I keep being bad about mentioning show openings.
The Cure for Love is currently playing at The Barter.
We are in the midst of tech for Marko the Prince here in Manhattan.
Posts Tagged ‘tech’
Shows
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
Tech Day Two
Thursday, September 20th, 2007Here we are at the second 10 out of 12 for Dracula! Of course 10 out of 12 refers to the actors schedule, for me its a bit more like a 13 1/2 out of 14 hour day, and thinking about the crew’s hours makes my head hurt.
The show is coming along very well. We got through Act One yesterday and somewhat into Act Two. I think this is shaping up into a nice looking show. The people here are fantastic. Very pleasant in general and the crew is fantastic. We have been getting a lot of good work done.
Enough of the liveblogging from the tech table. Time to get back to work.
Hurry Up and wait . . .
Monday, September 17th, 2007That’s the name of the game. I have been in Abingdon a few days now. Saw two rehearsals, and Dracula is looking to be a fun show. It will be fun to live in the world of melodrama for the week. Unfortunately, the scenery is a bit behind schedule, so that pushes the light focus back.
Its beautiful down here in the Virginia Highlands. The rolling hills are covered in a green just beginning to show signs of Fall. The light is clear and bright. At night the stars come out, and for someone whose eyes are accustomed to New York nights, it seems there are so many of them.
The people here all are very pleasant. I am staying at the Barter Inn. It is housing for all the company actors and out of town personnel for each production. Kind of like a civilized dormitory.
I have been quite amazed by several things this company does. First off is the volume of work they do. They have two stages each with two shows running in repertory for a total of four shows at any given time. Every actor in the company is in at least two shows at once. Its quite a hectic schedule for the actors, run crew and technicians.
The other wonderful thing is that they have a resident company of actors. So all the actors both live and work together. It is a truly wonderful theatre community all focused around the work being produced.
It has been quite wonderful visiting this little community. I had no idea before arrival what it would be like. It seems that the combination of the living situation and the volume of work produced creates for some very strong community ties in the actors and crew of the company.
Its been a wonderful couple of days, but now it is almost time for me to start pointing some lights, so I’ll have to sign off.
Regionalisms
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007The summer has been crazy with all the travel. I got back from California Monday morning and went, more or less, right into tech. Today we load-in for the dance piece I am working on at Joyce Soho with choreographer Trebien Pollard. I am very excited about this project, I think it will be a lot of fun. I have lit around ten or so of his dances but never a full evening piece, so this should be interesting. And then on Sunday I fly to Edinburgh.
Quite a time!
I just got off the phone with a company in Virginia and it looks like I will be lighting two plays in repertory there this September. It is an interesting pairing, Dracula and Driving Miss Daisy. This promises to be a curious few weeks of tech. At least they tech sequentially so I do not have to bounce my brain back and forth from one to the next.
I really enjoy working in differing locations. Spending time in a new or just different city or town really helps with theatre work. Theatre, and by that I include dance and opera, is at its core about human beings and human relationships. The more different types of people one knows and interacts with the greater depth and breadth of experience there is to draw from when working on a show.
So far this year I have worked in four states and one foreign country. By the end of the year I will be adding at least one of each to that list. Not to say that the quality of the experience is based upon its frequency or volume, because it is not, but something for me really gets animated being in new and different places. Returning to familiar locations, like Berkeley, is wonderful as well and provides its own satisfactions.
Working in the theatre is, in many ways, like a perpetual homecoming. Friends and coworkers recombine and move about and are encountered in varying situations. The lead tenor in Aida sang the role of the Mother in The Seven Deadly Sins. The safety coordinator at Glimmerglass was the TD when I worked at Virginia Opera. Different show, different city, same people.
This fall is shaping up nicely with shows in Virginia, California and New York. It will be nice to get a good dose of American regionalisms after spending three weeks in Europe and the UK.
But in the meantime, come see my play, opera, or dance.
Thursday work-a-day
Thursday, June 21st, 2007It has been a busy day. I have been catching up on my preparatory paperwork for Aida. I have also begun some preliminary work on Lovers and Executioners, a play I will be lighting next November in California. Its a little early yet to begin any real work on that play, but I do like to get some of the initial organizational stuff out of the way early so I can focus more on the artistic aspects of the piece later on.
I have worked on so many new scripts recently that it will be nice to work on something published, whose scene structure is known and will not be shifting around much during rehearsals. It can be difficult working on new scripts because quite often one does not know until the piece is up what you have in your hands. It takes a lot of guesswork.
At the same time the trouble with well known works is the trap of falling into a rote response. The trick in both instances then is to come in with a strong idea about the work, but then to remain open and flexible to what the piece can be. It is quite impossible to know before you have actors on stage, in costume and under lights what anything will look like. Or to be more specific, if any of it will work.
Changes to the placement and focus of lighting instruments can at times be interpreted as a lack of preparation on the part of the designer, when in fact the issue is much more subtle than that. Theatre exists in time. And as a temporal artfom one cannot know if a particular gesture is the right one until one sees it in the context of the piece in motion.
