It has been a busy day. I have been catching up on my preparatory paperwork for Aida. I have also begun some preliminary work on Lovers and Executioners, a play I will be lighting next November in California. Its a little early yet to begin any real work on that play, but I do like to get some of the initial organizational stuff out of the way early so I can focus more on the artistic aspects of the piece later on.
I have worked on so many new scripts recently that it will be nice to work on something published, whose scene structure is known and will not be shifting around much during rehearsals. It can be difficult working on new scripts because quite often one does not know until the piece is up what you have in your hands. It takes a lot of guesswork.
At the same time the trouble with well known works is the trap of falling into a rote response. The trick in both instances then is to come in with a strong idea about the work, but then to remain open and flexible to what the piece can be. It is quite impossible to know before you have actors on stage, in costume and under lights what anything will look like. Or to be more specific, if any of it will work.
Changes to the placement and focus of lighting instruments can at times be interpreted as a lack of preparation on the part of the designer, when in fact the issue is much more subtle than that. Theatre exists in time. And as a temporal artfom one cannot know if a particular gesture is the right one until one sees it in the context of the piece in motion.
This is one of the reasons I do not like technical rehearsals that do a “Cue to Cue.” For the non-Theatre people a Cue to Cue is a horrid situation wherein everyone sits around static and the lighting and sound designers build cues, then, once the cues are written everyone moves on to the next scene or Cue and it is all done again. It is boring for everyone involved. The actors lose a day or two of rehearsal, and the designers work in a static environment that bears no relationship to the actual work.
Far better than the Cue to Cue is to light the show over rehearsal. In this situation the actors and director and whoever else(choreographer etc.) rehearse the play and the lighting designer writes light cues independent of them. The benefit of this is seeing the light in motion as well as the people in motion under the lighting. The cueing and timing is stronger because the light is built with the time sense of the play in mind.
I spent a little time this afternoon cleaning up my lighting design portfolio. A few things were out of date like the upcoming shows as well my resume. I am glad to have taken care of all that. Overall it has been quite a productive day.
In a bit of funny news I saw the UC Berkeley Theatre Department Alumni newsletter today. It has a section where alums can put in a short blurb about what they are doing. I had sent mine in months ago and decided to take a look at it. It turns out that there was more there than I had put in the blurb. So my hunch is that someone involved there reads this blog. I wonder who it is. I am so used to bios and things having to be cut, that it never crossed my mind one would be extended like that. How funny!
