Quality Control

Tech for my latest show has been going well. Long days and frustrations due to an EXTREMELY limited facility. But it is all progressing nicely. 24 dimmers for a play with 34 scenes and about half that many locations. Blah blah blah the difficult life of a lighting designer.

We have abstracted the world in an interesting way. Creating a space that operates like an Elizabethan stage but with a very modern sensibility. The scenes move rather smoothly given the high potential for disaster with the rapid transformations that are needed.

With my projects I like to give myself limitations. Light, like music, is a time dependent medium. It is not an individual look that is important so much as it is the changes and transformations that occur between the looks. I like to focus the lighting around a central idea of transformation. In my last play, I based the transformative quality on color. We had five acts and by the end of the third act we had seen just about every color you would ever need. And all that was left, the one thing we had not seen all night, was raw uncolored light. By contrasting with the lushness of the rest of the evening the clear lights became a striking statement of color. As a result the sense of color in the final act was heightened by a return to the original vocabulary.

These limitations give a kind of freedom to the work and at the same time a clear focus. While Haiku Geisha was about color and Medea was about angle, Cupid and Psyche is about the quality of light.

Quality of light is something that is often ignored, or at least simplified, in theatre. The use of 'theatrical lights' for most plays reduces the working vocabulary of the designer down to variations on hard directional light. The other day I got into quite a discussion about language and vision. I made the point that language determines reality. While the literal example I used to illustrate the point turned out to be false, the idea behind I believe is still valid and worth exploring.

Language determines reality.

Richard Foreman, as a lighting designer, truly understands the value of transforming the quality of light in a space. He will shift from focused theatrical lights, to industrial floodlights, to television softlights to regular bulbs you might find in a desk lamp. The interest is in finding light that transforms the quality of the performance space.

Photography, specifically Black and White photography, tends to understand the variations of the quality of light better than theatrical lighting. This I feel is in large part due to photography being focused on capturing, and thus expressing, a specific quality of light. Whereas theatrical lighting can become a kind of intellectual game. A conceptual project as much as an aesthetic exploration.

There has been much talk recently about a body centered theatre. A theatre that treats the human form as the yardstick for beauty and story telling. A theatre that finds or creates for itself an aural, kinesthetic and visual vocabulary capable of expressing its varied needs.

This kind of a theatre must be able to respond to the shifting qualities of movement and emotion in the performers through a transformation of the space they are in. An individual is always in a kind of dialogue with their environment. Dim the lights in a restaurant and the conversations change. The same form will look completely different when enveloped by the soft diffuse and directionless light of an overcast day than it does when sharply limned in the low angles of a brilliantly setting sun. The tender wash of morning light touches the body differently than a cold bright noon.

How something is said can be as important as what is said. Form is content and content form. Language, Aural, kinesthetic or visual, determines reality.