Style / Choice

Language is a very powerful medium. It is a technology that contains within it the ability to take an idea from inside one mind and transfer it to another. No USB or Firewire cables required. I am often amazed at language for this very reason. But the flip side to this amazing potential is an obfuscation of ideas. A loss of clarity due to a mis-match of signs relating to a single word or idea.

I remember a discussion one day in graduate school. One of my classmates was working on a show and talking through his ideas for the lighting. The play followed an arc through a single day. Scene one morning, scene two afternoon, scene three dusk and so on. In his description of the second scene he said he wanted to go for a cloudy day where halfway through the sun breaks through the clouds.

He is sitting there describing how he wants that dull grey shadowless quality that you get on those overcast days. I love that quality of light. I begin to imagine the day as I hear talk of tons of little spotlights to cover all the shadows and try to eliminate them. I keep coming back in my head to the description of the light. Dull, grey and shadowless. Sounds like daylight color fluorescents to me. So I chime in with the suggestion that he might consider using dimmable fluorescent lighting for the scene to create that effect.

The response from several other people in the room is that this is 'not the kind of play where alternative lighting is appropriate.' That sort of set me back. "Not the kind of play" for the use of "alternative lighting." Alternative to what. Alternative to a knee jerk reaction in a theatrical setting, sure. But what about a dull grey shadowless day translates into hundreds of tiny shadows flickering over the stage.

Because the acceptable theatrical vocabulary is limited to a very few types of lighting instruments, anything outside that is considered 'alternative.' The kind of thing to be used in a 'stylistic' or 'expressionistic' production. The language surrounding lighting has confined much of it to an incredibly limited visual vocabulary. We have infinite combinations of nouns and adjectives to describe the quality of light yet only a handful of acceptable words to express it. This dearth of expression often leads to sadly cliched responses.

Working for two years as the resident lighting designer for the NYU dance department was a major help in overcoming cliched responses to dance lighting. As a medium of performance, dance is expressed visually in light through the dominant use of low side lighting. Lights at floor level and head height and in between. Its great for a while, but 80 dances later in one year, you start to get bored. You have used every color in every conceivable combination. All that is left is to question the use of side lighting.

Sometimes these experiment prove why there are standard responses to a given situation. But they can more often than not show you whole new ways of looking at things. My friend Mark and I spent a year playing a kind of game with the lighting. Since we spit all the lighting between us and saw every one of the pieces we would give little challenges to each other. If the typical response was blue we would tell the other, "no blue in that piece."

Working in this manner forced us to overcome the weight and inertia of the accepted vocabulary. Sometimes it worked brilliantly and sometimes we failed equally brilliantly. But every time was an expansion of our visual vocabulary. Ideas like "this is how you light dance" fell away quickly and that energy carried on to work in other genres.

What is "theatrical lighting?" What makes it work? How do you get to the emotional core of not just this particular play, but this particular instance of this particular play? Language can be and is a powerful medium for the exchange of ideas. But it is necessary to keep an eye out that it is not overly confining at the same time.