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The Year in Review 2010

Monday, December 27th, 2010

It sure has been a productive year here at Light Cue 23. Over a hundred blog posts, most of them 1-2 page essays (if written in a non-digital format), so somewhere between 100-200 pages of text. Whew!

I sure enjoyed it. But what was it all?

I wrote extensively on Color Theory

And Gobo theory

I wrote a lot about software including Maya

and Vectorworks

I lit some beautiful shows, but only got pictures of


Don Giovanni


and Of The Earth

I wrote about the theory of design

The practical aspects of design

I was Interviewed by iSquint. And I argued, to seemingly wild applause, that Theater is Boring

Have a wonderful New Year! See you in 2011.

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Theater is boring

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Theater is boring.

This is more true than most theater makers are willing to admit. I can not count the number of times I have seen some version of “Our subscriber base is getting old, how do we get young people into the theater?” “It must be ticket prices, let’s do a special rate for people under 30.” Sure ticket prices may be part of the problem, but they can only account for a small percentage. “It must be competition from TV and movies for entertainment dollars.” Perhaps.

Or maybe, just maybe, most theater is boring.

The sad part is the problem is cyclical. Audiences decline and theaters panic. In order to ensure a slower drop off they play safe with their subscriber base (main source of income) and program boring stilted shows they think their increasingly greying audiences want. They are shocked when younger people don’t want this and choose instead to spend their money on a rock show or going out to clubs. More income drops and the shows become safer, and smaller, and more like sitcoms. They become dead and boring. They lose their theatricality and their aliveness.

There are interesting works out there, they are just not the norm. Cirque du Soleil is an expanding global franchise. Not only do their shows pack in audiences, but these audiences are willing to pay a premium price for the experience. Triple digit ticket prices may be grumbled about but they are paid. When the audience leaves the theater there is a smile on their face. Traditional theater, not so much. And it baffles them, these producers at traditional theaters. “We’ve been doing the same good work we always have, why is our audience dying off?”

Perhaps because the same good work has become boring. Perhaps paying $100, or $40, or even $10 to watch a small handful of people, only slightly more interesting than your friends sit around and talk about inane subjects is too much to pay. I can get that on TV, without cable. Fuerzabruta in New York packs in audiences like sardines. Why? The show is not boring. In fact, it is exciting and big and dangerous. Three adjectives rarely, if ever, applied to the typical regional and mid-sized theater.

Making money with live entertainment is hard. It is hard because you are asking patrons not only for their money, but for their time. Buy a painting you don’t like and you may be out a few hundred dollars, but you can just pack it into the closet, or resell it. CD you don’t like? Take it to the used record store. But with theater we have the audience trapped, for anywhere from 90 minutes to 6 hours. This is a not insignificant amount of time that they are never getting back. If what you are subjecting them to is not fucking awesome, then you are doing it wrong.

I am not saying it needs to be perfect. I am not saying it needs to be above critique. What I am saying is that it needs to not be boring. Sure there are exceptions. Theater makers like Richard Maxwell, and a large slice of the New York downtown avant garde, have taken boredom as an aesthetic lens through which to explore the human condition. That is different. Audiences going to those shows know what they are getting into and love it. Ibsen, Shakespeare, Checkov, Wasserstein, and many many more are regularly given mediocre productions of potentially interesting plays by reputable companies. This drives audiences away in a steady march towards irrelevancy.

Shakespeare should be sex, and passion, and sword fighting, and clownish baffoonery. It should be funny and scary and dangerous. Too often it is a pathetic imitation of a middle school English class production. The average non-theater-going public will go to a show because they think they “should” or to support a friend, not because it is exciting. Shakespeare is thought to be boring when his texts are anything but. Yet the productions he gets make me want to quit the entertainment business.

If the show is not dangerous it is boring. If the show is boring it is not worth spending time to go see. End of story.

Dangerous need not mean the audience risks having scenery fall on them. Ibsen, when his plays were first produced, contained dangerous scary ideas. It was feminism back when the very word was terrifying to the establishment. Not the mock fear we have now but actual existential threat. Today the ideas are small and the plays are still produced. And that is the problem. A new translation does not make it exciting.

Why would anyone produce A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler unless they had found a way to make it big and interesting and dangerous? English class is boring. Mabou Mines did that with their A Doll’s House. It is awesome and has been touring the world for the better part of a decade now. It is big and dangerous.

