Posts Tagged ‘minimalism’

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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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Simplicity, Complexity and Sophistication

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Sitting in an airplane I was just reminded of an interesting conversation I had last week about lighting and music. I was fortunate enough to not only see, but meet, Sonic Youth when they played the Fox Oakland last Sunday. It was a great show. The music was superb and the members of the band who I met, very pleasant to talk to.

The lighting for the show was quite beautiful. There were a few basic elements used and recombined in very interesting ways. First there were four semi-transparent light boxes lit from the front and within. Then eight boxes with incandescent PARs in a 5×5 grid arranged in a semi-circle pointed at the audience. Next up were a half-dozen color changing strobes arranged similarly to the incandescents. Lastly was what I presume to be the house plot, a few dozen moving lights of different varieties.

The evolution of the elements over the course of the show was stunning. The light boxes changed color lit from both directions, thus providing us with an ever shifting color field. The strobes, also color changing, really punched the post-punk deconstructed sound of the band. The overhead lights did what they do best, atmosphere, texture, movement and color.

The real surprise of the show, from a lighting perspective were the incandescents. Not only was the color, clear incandescent light, an almost shocking experience within a rock setting, a medium typified by heavy saturated color, but the sophistication with which they were used was delightful and surprising.

Starting out they did some basic strobing and chase effects blasting the audience the way any good bank of PARs should do. As the show went on, it was revealed that each lamp was individually controlled. These lights morphed from blunt banks of light to clever geometric patterns to words to the organic feel of flames and clouds.

The end result was a lighting scheme sophisticated like the music. While never letting up its grounding as a punk influenced rock show, it revealed an intellectual and aesthetic sophistication akin to the music itself.

Talking with Lee Ranaldo after the show the subject of lighting came up and we discussed what their lighting designer was doing for the tour. Lee mentioned that he liked how simple the design was. I replied that while it used a few simple elements the actual design was quite sophisticated. This led to a brief conversation about the distinction between simplicity and complexity.

The simplicity of the lighting was of a similar nature to that of the band: four guitars, vocals and drums. Lee explained that it was the simplicity of the elements that he was responding to. I found it amazing how the seemingly simple, once one scratches the surface, fast becomes quite complex. Musically this is what Sonic Youth has done for years, taken a rather simple conventional structure and turned it into something amazingly dynamic and sophisticated. Well beyond what is often found in guitar based music.

Sophistication it seems does not derive from complexity. In fact it often arises out of simplicity. This is the essence of minimalism. Minimalism is not about eschewing elements for the sake of fewer things alone. Rather it is a matter of clearing out the noise to provide a clearer and cleaner signal.

Utilizing a few simple elements in profound and complex ways often displays a deeper understanding of the material than a solution that constantly cries out for more. Being comfortable with the material and one’s tools to the point that you can step back and allow the performance to emerge on its own terms takes a great degree of skill.

I am writing this from a window seat on an airplane flying west. Below me are clouds bathed in the warm glow of the slow setting sun. Perhaps as far an image, some might say, from the aesthetics of a rock show. And yet, the visual sophistication created with a single lighting source mirrors in some way the minimalist roots of post-punk Rock and Roll.

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The Freedom of Minimalism

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

The aesthetics of Minimalism are at once precise and freeing. Precise because as one removes extraneous elements from a work what remains takes on increasing significance. Freeing because the relationships are so clear that one can shift and recombine them in a multitude of ways allowing the multiplicity of experience to shine through.

mondrian_albero_rosso

So often the theatre is dominated by a kind of maximalism. A desire to put everything possible into a single work as if by desperation trying to contain all of experience in a few hours performance. The result is often the opposite of what is intended. Rather that giving the fullness of experience, each element is diminished as it all fades into a wash of gray, bland and undistinguished.

This is not to say that minimalism does not employ a rigid and tightly controlled grayscale, but it does so knowing that the fullness of each of those few grays will come across. The depth and subtlety of slight variation becomes a thing of power and strength rather than a faltering weakness.

Mondrian-apple-tree

To work from a minimalist aesthetic requires rigor and discipline. Because while there is a great deal of freedom, if any single element is out of place the work implodes under the weight of its own delicate structure.