This is one of the reasons I do not like technical rehearsals that do a “Cue to Cue.” For the non-Theatre people a Cue to Cue is a horrid situation wherein everyone sits around static and the lighting and sound designers build cues, then, once the cues are written everyone moves on to the next scene or Cue and it is all done again. It is boring for everyone involved. The actors lose a day or two of rehearsal, and the designers work in a static environment that bears no relationship to the actual work.
Far better than the Cue to Cue is to light the show over rehearsal. In this situation the actors and director and whoever else(choreographer etc.) rehearse the play and the lighting designer writes light cues independent of them. The benefit of this is seeing the light in motion as well as the people in motion under the lighting. The cueing and timing is stronger because the light is built with the time sense of the play in mind.
I spent a little time this afternoon cleaning up my lighting design portfolio. A few things were out of date like the upcoming shows as well my resume. I am glad to have taken care of all that. Overall it has been quite a productive day.
In a bit of funny news I saw the UC Berkeley Theatre Department Alumni newsletter today. It has a section where alums can put in a short blurb about what they are doing. I had sent mine in months ago and decided to take a look at it. It turns out that there was more there than I had put in the blurb. So my hunch is that someone involved there reads this blog. I wonder who it is. I am so used to bios and things having to be cut, that it never crossed my mind one would be extended like that. How funny!
No holiday
Sunday, May 27th, 2007Well tomorrow I have rehearsal for Antigona. We fly to Rumania on Tuesday. There are still a lot of unknowns regarding the technical aspects of this production. What we do know is that the venue was unable to supply us with the lightplot I had requested, so there will need be some cuts and rethinking of how the lighting is going to work.
This is a problem we had foreseen and already have a plan in place to solve it. It will be quite an adventure to see what all happens with this show. I am looking forward to it. We began by approaching the text and performance from a minimalist lighting perspective. Now the question will become how minimal.
Previews continue for Fate’s Imagination, although my work is done. No notes from the director and only a small handful of timing changes I noticed makes me feel confident leaving the show with two preview left. I do feel bad about it and try to avoid this kind of situation whenever possible, but in this case it was unavoidable to not leave early.
The process on this show was wonderful. Everyone involved was a true pleasure to work with and for the most part, the design team had never worked together before. I have done one other show with the costume designer and then the director and sound designer have worked together, but other than that a whole new team. And it was a big one, scenery, costumes, lights, sound and projections. Not a simple show by any means. Sound, lighting and projections all have very involved cueing, but it has been handled admirably by the stage manager.
Truly this is one of the more involved shows I have worked on from a technical standpoint. Interestingly it came about very organically through various attempts to solve specific and distinct storytelling problems. The style is a kind of heightened naturalism. Upon a first read I thought it would be a very straightforward naturalistic play, but as things progressed it found a rather interesting and I think very satisfying style. Far more involved then I first thought going into it, but very exciting.
The entire process had one of those “why can’t they all be like this” feelings. The whole design team had a synergy to our working process that is one of the best feelings in the theatre. Where the ideas just flow and the exact germination is of little consequence as it simply becomes a matter of practical and artistic problem solving. A true collaborative effort. I think we have quite a handsome production on our hands.
I have a little bit of work to finish up so I can leave the show in the hands of my master electrician and then its off to the world of minimalism.
First Day of Tech
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007We focused the lights last night for Fate’s Imagination. Things went OK. We had a few minor setbacks due to the rental shop sending us the wrong fixtures and pushing the whole lighting load-in back several hours. We have some notes to take care of this morning and should be back on track by the time we have actors on stage at noon.
I got the best Horoscope EVER for a first day of tech:
Your life will be like an action movie today — minus the explosive car chases, of course! But hour after hour will present you with situations that require quick, decisive responses. Today is not a day to mull things over — you have to act, and act fast! Luckily, there is very little danger that you will make any bad decisions today, so don’t be afraid to lead with your intuition (like a true action hero).
Let’s see how that pans out!
Fate’s Load-In
Monday, May 21st, 2007We have the Load-In for Fate’s Imagination today. The electricians are, I presume, hard at work installing the lighting units for the show. I am finishing up a few of my focus documents and double checking a couple of the things on the lightplot against what I have seen during rehearsal. Most of the changes are simple reassignments of the purpose and functions of lights rather than moving them around.
The space has a VERY low ceiling. The result of a low ceiling is that the space demands a LOT of lighting equipment. It is the irony of these small spaces. Having worked in quite a number of these kinds of spaces I have tried numerous approaches to addressing this issue. This time around I am using many worklights crafted to be functional to the dramatic needs of the play.
The great thing about worklights is because they are designed to flood a room with light, they work very well in these low ceiling situations and allow fewer lights to be used than if conventional theatrical lighting were to be employed. Another aspect of that is how it changes the aesthetic approach to the play. Because these lights move so differently through the volume of the room, one must re-conceive all the lighting for the play to remain stylistically consistent.