It is also theatrical. This is another problem rarely dealt with in theater productions. Most are not theatrical. I hear far too many people say something like “what is interesting about theater is it’s aliveness, having real live performers in front of you.” But that is only true if the production is alive. If we just have a few people sitting around a living room discussing the effects of the Iraq war it is not alive, nor very interesting. It is television. Too often bad television. If you want to write and produce TV shows, that is awesome. Go do it! But please, for the love of god, don’t put them on stage.

I’ll come clean. I don’t go to the theater much. I used to. There was a time when I would go see at least, at least, one show a week in excess of whatever I was working on. The problem I would encounter, over and over again, was a sense of having wasted my time and money on a boring TV show. These days, even if the ticket is free, I typically turn it down because I don’t want to waste my time. And many to most potential audience members have had the same or similar reaction. Why pay $50 for one TV show when I can get a month’s cable for that?

Vaguely apathetic middle class white people who speak in liberal talking points is not interesting theater. Nor are any of the other stereotypes of American demographics being paraded around on stage.

For theater to be interesting it needs to be big. It needs to think in big ideas and make broad gestures. It needs to entertain. Somewhere along the line many (it feels like most) American theater makers forgot that we work in the entertainment industry and began a transition to social medicine. Having a play about a cause is fine, but make it interesting. Angels in America was big and theatrical and scary when it first came out. That play is about as cause driven as you can get.

Theater will never go away. There will always be a sufficient amount of grants to combine with people who think they “ought” to go see a play to keep it limping along. But for theater to truly be alive, it needs to reinvent itself and be something that people are banging down the doors and waiting out in the rain and snow to see. It should cause rioting, or at least dancing, in the streets. It needs to be the event that can’t be missed. Because if it can be missed, why not miss it? There will be another, to be missed production, in a few weeks anyhow.

Or perhaps the apathy in the theater is the same apathy which prevents people from standing up for their rights with TSA, or demanding that 9/11 first responders get health care. Perhaps, then, we have exactly the theater we deserve.

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Greek Drama and Aesthetic Archeology

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Modes of minimalist thinking often find fullest expression in Greek stories. Layers of culture are stripped back to the origins of Western discursive and narrative approach. Cutting through layers of history and culture to expose its root means cutting through all narrative structures to find their essence.

Minimalism forces upon us a kind of archeology of style. Idiosyncratic and stylistic flourish often fail when exposed to the archeology of minimalism. The Greeks allow for a minimalist narrative in large part because their stories are so close to the archetypal source there is little extra. Often, Greek stories provide the bare minimum of context before moving forwards with a primal and archetypal tale.

Sophocles, in many ways, deals in pure archetype. Some of this is based on the stories he chooses to tell. Focus on the parent child relationship, as in the Oedipus cycle, strikes to the core of the human experience. This essential story is amplified by the narrative structures available to him. In his day, drama was seen as consisting of two actors and a chorus. Because of this constraint, he was forced to fit the complexity of human experience into a dichotomy. It forced dialog and paired monologue instead of conversation.

This very contained world is in sharp distinction to the plays of Euripides. Not only is Euripides willing to call into question the very power dynamics underlying society, he does so through a revolution in the dramatic form. The addition of a third actor increases, logarithmically, the complexity of potential storytelling dynamics.

In The Bacchae, for example, the same actor who plays the priest also plays the god. The actor who plays the mother plays the son. The king is played by the same actor who plays the servant. In this way, Euripides is able to question social politics through the very structures of narrative. If the king and the servant are manifested through the same soul, through being played by the same actor, what does that say about power and control in society?

What implications does this have for those of us who would design these worlds? Are there lessons we may learn? What are these plays speaking that would inform us, in a useful way, as builders and designers of the worlds these plays would inhabit?

First, it would serve us well to look at the structure of these stories. As designers, we are first and foremost visual storytellers. The story we are telling comes from the text. If it is a minimal or archetypal text, then perhaps we ought to look for that archetype in our design.

But what kind of minimalism is this?

The minimalism of Sophocles is different than that of Euripides. Do the characters have a single, unchanging, soul? Do they have a shared soul which manifests different aspects? Are these writers even minimalist?

A lot of evidence indicates that these texts are little more than the equivalent of an operatic libretto. In short, we are missing the music, the songs, and the choreography which these plays originally had and which made them far more of a spectacle than common thinking often allows of them today.