Every move must be precise and calculated. At the same time one must allow for room to breathe. For play. Minimalism defines itself not in relation to itself but in relation to the varied multiplicity of the world around it. A blank page only appears blank when surrounded by the frantic modern world. Taken on its own the blank white page is a universe unto itself, filled with color and texture and infinite stories. The filled page is far more fixed and reduced in scale by comparison.

Mondrian-Composition_II-1913

It is interesting to me how much the theatre of the Greeks lends itself to a minimalist aesthetic. When I worked on Medea we employed a very strict minimalism with incredibly slight changes in angle or color. With Antigone we opened up the palette more allowing for greater, yet still a very slight, range of color. This control of the color palette makes the shifts in angle and direction of the light became quite significant.

ryb

In a minimalist aesthetic one often takes a single characteristic or element that remains static around which all other elements rotate. In painting perhaps one employs the use of strict linearity but then gives great variety and contrast to the colors, with vibrant and bold strokes.

In Antigone a tightly controlled color palette gave rise to a great variety in angle, direction and shadow. The simplicity of the setting allowed for a high contrast with the costume. Finding these points of control is what makes possible the freedom in a minimalist work. A clear centerpoint is the basis of minimalism.

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Color Sense

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

I have been working on the lightplot for the revival of Cinderella with New York Theatre Ballet. Largely the plot is the same as last year. However there were some changes in the house plot at Florence Gould Hall and the repertory program that plays with Cinderella is different so the lightplot has changed some.

I think these are all very beneficial changes. Some things have been streamlined, some others expanded. For the most part it has been a matter of maximizing what is available in the palette. The company prefers a very colorful look. This is a fun aesthetic to work in, but the trick is to get the color sense without using so many colors that the light gets muddy. It is very easy with a lot of color to make costumes look old and dingy. The trick is to have a look that is clean and also shows off the dancers, costumes and scenery to the best advantage.

I love working in heavy color environments. Windows was quite the extreme as far as the use of color goes, but it helps make the point. Often, though, I find that direct saturated colors like that are not what is wanted in a colorful space. More the need of the piece is a sense of color. The feel of color is very different than the direct application of heavily saturated colors themselves.

The color sense of a piece is often a key factor in how a piece if perceived. Medea wanted a terse look. It needed a strong but minimal framework to place around the action of the play. The result was heavy use of shadow, black is a very important color in the lighting designers toolbox, and a very contained color palette. The Last Word . . . , a totally different kind of show, had en even tighter color palette. The color varied by less than 1000 degrees Kelvin, with no black.

New York Theatre Ballet can be a tricky aesthetic to nail down. My experience has been that it works best with a sense of color, but when saturated colors are used they are kept in the background. Saturated colors are very present, purples and blues and greens and reds, but the majority of the color work is “invisible.” That is, the colors are tints. A cool white or a warm white, slightly pink or a touch of amber or a pale blue, but no strong color.

It is the careful mixture of these tints, combined with the selective use of saturated colors, that gives the overall piece its color sense. Color can be a difficult thing to get a hold of. One of my reasons for going to NYU for graduate school is the legendary color lecture of John Gleason carried on by Curt Ostermann. And while this can provide all the rules, it then takes hundreds of experiments and breaking of the rules to really get a grasp on it.

Every play or dance or opera is a kind of experiment. Even revivals. They are never definitive, but always propositions. Will this piece resonate with an audience today? What must be done to make it speak in a language accessible today. In many ways dance is the strongest in this regard. There is an immediacy to dance that is a much less common thing in a play. In Opera it is the rare occurrence that it holds that fresh immediacy, but when it does, it is a sight to behold!

The color sense can be a powerful tool to help bring a piece into a framework accessible to the audience. It is a delicate balance to find what is both true to the work and at the same time pulls the audience into that work in a clear and direct manner. Lots of work, but a hell of a lot of fun too.

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Addicted to cancer like there’s some type of cure for it

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

I am considering only using rap lyrics for my post subject headers for the month of November. Not quite the dedication of writing a play during the month. But its a goal. And goals are good things to have.

I write a fair bit about aesthetics here in this forum but I often feel as though it is a hollow pursuit. For one thing it feels like an awfully long monologue with little critical engagement. The other reason is that in freelance design, certainly lighting design, aesthetics as a formal entity take a back seat to a kind of philosophy of presence. The goal becomes not the execution or definition of some aesthetic pursuit, but rather a clarification of a way of looking at things.

