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Inside the Design Idea – Den of Thieves

Friday, March 5th, 2010

When I first moved to the Bay Area after leaving New York I kept hearing about SF Playhouse. It seemed that in the time I had been on the East Coast this little company had gone from nothing to making quite a name for itself in San Francisco. Eager to find interesting work, I made a point to see some of their shows and was not disappointed. So, when Artistic Director Bill English asked me to light a play for them I was excited at the opportunity.

I need to confess something to my readers at this point. I don’t like reading plays. I enjoy rehearsals, and techs, and worksheets, and everything that goes into making a play, with one exception. I don’t like reading plays. Thus it was with my usual resignation of “Well, I have to get through this part in order to get to the fun stuff” that I picked up Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Den of Thieves and began reading.

The result? I had not laughed so hard in quite some time. The script is so outrageously funny that I had trouble getting through it, but this time for totally different reasons than a typical script read. I kept laughing so hard I had to put the script down repeatedly. The story revolves around a group of thieves in a kleptomaniacs recovery program. Then someone shows up with the perfect heist. Wackiness ensues.

When I did finish the play I began thinking through how to light it. There is a sharpness to the comedy that demands to be addressed through light. No mushy recessive stuff here. Both colors and angles need to be crisp and distinct.

The first thing I saw clearly was that the air must feel colorful. Much like approaching musical comedy, the farcical nature of the piece demands a feeling of color everywhere. But that color must be carefully chosen to augment the crisp dialogue. I also knew that I wanted a very sharp look in terms of my approach to angle but was not sure how to achieve that.

At the first production meeting Bill, who was designing the scenery, came in with a corner set on a 90 degree angle (the US was the corner of a room with walls at approximately 45 degrees from that point). Upon seeing this I was immediately struck with my solution to the sharp angle. I would hang a two color system of diagonal front Head-Hi’s following the angles of the walls. Once this piece was resolved everything else fell into place.

Backlight would be a cool and a color changing system. Sidelight would be a pair of pipe-ends from each side. A bunch of scenery specials. Both the Act 1 and Act 2 set had windows, so light through the windows would be prominent. The nature of the comedy led me to choose to fill in the shadows with color. As such there would be a medium blue through the windows for the night scenes and a dark blue frontlight system to fill from front of house. A pair of FOH IQs would do any additional specials as needed. The final element would be a lot of practicals in each scene to really bring the world to life.

Lighting systems are as follows:

  • Cool Head His in L201+R132
  • Lavender Head His in R51+R132
  • Warm Diagonal Fronts in R302+R132
  • Low Blue Fron in L079
  • Straight CLR Front in CLR
  • Cool Backs in L202
  • Color Backs (the house scroll is a standard apollo rock&roll string)
  • CLR Cross Light in R132
  • Outside Night in R68
  • Outside Dawn in L201
  • Outside Sun in R318
  • Practicals are all CLR
  • IQs in R132

Below is a look at the lightplot:

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Inside the Design Idea. Please leave any comments or questions you might have.

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Orestes 2.0 Opens tonight

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

More information here. Note, this is a link to a Facebook event page. You may need an account with that service to view it.

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This is your sort of civilization, then

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

I think Charles Mee is one of the most interesting writers alive today. He publishes all of his plays to his website for free download. This speech is by Tyndarius from his Orestes 2.0:

If I would speak to you, how should I speak?

I know one mustn’t use certain expressions these days,
among your generation.
One mustn’t call people barracudas, for example
no matter how they behave.

Shall I apologize?
This was your mother, after all,
my daughter,
even if she was a slut.

But one mustn’t speak this way, I know.
For this is rude and might offend one’s feelings.

(He takes his time)

There are words these days, I know, that cause a certain pain–
like”slut” or “sweetie” or “dear” or “peg leg,” or–”watermelon.”

There is some quality of magical thinking in this, a certain
“primitive” turn of mind, if I may use the word, that seems to fly to
the belief that if one disposes of a word, one disposes of all the
dreadful or disagreeable things that have become attached to it.

So that if one simply doesn’t use the word “articulate,” in referring
to a certain sort of person who is articulate, as though a certain sort
of person’s competence with language were an exceptional matter, then
the exceptionality of this articulateness will disappear.