The play is structured such that it has three rather different acts thus affording a style change with each act. Further, the acts are largely grounded in location making these style changes easier still. This, combined with the somewhat new approach to lighting the play that I am taking, is looking to be rather exciting. There is an element of risk to some the aesthetic choices I have made that I will find out in a two days if it was the right way to go. I am fairly confident, but there is still the element of the unknown that I look forward to.
Overall the design encompasses a nice hybrid of conventional and non-conventional lighting strategies for the play. In addition to trying out some new structural elements in the design, I am also exploring a few new colors that should be exciting. Color is one of the easiest things to experiment with, as it is one of the cheapest aspects to lighting.
Interestingly color is also one of the easiest elements to fall into rote use with. I have heard designers say so many times “Well I always use . . . whenever I design a lightplot.” I do not understand this approach. A graphic designer would never “always use” a particular font or color palette yet somehow this is accepted in lighting. Certainly there are very useful colors that can and should get reused, but to “always” employ the same ones seems silly.
At the same time I can easily see the color palette in Fate’s Imagination evolving into something a lot more conventional as we progress through tech. There is a solution to one of the main design challenges that would use most to all of the lights with no color media. Most of the effect needed for this play is independent of color, relying on the shape, intensity and quality of light itself. In fact I could easily see a version of this play where no color was used at all. While it is possible we might get there by the end of the week, I do doubt it, but one never can tell.
The director and design team are a great group and we have had a lot of fun in our design meetings so I think this week should be quite enjoyable.
Rotating Rep
Monday, April 16th, 2007Its a curious thing lighting a work you have already designed a year earlier. We load in Cinderella and the repertory program this Thursday and have shows this weekend and next weekend. Its curious because on the one hand the work is done. I have done this before and rebuilding it should be no real trouble at all. On the other hand, every time you encounter a piece it is different. Sometimes its a different cast, sometimes you just have different eyes. Any way you slice it, the work is different.
The lightplot is very similar, but I did make a few adjustments to it that will help the new pieces in the repertory program this time around. Small changes. The kind of this only a lighting designer would notice. But very important.
Repertory lightplots are such strange beasts. They are a delicate balance of specificity and generality. In the case of New York Theatre Ballet each program is distinct enough that there is a different plot for each show. The Cinderella plays not just by itself but with a rotating repertory program that varies year to year. Thus the plot must be able to work for Cinderella but so too must it work for the changing repertory program that goes along with it.
Depending upon the piece, be it a dance, a play or an opera, no less then half the lighting needs to be general enough that the plot can accommodate changes. Perhaps the staging changes at the last minute, or the scenery or costume colors are totally different than you were led to believe, or the writer adds a scene in a new location in the middle of the piece. Any of these scenarios can, will and have happened. The lightplot needs to be flexible enough to react to these and more extreme scenarios. At the same time it must give the particular work in question the specificity and care that it deserves.
It is a balancing act. Difficult and at times nearly impossible, but so goes the job, here is an impossible situation, make it beautiful. Cinderella is far from impossible. It is, to be quite honest a fairly straight forward situation. Some of the documentation is incomplete and most of the repertory pieces are new to me so there is a lot of creation that must go into it. Not so simple as plugging a disk into a computer and cleaning up a few light cues, but certainly not difficult.
It looks to be a nice program, with an interestingly eclectic group of dances. This should be a very pleasant couple of weeks.
A Very Happy Birthday
Saturday, March 17th, 2007Eleven hours straight of tech is a lot to handle on a birthday, but I have to say getting to light some dance was a nice present. Yesterday went very well. We loaded in, focused and got the show cued by 3pm for a run through. A long exhausting day but very satisfying.
While I was just in Florida it feels like I have not lit any dance in a while. I am quite pleased with the result. I think there is some very nice stuff going on on stage from a lighting perspective. The pieces are very different from the company look I have grown accustomed to, it is much more in an aesthetic direction that I enjoy working in, so the lighting was a pleasure to do. It felt like a birthday gift, even though it was simply a pleasant coincidence.
After I got out of the theatre I met my girlfriend for dinner. She took me to an amazing vegan restaurant called Blossom. This was seriously one of the best meals I have ever had. Not just one of the best vegan meals, but one of the best meals. Ever. Seriously. Amazing. Anyone with a passion for good food would do themselves a disservice by not eating here.
What truly surprised me was the dessert. I ordered the cheesecake. Now I love cheesecake, and while I am only vegetarian, not vegan, I still try to minimize my dairy intake, so cheesecake is not consumed that often. But, OH MY GOD. This was amazing. It was not just amazing as vegan cheesecake, it was amazing cheesecake.
Between lighting dance all day, a play opening and having such a wonderful meal last night it was sure a good day. I was off line all through the day while at the theatre and dinner, so I was able to come home to a pile of emails and a few MySpace messages saying happy birthday.
A very nice day.