Interlude: I am listening to Overture on Ice by Laetita Sonami, part of the “Handel’s Messiah Remixed”, and it is FUCKING AWESOME !

Back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

These discussions of aesthetics, or this exploration of the aesthetics of presence are something that I am having trouble coming to terms with. At one level is the fact that I find myself unable to more directly engage my subject matter because it would involve criticism of my colleagues. This is something that I feel is a violation of the trust placed in a collaborative partnership. Its the same reason I do not talk about my relationship with my girlfriend in public. It is a unfair of me, I feel, as one part of a greater whole to violate that. Like Zay says, one must maintain the integrity of the container that holds any relationship.

The result of this is that I talk either in generalities or my writing becomes reductively self-referential. Neither of these is something that I am wholly satisfied with. I am very bad at documenting my work. As a result there is only a small subset of my work that I have pictures of. And there is only so many times anyone wants to look at a Foucault’s Pendulum or Flaming Pasties. So I post my camera phone pictures. Some of them might be nice, but they are snapshots not compositions, so they can only point around what I am speaking to not directly engage it.

A Picture Share!

My first true engagement with light came through photography. I love black and white photography and have spent countless hours developing film and making prints. I began in theatre as an assistant stage manager. My engagement with it was always lukewarm. When I first got into lighting I wanted to do music videos. I was attracted by the intersection between light and music. I found them to be far more similar than they are different. This was a wonderful discovery for someone who has loved music since he was a small child(even if my dad did play his records too loud!) yet could not play an instrument to save his life. I survived in the high school band through a determination built from my crush on the first clarinetist more than any interest or ability in playing music.

So light, as a perfect compliment to music, became my goal. I wanted to learn anything and everything there was to know. I photographed incessantly. I took every design and electrician job I could get my hands on. I lit theatre, dance, raves, anything that came across my path. I went to NYU to continue this study and exploration of light. Again I took on anything that came my way. I lit 12 dances for the dance department my first year and ended up their resident designer my last two years. I went out and saw as much performance as I could, averaging between one and two shows a week for my first year on top of a full school and work schedule. Needless to say I did not sleep more than three hours a night.

A Picture Share!

Since then I have been doing as much work as I can get my hands on. When I met Ken Posner, he was just getting off a phone call. He turned to me and said “I don’t even know what the show is, but I said yes. Always say yes.” Sounds like great advice, he was after all designing Wicked, one of the largest Broadway shows to date, at least from a lighting standpoint. So since then I have always said yes.

I would not say that was a definitive moment, as I was already going in that direction, but it sure strengthened my resolve. Say yes to every show. It can be good dating advice too. Somewhere there my goals shifted from an interest in exploring the intersection between light and music to taking every show I was offered. This is not a bad thing. I have developed interests that otherwise would not have come my way had I closed myself off to them.

A Picture Share!

The more I do this lighting thing the more I find myself drawn to the world of Opera. I think in Opera lies the perfect synthesis of my interest in intellectual minimalist modes of storytelling as well as an exploration of the intersection of light and music. Yet I am still in that tricky situation of being a freelancer and thus able to say yes and no to what comes across my plate, but unable to choose the work that I do.

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Total Commitment OR The spiritual affinity of Moss Hart and Jerzy Growtowsky

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

We shout with triumph when we discover silly misunderstandings in Artaud. The sign which, in oriental theatre, is simply a part of a universally known alphabet, cannot – as Artaud would have it – be transferred to European theatre in which every sign has to be born separately in relation to familiar psychological or cultural associations, before becoming something quite different . . . Yet he does touch on . . . the very crux of the actors art: that what the actor achieves should be . . . a total act, that he does whatever he does with his entire being, and not just one mechanical . . . gesture of the arm or leg, not any grimace, helped by logical inflection and a thought. No thought can guide the entire organism of an actor in any living way. It must stimulate him, and that is all it really can do. Without commitment, his organism stops living . . . In the final result we are speaking of the impossibility of separating spiritual and physical. The actor should not use his organism to illustrate a “movement of the soul”, he should accomplish this movement with his organism.
Jerzy Grotowsky, Towards a Poor Theatre

It might seem strange to associate Moss Hart with Grotowsky, but I think the two of them have a surprising amount in common. On my vacation to the Republica Dominicana I read Hart’s Act One. If anyone is keeping score with my “Gradschool Procrastination” series this fits right in. My second year at NYU one of my lighting teachers Allan Lee Hughes suggested I read it. Not a formal assignment, but as a supplement to my course work. Well, with the rigors of grad school the only supplement I would take to my course work was drinking. So it took me a few years to finally do that assignment.

