I had my first design meeting this morning for The Floating Lightbulb that I will be designing in San Francisco this spring. The director and entire design team are all new to me. I find this to be a curious experience as the vast majority of shows I have designed over the last several years have come to me through personal connection. Either some or all of the team are people I have worked with before, or I meet a director or producer at some social function. Sometimes a designer I have worked with previously recommends my work to a director or producer, but even then there is the personal connection. In this case, it was none of those situations. Rather I sent an email to the producer and they liked my work enough to ask me in for a meeting and then hired me for the job.
These situations always feel a little odd to me. Most of the time is spent getting a sense of where your collaborators are coming from. This is not necessarily even artistic in nature, Rather, you are simply trying to get a hold on the personalities of the folk you are working with. Some art does get discussed, of course, but it is almost incidental at these first meetings to developing a shorthand with your collaborators.
The shorthand is not something you can force. Rather it derives from working together and learning what “moody” or “bright” or “shadowy” or “blue” means to different people. Even common cultural referents must be learned and understood. “Noir” to one director may be all about lighting, while to another costuming and another acting style. The more you work with a similar group of collaborators the more you learn what each person means with their language and the work delves deeper into the play earlier in the process.
In New York, I worked with similar groups of people all the time. Because of this, there was a common short hand and ease of expression with regards to design ideas. I now find myself working on my fourth show in the Bay Area and with my fourth wholly new creative team. While I know that it is only a matter of time before I begin working in overlapping circles of directors and designers, for the moment it appears to be something like dating. You get out of a relationship and suddenly find yourself meeting and interacting with all these new people, trying to understand them, who they are, where they came from and where they are going, to see if you are a good fit.
Unlike this first meeting for Lightbulb, Dracul was like the kind of working situation I am used to. I had done a show with The Crucible a few years ago and was familiar with the basic aesthetic they were coming from. The director and I both knew each other from our time at San Francisco Opera and had a very similar working vocabulary from which to begin. Despite having never actually worked together on a show we were able to quickly devise a shorthand that allowed us to communicate ideas quickly and efficiently. Ultimately this made the process very smooth and a total joy to be a part of.
Next week I fly down to Virginia to begin work on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I have worked on a half-dozen shows down there to date, two of them by the director of Joseph. The shorthand is already there. We each have a basic understanding of the aesthetic place the other is coming from. Thus far our phone and internet conversations have been relatively smooth.
Obviously there can be and often are misunderstandings and disagreements. But more often than not they tend to be around the details rather than the fundamental aesthetics of the piece. Developing a shorthand also helps bypass a lot of those misunderstandings as well as shortening the length of the disagreement.
Collaboration, as found in the theatre, only works when it is a win/win situation. If any person or aesthetic viewpoint “loses,” the piece suffers. Finding a means of integrating varying and disparate aesthetic perspectives is what creates the synergistic magic that is theatre and opera and dance.
