Mother GOOSE! is packed away in a truck on its way to Arizona. I will not be going to Arizona, but my lighting will. My friend Ben is traveling with the company as a stage manager and lighting director. His job is to as faithfully as possible recreate my lighting for the Ballet. This means is in a few days my lighting will be up before audiences in two different states.
Sending a piece out on tour like this can be a tricky proposition. Not every venue will meet all the lighting needs for the piece. The result is that items must be placed in a hierarchy of needs such that the core ideas are maintained even when it is not possible to recreate the whole and complete work.
The same thing happens with staging as well. Some venues are bigger, some smaller. As a result the staging must expand or contract to meet those changing needs. Taking a piece on tour is a powerful reminder that the term “site specific” is a bit of a misnomer. All works are site specific. Every piece of entertainment, be it theatre, opera or dance is all dependent upon the specific site that it is located in.
Very often these sites are quite similar. All proscenium stages have a regularity to them. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Certain shots simply will not work in certain houses. Some places the proportion is such that the entire work needs to be restaged so that it feels right, even if it fits at a literal level. It can be a tricky balancing act.
The Last Word has its first preview tonight. My work with the play is done. I am going to stop in again on Wednesday to go over a few things with the stage manager about maintaining the design, but the work part for me is finished.
The floor was white tile, but the intent was to make it look old and dingy. That, for various reasons, did not happen until the night before the final dress rehearsal on Sunday. It is an interesting thing lighting a set that is still being finished. During tech we had our rehearsals and then in the evening afterwards were work calls to finish the scenery. What this meant for me was that there was a lot more bounce to the light during tech than there was going to be in the end. As a result I was forced to overexpose the lighting such that when the floor came down in value to its proper level, the lighting would look right.
I loved watching the show on Sunday. I had spent the few days before a little nervous that the value of light on the walls was a little to high relative to that on the performers. I had to keep reminding myself that the walls would get dim when the floor was less reflective. And it worked. I had guessed almost perfectly and the lighting looked exactly as I had intended when I watched the runthrough Sunday evening.
Photograph by Carol Rosegg
I have been up quite late the last few days working on various personal projects as well as tidying up a bunch of work stuff. Two shows I have coming up soon are fairly organic in their process. Of course that does not change the fact that lighting equipment must still be rented and dealt with.
It’s a busy time. I have four projects in the next three weeks. Artfuckers and Operation Ajax are full plays. Then I have a workshop of Ajax at Target Margin for two days. Also, I am assisting on a dance piece at The Danspace Project.
It is a bit intimidating, but somehow it all fits together nicely with days off for one coinciding with runthroughs for another. On the 8th is the official opening of Last Word. After the madness calms down I have a few days with no work in a theatre before I head south to Florida to meet up with the Ballet tour for a weekend of performances. Not Mother GOOSE!, they are performing a selection of their repertory for adult audiences in Delray Beach. And gauging by the weather here, I have a feeling that a Florida beach town will be a wonderful break from New York CIty.