Or, if one will eschew the word “community,” in speaking of a group of
people, as though that group shared a monolithic culture in which they
all acted and thought in the same way, then one’s language would not
create ghettoes in which these groups are constrained to live. One
should never refer to the black community, for example, or the gay
community. One should refer, rather, to the black residents in a
southside neighborhood.

Then, too, one ought not to say “oreo” in reference to black Americans
who have abandoned their culture, or refer in a similar fashion to
Asians as bananas or Mexicans as coconuts.

One ought not to say “illegal alien,” when one has available such
vocabulary as undocumented worker or undocumented resident.

One ought not to use the expression “qualified minorities,” as though
minorities were in general unqualified.

One ought not to use the word “swarthy.”

One ought not to say “blonde and blue-eyed” unless one is prepared to
use the expression “brown-haired and brown-eyed” as an expression of
equal attractiveness.

One ought not to say “inscrutable” in speaking of an Asian.

One ought not to say “Dutch treat,” as though to say the Dutch people
are cheap.

One ought not to say “fried chicken,” under any circumstances as I
understand it.

One ought not to say Jew–or I should say that some people prefer the
expression Jewish person, and in any case that the word should never be
used as a synonym for stingy. And that it should always be used as a
noun, never as a verb.

One ought not to say buxom or fragile or feminine or pert or petite or
gorgeous or stunning or statuesque or full-figured or in any other way
refer to the physical attributes of a woman.

I can accept all this with equanimity.

And yet, one can commit murder and find the words to justify it.

This is your sort of civilization, then. It speaks nicely and behaves
barbarously.

Indeed, it thinks that speaking well, putting a nice face on things,
will transform the very stuff of life on earth.

No, no, no.
You’ve come unhinged.
You’ve lost your bearings altogether.
You’ve assaulted the very foundations of your home.
You’ve forgotten who you are, where you come from.

You remember nothing: not your parents, nor the values they held dear,
not your country, nor the polity it once held in its grasp, or at the
very least aspired to, not your history, nor your religion, nor even
the most rudimentary tenets of ethics or gentleness.

And this is what you ask me to give my blessing to.
No.

(To Menelaus)

As for you, Menelaus, I don’t expect some form of civil behavior from a
man who has just returned from rendering an entire civilization into a
smoking ruin, while his own home sinks in rot and violence, husbands
murdered by their wives, mothers murdered by their sons, sleeping
children shot through bedroom doors. I know of a boy who poured
kerosene on a derelict and lit him on fire and burned him to a crisp,
not thinking he, the boy, had done anything wrong. That’s the value
they place on human life in the world that boy comes from. And soon
enough such boys will fill your neighborhood. You flatter yourself that
you are an old-fashioned sort of man, but you’ve no idea what it is you
ought to be old-fashioned about.

And I will tell you this:
for the murder of my daughter,
I expect the murderer to suffer the punishment of the state.
No more. No less.
That’s what I mean by a civil society.
I’ll hold you responsible.
Let us begin there to put the world to rights.

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Inside the Design Idea – Orestes 2.0

Monday, February 15th, 2010

I find Charles Mee to be one of the most interesting playwrights alive today. His texts, often contemporary reworkings of the Greeks, are deeply profound insights into the contemporary American experience. Orestes 2.0 is no different.

Upon my first read of this play I was hit with a strong visual sense of the world. The first thing I was struck by was how bleak the world is. A desolate landscape where words like “possibility” or “hope” come across as cruel jokes at best. While that is the background of the play, there is a deep and almost perverse comedy element as well. The lighting had a difficult balance to strike. On the one hand we have this desolate place. On the other hand we have this big, broad, and perverse comedy. Exploring that tension is where the visual world gets interesting very quickly.

When I brought my ideas to director Jessica Heidt she was a bit wary of the bleakness and very eager to explore the comedy. Her concern, and rightly so, is that if the production focuses too strongly on that one aspect of the text, the delicate balance Mee has constructed will be lost. And it is in that balance that the play finds resonance with our contemporary experience.

Our research focused on post-invasion Iraq. Demolished palaces and military occupation. We looked at images of once grand palaces turned lounges for soldiers with fluorescent tubes bolted randomly to the walls and broken chandeliers hanging sadly unlit.

The space is a three-quarter round thrust stage. The set consists of a broken marble floor backed by a half demolished wall with three crumbling arches. Upstage of the arches is a CYC which might be a sky or perhaps a lake in the distance. This left the lighting unobstructed and gave me a large canvass to work with.