It was recently discovered that Greek statuary was painted in vibrant colors. Perhaps, then, neo-classicism and classical minimalism are nothing more than aesthetic anomalies founded on a misinterpretation of historical evidence. Minimalism, as an aesthetic concern, may indicate a far more modern line of thought than we typically consider it to be.

All of this concerns us as designers of theatrical worlds. Scenery, props, lighting, costumes, and music are all implicated by our asking of these questions. Our results are determined by our answers.

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Of The Earth – Pictures

Monday, December 6th, 2010

Below are images from the Shotgun Players 2010 production of Salt Plays Pt. 2 – Of The Earth

Written and Directed by: Jon Tracy
Scenery by: Nina Ball
Costumes by: Christina Yeaton
Video by: Lloyd Vance
Sound by: Brendan West


All photographs courtesy Pak Han

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Of The Earth – Opens Tonight

Saturday, December 4th, 2010

Tonight is the opening of Of The Earth written and directed by Jon Tracy. This is a beautiful poetic piece with a very physical theatricality to the staging. If you saw Part 1 this past summer in the park you know what kind of awesome you are getting into.

I am very proud of my work on this piece. Along with my fellow collaborators we have created a dynamic visual and aural landscape that really should not be missed. Lest you think I am exaggerating, the production photos are quite stunning and capture the visual world of the play exquisitely.

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Frontlight as a sculptural element

Monday, November 29th, 2010

I hear a lot of lighting designers say things like “frontlight is boring” and the more I think about it the less I find myself agreeing with this statement. Sure the typical, straight in front light at a 45 or even 30 degree angle is not the most dynamic. It does provide the useful function of clearly, cleanly, and evenly lighting faces.

A lot of the boredom comes, I think, from a certain resignation. Because “frontlight is boring” no effort is made to find an approach to frontlight that is sculptural. Frontlight can be quite interesting when the time and care is taken to treat it as a sculptural aesthetic element rather than a grudging necessity one hangs and focuses for bows.

This problem is largely an American problem. I say this because the American school of design, which traces itself in one way or another back to Stanley McCandless, treats a 45 degree angle as the base for all lighting. Sidelights, backlights (when possible), and frontlights all start from an assumption of 45 degrees up from the stage. While the “McCandless Method” has gone out of fashion along with its multi-colored diagonal frontlights, there are some ideas contained therein which might prove useful when applied within a contemporary aesthetic environment.

McCandless’ “Method” was born in an era of limited power, control, and instrumentation. These are not concerns we have as much today, but it forced him into a rigorous line of thinking which may be useful to return to. He developed his method as a means of providing the maximum variety and sculptural qualities to performers under extremely limited situations.

The somewhat blunt color approach to his use of diagonal frontlight may not hold up under contemporary aesthetic analysis, but the underlying intent is worth looking at. That intent being a well sculptured figure on stage. His specific solution may not apply, but we can all resonate with wanting to create a sculptural figure on stage. Using diagonal frontlight, though with consistent color, thus creating texture and variation through differing intensity levels, would be a more contemporary approach.

This is a sort of archeology of lighting aesthetics. It returns us to a foundational moment from which we may then build back up into the present to address our current aesthetic concerns. Simply modifying McCandless only goes so far. If our goal is creating a sculptural figure, we must base our decisions and analysis of lighting angles upon that premise.

Diagonal frontlight is far from the only means of creating a sculptural figure. In many circumstance it is also far from the ideal visual aesthetic. At a practical level, it doubles the required instrumentation needed. This can eat up valuable gear in limited situations and, of course, doubles the focus time for FOH positions. Then there is the matter of it lighting up a much more broad stage area than frontlight which comes straight in. Diagonals illuminate almost twice as much stage area as straight in frontlight, yet still only light about the same area at face level.

Footlights are a popular, though slowly going out of fashion, approach to finding a sculptural solution to frontlight. More so than diagonals, footlights light up a very broad area and are thus not right when maintianing a contained space is another requirement of the design. While beautiful under the right circumstances, the look is so emotionally specific that it can rarely be employed for general use.

An approach that is quite common in Europe, but surprisingly rare in the US, is steep angled frontlight. Pushing the lights up, past the 45 degree mark, to 70, or even 80 degrees, can turn this once boring lighting angle into a dramatically powerful storytelling device. What you lose from using so steep an angle is illumination of eye sockets and underneath any hats with brims. But what you gain is a tremendously powerful and evocative look.

