance. Light can not hide a bad performance, but it can make a good performance great.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in design, theory | 7 Comments »

Creative Commons License

All text on this site, unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All other rights reserved.