Solving the desolate landscape came first. It is the foundation upon which the action occurs. How would I approach this? Gray came first to mind, a sad and lonely gray. But there must also be a harshness. Something unforgiving as well. This led me to consider exploring soft diffuse sources contrasted with hard sharp ideas. The frontlight would be addressed with bounce light. I hung 9 Source-4’s with bounce cards to ring the stage, three per audience side, to give us facelight. Contrasting against that is a 3×3 grid of hard edged boxes that will allow us to delineate areas on the stage floor that we want to highlight. The facelight would be in a dominant daylight color and the boxes would be in a pale cyan.

This gave us our base for the landscape. Now on to the comedy.

Jessica was interested in my idea of heavy and saturated color invading the space. As such, I placed a system of color changing backlights using Source-4s with Seachangers. This would give me the ability to transform the space into any color needed for the many scenes. Further, several of the monologues have been converted into rock songs along with a dance number to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance so having color change options is necessary. Upstage, the CYC is being lit with a three color RGB striplights. This allows us to get a lot of color out on stage in any hue we might desire.

Two sidelight systems and some cool PAR bakclights fill out our full stage ideas. We then have several ideas of light scraping across the scenery to pull out the textured walls as well as help lend a degree of realism to the painted scenery. People upstage of the arches are lit by booms with a Head Hi and a Shin.

The research image of the fluorescent bolted onto the wall really stuck with me. As such I asked to add two T-8 fixtures to the walls. In addition we will have a pipe added 3′ below our, already low, grid to hang three large scoops pointed out at the audience just downstage of the wall. Add a small handfull of worklights and we have a good array of practicals to play with contrasts between realism and theatricality.

And contrast is the name of the game here. Contrasts in color, quality, and angle of light; as well as contrasting reality with theatricality.

The system breakdown looks like this:

  • Bounce Fronts in L201

  • Top Boxes in R4315
  • Clear Cross in R302+R119
  • Cool Cross in L161+R119
  • Front Spots in R3208+R132
  • Color Backs in C-M-Y-G
  • CYC in R68, LHT139, and L106
  • Cool Backs in L281
  • Scoops and Worklights in CLR

The grid, as mentioned before, is very low at 13′-9″. All lights will be overhung to give a clean grid line with the exception of the bounce lights (which have to underhang to work properly) and the low pipe with scoops. The intention there is to allow the lights that we are meant to see be very visible while those just lighting the show are more or less out of the visual field.

Here is a look at the lightplot:

I hope you have enjoyed this installment of Inside the Design Idea. I would love to hear your thoughts or ideas in comments below. Thank you for reading.

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The Sisters Rosensweig Opens

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

First Preview for The Sisters Rosensweig is tonight. The play opens on Saturday the 9th. If you are in the SF Bay Area come on down and see it. The show only runs for two weeks, until the 17th, so if you want to see it, book tickets now.

For more info about when, where and who click here and here.

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Inside the Design Idea – The Sisters Rosensweig

Friday, December 25th, 2009

I wrote last week about a few projects I am working on that have embraced an aesthetic of minimalism in their productions due to budgetary issues. But how do these ideas arise? More importantly how do they develop into a final product? I have written generically about my design process but I thought it might be fun to explore a single project more in depth to see how these ideas make it to the stage.

I was approached by Aaron Davidman, Artistic Director of The Jewish Theater – San Francisco, to light his production of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig for their 2010 season. I had never read or seen the play so my first read for this production was my first time ever through the play. I had no preconceived notions of what it was about or how it “should” look. So I sat down with the text and began to read the play fresh.

Upon that first read I was struck with how important time is to the play. It takes place over a 36 hour period and all the action occurs in the same location. It is almost Greek in its unity of time, place, and action. As a lighting designer time of day is a central concern when working through the text. While location is important it is not central in the same way that time is. Even when the work is highly abstracted there needs to be some unity of expressing a changing time of day. Because time plays such a central role in the storytelling of Sisters Rosensweig I became instantly curious about how to provide that.

The script calls for a rather elaborate setting inside a well furnished apartment. While the action takes place in this well furnished apartment what is more central to the dramatic storytelling is that everything happens in the same room. I proposed to Aaron that we consider setting the play on a rather minimal set and utilize lighting conventions borrowed from the dance world to approach the piece. He readily welcomed the idea and we set out with our scenic designer to craft this world.