Steep frontlight like this can easily be used on its own without being boring. It is very sculptural. It can also be readily used in conjunction with sidelight to get under hats and into eye sockets, or as fill to eliminate the harsh dark line caused by the exclusive use of sidelighting. Another wonderful benefit of steep frontlight like this is the very limited stage real estate taken up by the light. It is possible to isolate a performer distinctly and discretely while leaving as much stage space as possible unlit.

There are plenty of times where a flat angle is desired in one’s frontlight. Musical comedy and farce often want the bright faces and crisp eyes made possible by a flatter angle of frontlight. Perhaps the show is exploring themes of boredom and what is desired is blank, plain, lighting. In such cases a very flat frontlight may be just the right choice.

The larger question we are exploring is, “are you making a choice?” Is your lighting palette based upon an exploration of the dramatic needs of the piece in question or is it a formula? Thinking through these questions and really exploring the frontlight needs of the specific show will help to make the finished product not just good, but great.

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Freelance Scheduling and Recession Economics

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

One of the most complicated aspects to freelancing is managing one’s calendar. A full year can include 20-30 projects easily, averaging around two projects a month. In a world of Platonic ideals this breaks down very simply and easily. The real world of freelancing is never so simple. In the real world shows pile up back to back, there are awkward gaps between projects, shows fall through randomly, and new projects pop up at the last minute.

A few month ago I got an email from the producer of a show I lit three years ago. The production is going to be remounted in Connecticut next summer. This is fantastic news. I truly enjoyed the project and my collaborators, it is a strong piece that deserves a wider audience. This also means I have at least one show definitely scheduled more than 8 months out. I have soft offers going well into 2012, but uncontracted and thus not yet firmly placed in my calendar.

When dates are uncertain and contracts are unsigned it is important to keep an awareness of projects without letting them be firm limiters on one’s calendar. This is an almost constant dance of finding out which soft offers and potential contracts (if only we can get the funding!) become real and what new concrete projects will come in the meantime.

This December was mostly free for me as few days ago. My last show of the year opens December 3rd. The following few weeks would mean a nice bit of downtime from production to get my bookkeeping and paperwork in shape, start preproduction work on 2011 projects, and generally get a bit of rest. Then the phone rang two days ago. A play. In Dallas. Focuses on December 6th. That’s three days after my last contracted show opens and eliminates much of that downtime I had previously thought I would have in December.

This is the way of things. It can be a roller coaster at times. Sometimes nerve wracking. Sometimes thrilling. Never boring.

I remember November of 2007. I had almost my whole year penciled in in my calendar. It was going to be awesome, filled with a wide array of regional and Off-Broadway projects, a season with a dance company, and several experimental pieces. Then the bubble burst. One by one I got calls from producers that they were unable to secure funding for such and such a project and it would be postponed indefinitely. By January 1st 2008 over 80% of the projects I had lined up were gone.

Over the course of that year new projects slowly filled gaps in my schedule. I made it through the year, scraping at times, but pulling through. Freelancing is never easy, but the Great Recession sure makes it that much more challenging.

Even during good economic times the schedule of a freelancer is never easy. You sign a contract for a project because you have a hole in your schedule to fill, it’s not the best, but its work. Then, two days later, your dream project falls in your lap and the dates are identical. Managing the overlap is an art unto itself.

Many designers hire assistants to carry them through the overlaps. Fees being what they are, one must calculate if the overhead of hiring an assistant is worth the value of the contract.

Managing multiple projects artistically is the easy part. We learn tricks for finding inspiration so we can keep moving ahead with our design work. Managing multiple projects logistically is a whole different beast. As a freelancer I can manage my preproduction work largely on my own schedule. But the one thing I can not manage is when the show opens.

Being a freelancer you share many of the same skills with a project manager. You are in charge of making and maintaining multiple projects on numerous timelines for a variety of clients. It is very different than simply running a small business. You have, at times, the administrative workload of managing a large business and maintaining a full time creative life.

No one ever said freelancing was easy. But as a student, and before I freelanced full time, I tended to think of the difficulty coming from an artistic direction. Relative to the administrative and scheduling aspects of the work, the art is the easy part. Add the increased volatility of our current economy and the roller coaster gets a lot steeper, faster, and jolts your around harder.

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Dancers are people too

Monday, November 15th, 2010

There is an assumption that a lot of people make with dance lighting that somehow, because it is dance, we can ignore standards of beauty for lighting people. The range of colors which look good on human skin are actually quite narrow. Pale lavender, pale amber, clear incandescent light, and daylight. Anything much more saturated than this and skin tones start to look, well, inhuman.