Act One should be required reading on the part of any serious student and practitioner of the theatre. More than any book book of theory or technique, Act One touches on the very heart of the theatrical life. That life of total commitment. The life that one can not “come back to” because it so firmly stands outside the day to day world of the rest of humanity. This is no hierarchical thing. It does not stand above other fields. But rather it demands of its practitioners a tenacious madness that once lost is difficult to return to. Even the six months I took off from designing to be the lighting assistant at the SF Opera killed so much of the momentum necessary to keep up. I wonder what I have missed in this week.

The story that Hart tells is one of unwavering commitment to a dream. His whole being dedicated to the theatre, to making a reality what he could only see in his mind. His story is one of the transformation from a vague impression of wanting to be involved somehow, to the nitty gritty practicalities of producing on Broadway. While told in almost epic proportions, the kind of transformation he undergoes is the same for every serious practitioner every time we step into the theatre. Every time we face that dark blank four dimensional canvass of the theatre we must strengthen our resolve against the pitiless gaze of the stage.

Every play is new.

Every new situation demands that we find that reserve again. That we rediscover that place inside ourselves that allows us to tap into the currents and energies of a text and build from that foundation a living breathing thing out of voice and movement and form and fabric and light. Sometimes it is the easiest thing in the world and all the pieces fall together born fully formed out the head of Zeus. And other times we are like Sisyphus pushing the rock interminably up that steep hill only to fail at the last minute and return to the bottom once again.

In many ways the truest test of this is the Musical Comedy. The light and effortless way in which a musical must flow takes the determined strength of hundreds to pull it all together. The rigor demanded by Minimalism is one thing, but what is demanded by the Musical Comedy is something of a whole other order of magnitude. In this same way opera demands an expansiveness that continually pushes at the horizons of imagination.

In all these theatrical pursuits what is demanded is an unwavering spirit and dedication to the art. And that dedication to the art must be born not in the head or in the body, but in the soul. The work must wholly infuse the spirit of the artist to even have a chance. And even then the risk of failure is great. It is this understanding of dedication, this total submission of the self to the work that is the intersection of Hart and Grotowsky. They both know the sacrifice that is necessary and live fully in that place of total commitment.

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Methodical Thinking

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

A method for Lighting the Stage by Stanley McCandless was first printed in 1932. My personal copy is a 1984 reprint of the 1963 correction to the Fourth Edition that was first printed in 1958. I mention this only because this book was, and by many people still is considered a primary text for lighting design. Rather than being “a” method during all those years, it was considered by many to be “the” method.

The specifics of the book are uninteresting to anyone but a specialist, so I will glaze over them for the moment. The basic idea is this. Light, in any setting is motivated by some source, i.e. a lamp, the sun, a fire, etc. Thus, any object that is hit by that source has essentially two sides, a light side and a shadow side. McCandless then divided up the stage space into a grid of acting ‘areas’ and into each area would focus two lights, each coming from the front on a 45 degree angle. One would be warm, perhaps a pale amber, and one would be cool, a blue. Which was which depended upon where the lamp or window or whatever was placed. This is a very efficient means of lighting a stage space. You cover the entire stage and you can control the relative brightness or dimness of different locations on stage. If you have six areas, you need twelve lights. Clean, simple, done.

Much of what was going on in McCandless’ thinking had to do with problem solving for a much less advanced technology than we now have available. Power and control were two of his main concerns. In those days there simply was not enough electricity to power more than a few dozen lights. And controlling them was an insane job taking several electricians operating large panels of levers. Then and now is like comparing a mid-century computer and the latest laptop. One is large, bulky and slow, the other small, fast and efficient. For his time it was an amazing and progressive way of dealing with a very real situation. And this is a situation many people still find themselves in in the ‘indie-theatre’ world, where power and control are the first concern and art the second. The Method is a great way to turn minimalism by circumstance into minimalism by design.