I find that audiences respond quite favorably to naturalistic plays happening on abstracted settings. When abstracted in the right way, such that the core storytelling elements are highlighted, the abstraction makes the reality of the characters resonate strongly. One trouble that can arise in naturalistic settings is that the characters get lost amidst the scenery. While it is a perfect approach for film, strict naturalism can impede an audience’s ability to process natural dialog. Abstract minimalism takes the benefits of abstraction even further and gives the audience a clear focus on the actors. After all the audience pays to see actors not well executed scenery, beautiful costumes, or fancy lighting.

As we developed our setting for Sisters Rosensweig we were very careful to create a space and develop ideas that will always keep our focus on the performer. A white rectangle set against a black floor to bound our room filled with a few simple furniture pieces, a staircase, and a chandelier all backed by a large and expansive sky. The sky, truly a white cyc, will be variously lit to show the passage of day into night and back into day. The performers will be clearly and cleanly lit and set against this shifting sky.

Through a clear focus on the performance we will create a visual space which can ebb and flow along with the emotional moment of the play. Each of the seven scenes take place at a slightly different time of day. In order to show these transformations the cyc will be lit variously from the top and bottom in a range of colors from morning pastels, to cool gray midday clouds, to nothing late at night. A shifting sun will illuminate the cyc variously from the sides as well as low and center on the horizon for an evening sunset.

While the sky will be changing behind us, the performers will be lit in cool shades of gray. Keeping the light on the actors in a tight color range of 3400° K – 5700° K will provide a clean and crisp look appropriate for both the sharp witted comedy as well as the darker moments of the piece. This color palette also evokes the cool light of London wherein the play is set.

Here is a breakdown of the lighting systems:

  • Two color Backlight in L201 (for daylight) and CLR (for the chandelier)
  • High Crosslight in L202
  • Head Hi Crosslight in CLR
  • Diagonal Frontlight in R3216
  • Scenery specials in L202
  • Cyc Top in L281, L161, and L119 as well as GAP508 templates in L201
  • Cyc Bottom in R53, L161, and R68
  • Cyc Sides in L025, R68, L201, and L193
  • The center sunset is a fresnel in L176 and the morning sunrise templates are GAP228 in color L101

All the actor lighting is done with frosted Source-4 Lekos. This will allow me to make shutter cuts to the white performance space and keep as clean a look as possible on the stage. The CYC is lit with various FarCycs, Mini-Strips, Fresnels, and PARs.

As of this writing the lighting paperwork is all finished and sent off to the master electrician and production manager. I have seen an early run through of the piece and have some basic cueing ideas although that will get fleshed out in later meetings with the director. We load in the lighting and scenery at the end of December, focus the lights, and then walk away for a few days over the New Year. When we come back in January we will begin lighting rehearsals.

Doing a post like this which goes into the specifics of a design for a show is new for me (I typically stick to theory). How was it for you as a reader? Would you like to see more of this?

Drop me a line in comments and let me know what you think.

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Recessionary Aesthetics; Money, Minimalism, and Art – Or, it’s the performer stupid

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I am currently working on two shows that, for budgetary reasons, have pulled back on the design elements and are working within a minimalist framework. It has long surprised me that smaller theater and opera companies will often spend a significant percentage of their budget on scenery (or costumes) and skimp on a lot of the other elements of the show. Dance learned years ago that when working with limited means the first thing to go should be the elaborate scenery, followed by fancy costumes. The whole purpose of live performance is to experience the performers.

Modern dance developed within a rather poor environment even for the arts. Scenery and, to a lesser extent, costumes were largely eliminated in favor of spending money on performers and, by extension, lighting. You can do any show without scenery and without costumes, but you can’t do it in the dark. As the saying goes, “If you can’t see them you can’t hear them.” One quickly begins questioning what exactly that means. Seeing the performer does not necessarily mean a spotlight on their face. If you are working on a noir piece revealing the actor in shadow and half light may be the most effective means of hearing what they are saying in a given moment. Yet the underlying logic is true. If the audience can not see the performance they will fast lose interest.

