May 10, 2005:  Lighting Design

Probably due to much bingeing on dim sum in San Francisco last weekend (I recommend The Pot Sticker at 150 Waverly – they’re fabulous), today’s scheduled report on Costume Design has mysteriously shifted to Lighting Design instead.  Enjoy reading while I reheat some egg flower soup!

The creative approach to the problem of stage lighting--the art, in other words, of knowing where to put the light and where to take it away--is not a matter of textbooks or precepts.  There are  no

arbitrary rules.  There is only a goal and a promise.  We have the mechanism with which to create this ideal, exalted, dramatic light in the theater.  Whether we can do so or not is a matter of temperament as well as of technique.  The secret lies on our perception of light in theater as something alive.  Does this mean that we are to carry images of poetry and vision and high passion in our minds while we are shouting out orders to electricians on ladders in light rehearsals?  Yes.  This is what it means.           

            –Robert Edmund Jones, The Dramatic Imagination

Saint Joseph Ballet is blessed by the talents of James F. Ingalls, a world-class designer whose lighting has been seen by a global audience.  Jim is regularly on an airplane, jaunting between Europe, New York, and Asia lighting opera, dance, and Broadway plays.  Go ahead, Google him and lose count of the number of credits to his name.  No really, Google him, I’ll wait.

Jim has worked with Saint Joseph Ballet since 1996, lighting five of our annual concerts at the Barclay and serving as an invaluable artistic collaborator in the creation of several dances.  Some of the dances that Jim has lit for us include Presence, Los Angelitos, The Music Came Last, listen look, Unearthing, and dreamChild. 

Lighting is one of those ephemeral arts, where words alone are used to articulate a concept or the atmosphere to be created.  Lighting can’t exist in a sketch or model (though some try, often unsuccessfully).  Choreographers and designers must create a vocabulary within which they can talk about light.  Often it’s a bit like dancing about architecture.

Lighting for dance is one of the purest versions of the art form.  Unlike plays, where the designer must worry about whether or not the audience can see the actor’s faces, dance lighting is about sculpting the body in motion.  Through angle, color, and intensity the lighting shapes the audience’s perception, and the key is often not where the light is, but where it isn’t.  In dance, side lighting is the means to success.  Through this angle the body is sculpted and illuminated with brilliant compositional qualities.  Walking onstage at the Barclay you would see numerous vertical pipes (trees or booms) just offstage in the wings with up to six lights on each, providing a blinding array of sidelight from numerous heights.

(Full disclosure:  Lighting is my cup of joe, my nirvana, my artistic outlet.  Yes that’s right, I’m also a lighting designer, sometimes even for SJB when Jim isn’t around.  Look for my lighting to illuminate A Seed this June)

Most audience members don’t realize the tremendous amount of work that goes into realizing a lighting design on stage.  Each light fixture, or instrument, must be hung and focused in a deliberate manner and colored with its specified “gel”.  It’s not simply a matter of walking into the theatre and turning them on.  How many lights you ask?  At the Barclay we use upwards of 400 fixtures and the focus session for the lighting often starts in the afternoon of load-in day and ends around 10pm that night.  And that’s when we move fast!

Unlike scenery and costumes, lighting designs often generate pages of paperwork that track the location, circuiting, color, and beam spread of each individual fixture.  Add to that the cue and tracking sheets that show the intensity level of each light as controlled by the computerized control console and you have literal reams of paperwork to track.  Fortunately, Christian DeAngelis and Samantha Hartzell, both of UCSD’s graduate lighting design program, will be assisting us in the tracking of all this paperwork at the Barclay.

The tech process in the theatre is the first time that the designer and choreographer will able to see the lighting outside of his or her own mind.  There’s a brief moment of terror as you sit down at the tech table and create a bold slash of light across a darkened stage.  Is it too bright?  How will the dancers interact with this angle?  Why on earth did I pick that color?

(Side note:  Jim and I were visiting last Friday and discussing the lighting for A Seed.  I told him that I had a new favorite color, Rosco 3220, which is a medium saturated blue that retains a lot of lavender.  There are literally hundreds of gels available to lighting designers, and it’s impossible to try them all, so it’s always fun to share new colors with colleagues.  Suffice to say, I’ll never forget the image of Jim jumping around my office staring at the sunlight through a sheet of R3220 and enthusiastically giving it the official JFI stamp of approval!)

Fortunately at Saint Joseph Ballet we believe in spending time to get the lighting right.  On top of the tech rehearsals, where cueing sequences are rehearsed, we spend several hours on the day of the dress rehearsal looking at each lighting composition on stage with the choreographer.  Changes are made to the intensities of individual fixtures, or sometimes even broad swaths of lights, in response to notes and collaborative discussions between the choreographers and lighting designers.  Timings between the lights fading up and down (cues) are adjusted and rehearsed with Stage Manager Ian Britton, sometimes right up until the audience is let into the house.  And then, during the dress rehearsal and opening night, notes are scribbled frantically via penlight in the audience, detailing cue adjustments to make before the next performance.

As you can surmise, the lighting is often the easiest element to adjust once we get into the theatre, being more malleable and tangible than the already constructed scenery and costumes.  This often leads to the unfortunate phrase, “That’s okay, we’ll fix it with lighting”.

And then sometimes we get it right the first time out, but what fun is that?

That’s all for now, folks.  Next week we’ll get to the costumes, I promise!

Your Intrepid Reporter,

Ben Tusher

Artistic Manager