The real tragedy of McCandless’ legacy is that too often his writing is taken literally, that one must light a show from the box booms with amber from one side and blue from another. If you want an old fashioned look, then this is certainly the source to begin with, but I would hope that our aesthetic sensibilities have evolved past the 1930’s. What I find interesting about going back to texts like this is to try and extract the essence of the idea, the motivation behind the specifics and then attempt to apply it to a contemporary setting. This is what I was getting at yesterday,

Both McCandless and Carson’s work is concerned with a kind of economy of volume. That is how to fill a stage both efficiently and beautifully. While the final product could not be more different, in many ways they stem from the same origin.

While we were working on Norma at the San Francisco Opera, Heather turned to me and said with a wry smile, “See, that’s how you light an opera for less than $12,000.” Both of these designers are interested in an economy of volume. They want to fill the space elegantly and beautifully, minimizing waste and maximizing the dramatic story telling. Their motivation is the same, where they differ, truly, is a matter of aesthetics. McCandless is looking for some replication of reality, while Carson’s concern is the idea. Her work tends to be very intellectually engaging and cerebral. It is very abstract, but the light follows very clearly defined rules of movement and transformation.

The conventional American style of lighting a play is in many ways an evolution of the McCandless idea. However, rather than a reworking of the initial impulse, an economy of volume, it has been a modification of the ‘area lighting.’ The stage is broken up into many little areas and a lot of little spotlights are pointed at those areas from various directions and in several colors. Virtually every theatre in the U.S. is equipped to light a show based on some variation of this idea. It is a very effective means of lighting a stage, but in many ways it feels like its aesthetic usefulness is coming to a close. I certainly do not envision seeing a broadway show radically diverge from this model any time soon, but something about it feels increasingly out of place in the modern world.

My fundamental problem is that it looks at the performer as an object. As little more than a moving prop that talks. The actor moves, the light moves, simple and easy. Yet, there is so much more available to light than mere illumination. Film understands this. The great cinematographers use light as a dynamic storytelling device in ways that are almost unthinkable in the theatre. There is a fallacy among a lot of people in the theatre that ‘if I can’t see their eyes I can’t hear them.’ Yet, Marlon Brando was heard throughout The Godfather while cloaked in shadow for most of his screen time. A cursory look at the Noir genre shows the almost limitless potential of light as storytelling device.

Revealing the actor to the audience is the primary goal of lighting. Yet how that revelation occurs is something that must be answered uniquely at every moment. A character is not simply illuminated. They are revealed. They are revealed existing within a given psychological and physical context. The are revealed through someone’s perception. They are revealed in relationship to some one or some thing. The performer does more, much more, than simply stand here, then there. They live. They exist as a complex matrix of thoughts and feelings and action. It is that whole that must be revealed, not just the deed of crossing the stage.

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Parabolic Hyperbole and Minimal Lyricism

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem.
–Aristotle, The Poetics

One gets the sense reading Ajax that Sophocles was trying to break free from the conventions of the Dramatic Literature of his time through the bifurcation of the story he was telling. Ajax at once falls too neatly into two different sections for a dramatist as skilled as Sophocles to not be doing this intentionally. Further, the work feels like a mirror, or perhaps a parabola, extending infinitely in either direction from the event of the death of Ajax.

The death of Ajax is like a node where all the events from the first half flow to and all the events of the second half derive from. Blanchot does everything Sophocles wishes he could do. Yet in a way Sophocles does attain to this degree of effort. Ajax’s death is marked by the words of farewell a lover might give their beloved. He bids farewell to the sun and the earth, his father and his wife after asking forgiveness and pity from Zeus and the Furies. It is a ceremonial farewell spoken with words held as in religious ceremony, only to end the speech with a mildly ironic turn of phrase, “These are Ajax’ last words on earth: whatever else I say only the Dead will hear.”

Yet if we remember, we are but phantoms, “we’re counterfeits, we mortals, we’re shadows, blown on the wind.” Even in the certain actions of Sophocles we are uncertain, for we are but shadows. The madness of Ajax that brought us to this place of dramatic revelation could be continuing still. All action is become suspect. We know no more than Blanchot’s narrator if the ground we stand upon be true. The uncertainty of life continues to the uncertainty of death. The Hero turned base scoundrel and madman is persecuted by his own mind in life only to find exoneration and vindication in death. His worst enemy in life becomes his savior in death.