I have seen more than one person, when seeing a color like L126, say something like “ooh there’s a dance color,” as though the medium itself somehow justifies making humans look like glowing neon space aliens.

These colors can be quite striking and bold. They can be beautiful and the right choice in the right moment. But to assume they are somehow “dance colors” is to unnecessarily limit one’s thinking when approaching dance.

Strong color can be a powerful tool in dance. Especially in modern dance, where there is little to no scenery, color becomes a primary element in the visual storytelling of the piece. Yet when we are lighting the human form, such colors are, more often than not, ugly.

The skin of a dancer is no different than the skin of an actor, or an opera singer, or a CEO. It looks alive and vibrant in the same range of colors and looks sick and dead in similar ways. Magenta, green, yellow, and even dark blue, all have their place, but are in no way inherent to dance.

I remember reading a letter to the arts editor of the San Francisco Chronicle years ago criticizing an SF Ballet piece. The critique said something to the effect of “with all these new lights available like LEDs I am at a loss as to why Ms. Tipton lit the entire piece in white light.” The implication being that because one could use color, one should use color. There was no thought that perhaps one of the greatest living lighting designers in the world had something else in mind.

Dance is not about color. Dance is about the emotional expression of the human experience through movement. It is movement that defines dance. Perhaps it is the, often, non-literal nature of dance which leads people to assume that wild colors are the best and only solution. But that line of thinking does a disservice to the dance itself. It takes one’s inability, or more likely unwillingness, to engage with the work on its own terms and uses that as justification for a bold lighting scheme.

A green dancer, unless they are supposed to be an alien, or perhaps the embodiment of jealousy (and even then I would be wary and probably let the costume tell that story), is not beautiful. It might look neat but it does not do the dancer justice. We must approach our use of color in dance from the point of view of making the most beautiful work possible. If we just want beautiful and colorful light we can go do installations. In a collaborative art form we are responsible for making all our collaborators work, and this includes the performers, look as beautiful as possible.

Angle, far more than color, brings a dance to light. Sculpting the form in space, engaging with the kinesthetic being on stage, is what truly makes a dance. Sidelights are typically used, not because they are “dance lighting,” but because they treat the human figure with a sculptural focus that is unparalleled by other lighting angles.

Shins and Mids, typically with bottom cuts off the floor, allow us to light a dancer without lighting any of the surrounding environment, wings, cyc, or floor. Head-His, while grazing the floor still keep most of the light on the dancer and off the rest of the space. As we move vertically we get a stronger lighting hit on the floor, and consequently bounce on legs, cyc, borders, and other elements that are not dancers.

When using color, one would do well to consider these facts of how different lighting angles light different things. One could light the dancer in flattering colors for skin tones and still make strong, bold, color choices in the backlight or cyc lighting. This way one creates a whole world of color in which the dancer floats effortlessly. The colors on the dancer can then be very flattering to their particular skin tone without negatively impacting the designer’s impulse towards a strong and bold use of color.

Powerful and vibrant colors have their place in dance lighting. They can be an amazing way of communicating strong emotions to the audience. The use of color must come from within the dance. It must not be an arbitrary imposition from the outside. Discovering, and then revealing, the inner truth of the movement, is the job of the lighting designer in dance.

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Artistic Inspiration

Monday, November 8th, 2010

One of the luxuries most artists have, which designers (and other artists for hire) do not have, is the ability to create on their own schedule. Someone who paints, or draws, or sculpts just for the fun of it can take as long as they would like to create something. If a canvas, or a comic book, or a screenplay takes them 25 years to finish, so be it. For a designer, specifically a theatrical designer, we have a hard deadline of opening night. No matter the circumstances in our lives, we have to get up and be creative. We go to work and we make art.

One of the most difficult issues that an artist grapples with is inspiration. Well, inspiration and money, but we’ll focus on the aesthetics for now. For the artist on their own schedule they have the leisure and good fortune to wait until inspiration descends upon them. For the designer or artist-for-hire we must grab inspiration when we need it. Sometimes it is like a hunt, trekking through dense jungles of the subconscious searching, in vain, for that elusive thing called inspiration.

While not every project will be inspired from the depths of one’s soul there are ways of creating inspiration. This may sound odd to those used to waiting for inspiration to strike them, but it can not only be done, but can be done quite effectively.

