Light Cue 23

Yesterday, I ran into a former student of mine from when I coached debate back in College. There were several of us who taught at El Cerrito High each with our own specialty. My particular thing was philosophical critique, specifically the Heideggarian critique of technology. To anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time I know it will come as no surprise that I was teaching advanced philosophy to highschool students at the age of 19.

What amazed me about this meeting was the discovery I had during our brief reunion of the impact of my teaching on this man’s life and the lives of several other students of mine. One, it seems, took the critique as far as it could go and made it to the college national debate finals.

I have loved teaching ever since this first experience but, until now, had never had any direct experience of the effect it could have. Certainly I know the influence of my own teachers, but the thought never crossed my mind that I could be that to someone else. Then suddenly over a decade later a random guy turns to you in a restaurant while eating a burrito and tells you that you contributed, in a not insignificant way, to something that was a major part of his life.

Truly, an amazing experience.

This got me thinking about influence and what that means. While the substantial reason for my writing this blog for the last three and a half years has been to provide me with a means of working through my own inner thinking, I have held a small hope that my words might in some way impact someone’s life for the better.

Whenever we engage in any pursuit we have an impact on others. No matter if you are cleaning floors or leading the free world, your actions have an impact. In the end, we are all part of a network and the strength of that network is directly related to the value we, as actors within it, give out. Value is a difficult thing to measure and in the end highly subjective. That said, we all have our own inner barometer of what is valuable. While we may spend endless hours disagreeing over what is of value in the abstract, we can all, in every moment, work to create value according to our own inner drive.

For the last few weeks I have been writing a lot about the basics of lighting. In my own blog I am midway through a series on basic lighting angles that is written to be a very elementary introduction for young lighting designers just stepping into this world, or for other people who would like a better idea of what it is that we do. In addition I have been writing a basic intro to the lighting designer’s process over at Isaac Butler’s blog. And recently I put together an article on the basic’s of dance lighting for Rob Sayer’s blog.

My true love and first interest in design is the intersection of visual design and advanced critical theory. This is one of the things that I loved about studying with John Conklin at NYU. He can design the hell out of a play for performance, but at the same time delves deeper into a text to bring about a visual reading than anyone else I have ever encountered.

All this is to say two things. The first is that we simultaneously influence and are influenced by the people around us. Depending upon our relative capacities it may be more or less, but that give and take is always there in all relationships wether formally academic or not. The second thing, and of direct import to this space here is that I will very likely be returning to my original motivation with regards to writing about the theatre. That is, taking on a deeply probing critique of the text and applying that to the visual world.

More than anything else that we do as designers, we are providing a visual reading of a text. That idea has been, and will continue to be a guiding principal of my design work and by extension, my writing.

Not all design can be talked about. Not all plays can be talked about. In the same way, there were ideas held in that Heidegger critique that could not merely be read or spoken. They had to be experienced. In the theatre, we are engaging in a deep reading of a text. Unlike philosophers and critical theorists whose work in this regard manifests only as words, our work translates words to the visual realm. It at once dives into and rises beyond the capacity for language.

Critique, and in that word I mean to include the theatre, lives only in the realm of debate. It exists in the reading by the performers and the designers and the directors. That reading lives on through the reading of the audience. When Hegel talked about the dialectic nature of thought, it was not merely philosophy that those ideas encompassed. All of human effort, all of society and culture, exist by those same rules.

No thesis may be presented that does not contain within it the seed of its anti-thesis and by that a future synthesis. This is biological life. This is the history of ideas. This is the world of theater. From word to image and back to word. Perhaps a few still images or video remains but in the end all we have are the thesis, the text and its resultant synthesis, the review, that came about through union with the text’s anti-thesis the performance.

I have traveled far afield from a post that was intended to be about our responsibility as teachers and creators. But then, perhaps this is all immediately germane to that topic. Perhaps the mundanities of responsibility are intimately wedded to the most abstract thought. Heidegger himself after all was concerned with the most basic of things. He took the most sophisticated and sublime of continental theory and used it to talk about hammers and shoes.

While we may remember the extreme highs and lows of our lives the best, it is so often the simple living and doing of our works as humans that we are remembered by others.