Unlike Blanchot’s Madness of Day where the destination is of far less importance than the journey, or Antigone where we watch two unwavering characters act out a battle of will, Ajax takes us on a journey that can only lead to despair and yet we do not. We can not despair. For Ajax was not a hero until vindicated in death. In life his deeds of the utmost bravery were ignored because of the clever words of Odysseus. His vengeful anger at this oversight triggered a madness that reduced him to little more than a common criminal. His suicide was neither noble nor redemptive. It was a cowardly act perpetrated by a man cornered in desperation. At the moment of his death he was no hero. He was the opposite of hero. He was in fact the most miserable character that could possibly be.

The very force of his fall was also cause for his restoration and redemption. His plight so extreme, he could only be raised to the highest of heights allowable to a mortal man. He is the opposite of Blanchot’s narrator, who through his too human suffering can go nowhere but back to where he began. Another aspect of this tension is alluded to by George. It is the play between poetry and prose, between literality and metaphor, madness and clarity that gives power to these works.

Ajax appears to achieve escape velocity from his prescribed fate and arrives in death a Hero. In mirroring his fall from grace, by showing us the opposite action in the second half of the play we are constantly reminded of the fall as we watch the ascent. In this way the two events, that lie upon a temporal spectrum, are compressed into a single experiential moment. Life and death and rebirth exist at one and the same time. We are able to see the Hero walk across the stage only after his mortal self has been taken from our world. Ajax is become immortal as Blanchot’s narrator becomes eternal. All of time and experience are compressed into this single moment, and for that instant, we too are forever.

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Across the Mirror – Madness, Mortality and Ajax

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Maurice Blanchot in his Madness of Day destroys the Aristotilian category of the primacy of Plot, along with most every classical value ascribed to dramatic storytelling. He does within literature what many so-called post-modernists do about literature. He creates text that falls in on itself. Action and character and episode shift in a never ending play of signification. It uses its own mass as a kind of grounding and never finds a level space on which to stand. It ends where it began, nowhere and everywhere.

A man.

Lost to himself.

Insane.

Alone.

This could be Ajax in the postmodern world. There is no set plot or rather there is no linear narrative. The various dramatic episodes flow neatly and smoothly one into the next in a powerfully organic way. Every death is a rebirth. Every reversal of situation reverses again and every recognition becomes once again hidden. The plot, in its own way, is actually quite clear. What is kept from us in any fixed way is place and time and point of view. Blanchot paints for us not a hospital room or a prison cell, but a true landscape of the mind. The transitions between events are at least as compelling as the events themselves. It is the connections and the distortions that are of interest, not the step by step series of locations.

Our speaker confronts the disaster of their own Being and finds himself lost in clouds of thought. Self and purpose obscured by the many shifting currents of the mind. Blanchot’s narrator is the perfect answer to Ajax and his righteous rage. We see this when he says, so simply, “When I die . . . I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying.”

Blanchot weaves a tapestry that speaks in the space between Ajax’s words. It is a vital stillness that holds us captive. A meditation on the inevitability of Human experience. It is a coming to terms with the madness and absurdity of life. The complete insanity that is the modern condition. One becomes the other.

The text moves imperceptibly slow. It creeps along. Holding your attention fully in the moment and when you step back to see where you are, a surprise awaits you. ‘How ever did we get here,’ one must ask. For place is not a static thing in this world. Time too. The end is in the beginning and we feel ourselves moved along inevitably like an ant upon a mobius strip. We become locked inside this story that is not a story. “A story? No. No stories, never again.”

This kind of text calls for a precision and a stillness that can only be found within the cleanliness of minimalism. That solitary speaker, alone, must not be over exposed. The words are too full, they go mad in the fullness of day. Only in the half light are they safe to be spoken. The memory that falls through our narrator’s hands like water must not get burned out. It is a fragile and delicate thing. Soft. “That was the truth: the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all reason; it assailed me irrationally, without control, without purpose.”

Blanchot’s meditation on mortality and madness must be handled with poetry. Prose is dangerous. Literality deadly.

The text must be allowed to breathe. The still and fragile morning air must be able to contain both the finality of life and the possibility of death. For in this stillness “a vast solitude opened . . . and the entire world disappeared inside it.” The text lives in the madness of day “and outside it there is nothing.”

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