One of the most direct ways to find inspiration is other artists. Now, if you are designing scenery for Billy Budd perhaps other productions of the opera are not the best route to take as that will often lead to second rate derivative works. But one might look to 18th century paintings of naval vessels for a literal interpretation. Perhaps if you want to echo 20th century political themes, your research might take you to the constructivists.

Personally I find photography to be one of the most resonant mediums for me to find creative inspiration. The work of Richard Misrach is one of my standard go to texts. His formal study of light, using the same exact frame, to capture myriad skies, gives an almost limitless source of inspiration for thinking through a sky drop.

Paul Strand is a favorite for thinking through abstract spaces. His 1915 print Wall Street is a strikingly theatrical look at the real world. Almost operatic in scope, this simple morning scene is transformed through the artist’s rendering of light and shadow. His The White Fence takes another infinitely mundane scene and transforms it into an abstract canvass of great depth and drama. While any reproduction will never do justice to his original platinum print, the frame alone is a powerful thing of beauty.

For more abstracted pieces, I find the work of Man Ray to be singularly useful. His profound humanism, framed within a surrealist approach, brings to life a world of deep and primal emotions. Cindy Sherman provides a very similar frame, though firmly rooted in the world of color.

Several painters I find particularly useful when a color palette just won’t come to me. Marc Chagall’s color sense is almost unparalleled in his ability to convey deep and serious emotions while maintaining an air of play in his works.

Another great source for color is the natural world. While there are any number of computer programs that can pair colors for you that will look good, nothing beats looking at fruit and vegetables. An heirloom tomato, or a banana, or a cucumber, or a honey dew melon, have a perfect color palette ripe for the taking.

Sometimes listening to music can be a powerful inspiration. Other time I just need to get out of my studio and go for a walk through the park, or the cemetery.

When you are feeling uninspired by a project it can be almost painful to get out the drafting pencils and get to work. Spending some time with some great art is never a waste. And it might just be the springboard to a beautiful design.

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Lighting Dance in the Digital Age

Monday, November 1st, 2010

Most everyone I know would agree that the ideal way to light a work for live performance is to see at least one run through prior to hitting the stage. Even under very short schedules and tense conditions this one rule of thumb is typically met. Every so often you encounter a situation where, despite everyone’s best intentions, it is not possible for the lighting designer to see a live run prior to tech.

I am now in the midst of just such a situation.

Next week, I am lighting a dance festival. Due to a combination of scheduling issues I will be unable to see the pieces live before tech. Ten, even five, years ago this would have been a bit of a problem. I’ve done it, so I know it’s not impossible, but it sure is not easy. Fortunately, there have been a handful of technology advances which make this current situation, while less than optimal, not even approaching a disaster.

Let’s look at the old model first to see how this would have been done just a few years ago.

The pieces average around 10 or 15 minutes each with 45 minutes of tech per dance. This gives time to run each piece twice with notes in between runs. Prior to the run, I would have written a handful of placeholder cues ahead of the rehearsal. Then, when time came for the tech of a particular piece, we would have run it while I modify the placeholder cues as the dance happens. During the notes we would discuss my lighting approach and I would make any desired changes, give cue placements to the stage manager and run the piece a second time, further refining the cues.

Cueing of this model is unfortunately common in the dance world. While it is far from perfect, it works.

These days we have all manner of technology at our disposal to bring us closer to an ideal situation. In this case, each of the six companies will video a rehearsal of their piece, upload those videos to Youtube, and send me the URL. I will see the pieces, though small and digital, before we hit the stage.

While I will not be able to see the pieces live before the show, there are some discrete advantages to this model. By having the piece on video I can pause, rewind, and restart the piece. Thus instead of trusting my notes from a single pass, I can get more detailed information about the choreography.

This in no way should be a default substitute for seeing a piece live. While a good addition, and a fantastic solution to my current conundrum, there is nothing like seeing a live body move through space. Video, certainly rehearsal video, is incapable of capturing the nuance of relationship between dancers or the connection of a performer to their audience. What video is very good at is capturing the shape of a choreography.

It would be a shame if video became the default means of lighting dance or other live performances. Video, however, is an invaluable tool when schedules collide and disallow a lighting designer from seeing the work he is soon to light.

I once heard the line “Anybody can light a dance they’ve seen. The real trick is to light one you’ve never seen.” attributed to lighting designer Sara Linnie Slocum. It is with all thanks due to modern technology that I will not be putting that line to the test next week.

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