It is interesting that theater and opera companies will often sacrifice the actual performances in order to have scenery and costumes when, in the end, the audience comes for the performers. Both of the shows I am currently doing in a minimal style have made sacrifices in order to directly improve the performances and thus the audience’s experience of the piece. In one case a rather pricey scenic element was cut to hire a dialect coach. In the other case singers salaries were increased with, what would have been, the scenic budget. In both instances a choice was made in favor of the performance over the packaging. In both these cases the lighting budget is tiny (as it should be) but I will make it work overtime.

Don’t get me wrong. I am incredibly vocal about the utility of good design. I firmly believe in the value that visual storytelling brings to a work. I have seen shows whose success was largely through the design ideas alone. But no slick piece of stagecraft will make up for a poor performance. One of the great things about lighting is that it has the capacity to work scenically as well as a means of illumination. Through the use of standard American theatrical lighting instruments whole worlds can be created with variations of color, texture, shape, and angle. Interiors and exteriors can be created not to mention the more obvious qualities like time of day.

I see a lot of companies cutting back their programming or doing smaller shows in order to make up the funding gaps they are experiencing under the current economy. Sadly this is precisely the wrong direction to go. Audiences come to the theater to see shows. By reducing the programming you are reducing your audience base and risk pushing them away more permanently. Instead the most logical thing to do is revision the way in which performance is seen. Exploring minimalist approaches to design is certainly one way to do this. Cut the scenic, costume, and lighting budgets and do the five actor play you really want. Cut all the fancy drops and hire that amazing singer.

It is common in New York, and with many European companies, to forgo design altogether. No set, rehearsal clothes, and worklights. While this is often too bold a choice for most directors it is a way of producing work that focuses first on the performance.

Before these ideas get tossed to the side as the ravings of a post-modernist, keep in mind that Shakespeare operated in much the same fashion. The scenery for his plays was minimal to non-existent, the lighting was daylight (and perhaps a few effects), while the costumes were a hodge podge of items the company would carry around with it. Roman characters might be wearing Elizabethan clothes and brandishing Greek weaponry and all this in simple daylight on a more or less bare stage. The focus, once again, was on the performance.

Far from cutting back on performance, when times are tough, it is exactly the performance that needs to be focused on. Additional rehearsal times, dialect coaching, higher performer salaries (to both allow them to relax and focus on the work as well as garnering a higher quality performer) are what the money should be spent on. An audience should leave the theater thinking fondly on the performance. If they leave remembering the scenery or lighting, with no resonance to the story, we have done something wrong.

At the rate of economic “recovery” we are experiencing these are issues companies will be dealing with for the foreseeable future. If live performance is not to be totally overwhelmed by mass consumer culture something must be done to keep performance alive and growing.

How will you respond?

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If Brecht were alive today he would be twittering about Kanye

Monday, November 16th, 2009

One of the things that interests me about Brecht’s theoretical project is his focus on creating work that resonates strongly with contemporary audiences. The world as he knew it was one firmly rooted in “the scientific age” of modernist utopian possibilities. He saw theater as a tool to open up fracture points in contemporary society in order to make possible a transformation in class consciousness.

He writes in A Short Organum for the Theatre:

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

Brecht’s work, to my reading, has always concerned itself with the extremes of society, the revolutionary consciousness and potential on the one hand and the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces on the other. But as he says in the above quote we must concern ourselves with the contemporary reality. We must use the system as it is, and through an exploitation of its fracture points, transform it into a more perfect world. He makes this second point more explicitly, a little earlier, when he states that “[t]he theatre has to become geared into reality if it is to be in a position to turn out effective representations of reality, and to be allowed to do so.”

Theatre, for Brecht, was to be an Event, in the Zizekian sense, an authentic experience which fundamentally alters the experience of events not only after its occurrence but alters the experience of the past as well. The theatrical Event was to be of such a magnitude that one’s whole orientation to the social experience would be fundamentally and irrevocably altered.

So what does this have to do with tweeting about Kanye West?

What I was thinking about specifically was the extreme of contemporary hip hop embodied in the radical political critique espoused by groups like Dead Prez or BDP (KRS-One) on the one hand and such acts as Kanye and Fergie on the other. Bling bling capitalism juxtaposed against social revolutionaries mediated through contemporary performative/artistic experience. How does Kanye’s Golddigger intersect with KRS-One’s Love is gonna get cha(Material Love)? But of more interest is the question: how does the technology through which these songs are experienced interact with the audience?

What twitter does, in a similar way to other social media like blogs, facebook, myspace and so forth, is to blur the distinction between life, audience, and performance. When surveillance is total, and everyone is on camera, then everyone is an actor. So then we have the consumption of culture as a performative act. We tweet about the song we are currently listening to and fold the performance of the song into the performance of subjectivity on-line in a way that presents it immediately as commodity and reifies the subjective performance.

This is the world we are in. The “scientific age” has been passed by for the “information age” and we are no longer gears in the machine but statuses in the social group blog. So the audience/actor takes the stage and incorporates cultural commodities into the performative feedback loop. The subjective experience of identity shifts along the audience/actor continuum and becomes complicated as that experience gets mediated through various technologies. Is a retweet performative? Has the subjective experience then become another cultural object to be consumed or does it still contain the potential inherent in performance? Has the subject/object dichotomy been pulled out of the either/or world and brought into the light of both/and?

Brecht makes it clear that “[n]ot everything depends on the actor, even though nothing may be done without taking him into account. The ’story’ is set out, brought forward and shown by the theatre as a whole.” I would argue that this extends to contemporary performative technologies.

While Brecht set out in his day to reconceive Theatre and Opera into a medium appropriate for his contemporary world I could easily imagine him shifting the very stage from the physical world to the digital world. Perhaps his performances would only appear in Second Life or as episodic narrative released via twitter.

Despite all this conjecture, the question still remains: how might these technologies be utilized to exploit fracture points in contemporary culture in order to unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses? Or to look at it a different way: is the very search for those points of fracture, and the desire for social revolution, an idea tied up with the modernist notions of a bygone era? Have the differences been so radically folded into one another that we no longer have such dichotomous existence but rather the uneasy experience of both/and?

I certainly don’t know the answers to those questions but I would love you to retweet this piece if you enjoyed it.

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Dirty Money, Starving Artists, and the need for new myths

Friday, November 6th, 2009

One of the most pervasive identity myths that haunts art worlds is that of the starving artist. There are countless examples in popular culture of this archetype including a very good opera about the subject. While the idea that a true artist suffers and through suffering art is born might have a degree of romantic mystique the truth of the matter is that all suffering creates is suffering. The archetype of the starving artist, and her condemnation of anyone who achieves any degree of success as “selling out,” does little more than provide limited solace to an otherwise unpleasant existence.

Archetypes are powerful things. Consciously or not, as beings in the world, we emulate strong and powerful archetypal roles. Not to get too Jungian but I see it as far too common to deny. Personality is performance. In the performance of personality we model our ‘character’ off of good actors (in real life or literature and pop-culture). The starving artist, through its romantic appeal, is a popularly recurring figure. Sadly this figure does more of a disservice to us in the long run, in the same way as the alcoholic writer generally creates alcoholics not writers.

The starving artist type gains value, to a greater or lesser degree, in the idea that money is somehow dirty. There is an air of superiority, by those who don the starving artist type, placed around obscurity. It is as though anyone whose work could be understood by, and thus appreciated and paid for by, more than a select inner cabal of followers is somehow flawed. Because popular/successful is read as bad, money, as a tangible proof of popularity of ones work, is also treated as bad or dirty. There is a belief that the work itself becomes sullied by making money off it.

This is as common in the performing arts as it is in any other medium. Many theater makers working on a small scale will deride the “commercialism” of Broadway plays or the work produced at regional theaters. Rather than examining the work itself the funding for the work comes under attack. Rigorous critique is replaced by a more general barrage against slick stagecraft and well rehearsed acting. Taken at their root these critiques are really about money and the relative access to, or paucity of, its presence in making the work.

While it is true that throwing money at a bad play will not make it better it does not follow from there that all plays with good funding are bad. It is true that people throw millions of dollars into producing total crap while others spend next to nothing to make a true gem. At the same time, those true gems, with a fully financed producer, would potentially become even greater while the well financed schlock would remain schlock.

The archetype of the starving artist and the myth of dirty money have created a false dichotomy between “uptown” and “downtown” theater. Between “indie” and “commercial” plays. Being poor does not inherently make one virtuous and even Jerzy Grotowski conceded that poor theater costs a lot of money. High budgets do not make one good or bad. Powerful authentic art can exist with no money or all the money in the world. But this is not the point. The focus of our critiques should center on the quality and effectiveness of the work itself rather than its funding.

So too our personal narratives would do well to be reoriented away from the damaging myth of the virtue of the starving artist and back towards the rigorous and devoted artists and craftsman. Even a cursory look at the Renaissance shows us that powerful and lasting works can be created from well funded origins. There are many people in pop-culture one might look to who are wildly successful and still maintain a high degree of artistic integrity. Danny Elfman comes readily to mind as one such example as does his regular collaborator Tim Burton. Many artists have made the transitions to the big leagues without sacrificing their artistic integrity.

Poverty is only romantic with distance. It is time to retire the Starving Artist as a myth of a bygone age. A romantic notion, well fit for literature, and hardly worth modeling one’s life after. The reality of the starving artist too easily winds up starved. We need new archetypes for a new millennium. Archetypes that empower us to live strongly and courageously as artists in our contemporary world and beyond.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate – Part 2

Friday, October 30th, 2009

In any interpersonal relationship the ability to clearly and accurately communicate is a necessary skill. When one gets into collaborative projects like theater the need for those skills increases exponentially. There is a degree to which everyone in a theatrical production must rely on and lean on everyone else in order for the whole to work. When any one individual does not live up to their end of the communicative deal the whole process can unravel.

I recently assisted a designer whose communication skills were insufficient at best. She would ask, for example, if something was possible, “Is it possible to print out the lighting cues?” and would get a response to her question, “Yes it is possible.” This is a different question than “Please print out the cues.” One day she threw a temper tantrum about how “nothing I ask for gets done. I have been asking for a cue printout for WEEKS.” Upon checking with with the electrician it was confirmed that in fact not once had the actual words “Print the Cue list” been said.

While this might sound like a minor issue it points to a much larger complex of issues. No one is a mind reader. As such it is only possible to know what is actually said. Working in theater, and lighting specifically, it becomes necessary to be precise with language when any given note may well cost hundreds to thousands of dollars in labor, parts, and so forth. Those carrying out the note need to be certain with regards to what exactly is wanted. Ambiguous requests, or requests for something other than what one wants, will only create conflict and confusion down the line.

Systems have been developed over years to allow for the precise giving of notes from a designer to an electrician such that exactly what is desired gets achieved. The precise type, placement, color, method of control, and so forth can all be described in exact detail so as to avoid any confusion. Part of why this system works is that it leaves nothing ambiguous. Because there is no ambiguity there is no room for misinterpretation.

Ambiguity and miscommunication do happen. But having a system that keeps information flowing without recourse to interpretive wizardry, or decoding efforts worthy of the greatest CIA Kremlinologists, allows for a minimum of miscommunication. One need not resort to temper tantrums over things never asked because everyone is speaking the same language and the same dialect of that language.

Asking for what one wants is the bedrock of good communication and, sadly, something far too many people lack. The equation is simple: use words to accurately describe what it is you would like to communicate. In far too many situations people are unable, or unwilling, to do this.

One factor I have found that contributes to poor communication are feelings of insecurity. Especially in the arts it seems that those who are unclear are also those who are uncertain in their ability or place. As such they use unclear communication as a way of shirking responsibility. If something goes wrong it is not their fault, but the fault of the person who misunderstood them.

While all this may explain why such things occur it does not get at the root problem. Poor communication and smokescreen tactics like tantrums will never compensate for hard work, diligence and competency. WIllful ignorance of how things are done does not absolve one of being unable to work in their chosen field.

Contrasting my recent disaster of a communicator with a designer I assisted a while ago is the difference between night and day. Working for Don Holder and Karen Spahn was a smooth and fluid experience. Notes and ideas were communicated effortlessly because they would follow the one rule of communication: say what you mean. Leaving aside their generally calm and easy going manner, the process was easy because there were no linguistic hurdles, there were only lighting problems.

By communicating clearly and directly they kept the focus on the lighting. Their energy could be fully devoted to the work in front of them on stage since they were not needlessly expending it in frustrated wonder at why no one could read their mind. There was no need for the Kremlinologist. They simply and clearly expressed what was needed and saw the notes carried out to the best of the ability of their crew.

Such a simple thing really. But then it is often the simple things that can trip you up if you are not aware.

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Posted in design, theatre | 1 Comment »

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