Thoughts on Lighting

returned from London

Clifton Taylor — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:27:35 GMT

Well, its been about forever. At least it feels that way. The
London production of "Jay Johnson: The Two and Only" has opened... and
closed. It garnered wonderful reviews (4 out of 5 stars from both
the Guardian and the London Times, as well as very favorable press
from many other sources), as it has everywhere it has played, but the
producers apparently could not sell enough tickets to the show. The
graphics, in my opinion, were much better in London than we've ever
had, but reviews and graphics cannot make a hit. The show was closed
after only 3 weeks.

The actual experience of working in London in the West End for the
first time was very instructive. I had a really wonderful non-union
crew fitting out the theater under very difficult circumstances.
Difficult because the show was supposed to run in REPERTORY with an
italian musical called "All Bob's Women." This was not a clearly
thought out situation. First of all, "The Two and Only" was
scheduled to start at 7:30pm. Our show was cut down to 90 minutes
for London, so that meant we were to come down at 9pm. "All Bob's
Women" was scheduled to start at 9:30! This meant that there were
exactly ZERO minutes to change the set between the shows. Even if
both shows were performed on the SAME set, this would not have been
realistic, and we did not in any way have the same set. The Arts
theater in London, though quite lovely and I thought perfect for "The
Two and Only" is one of the smallest West End venues, and there is
very little room backstage.

To make matters worse, we never received proper drawings of the "All
Bob's Women" set (the theater crew said that there were never any
proper drawings of the set). Many things that Beowulf Borritt (our
wonderful set designer) and I had planned had to be modified in the
theater during load-in. The biggest being that our set had to be
about 1 meter shallower than we had drawn because of the upstage
location of the "All Bob's Women" set. But there were other things
as well. The side masking was in so far that the side-lights had to
be all re-hung and mounted inside the proscenium arch in full view of
the audience in order to make their shots. The overhead pipes could
not be re-trimmed between shows because of time and the way they had
been rigged, so we had to live with trim heights that were not
ideal. The first time that the crew did the change-over under time
pressure with an audience, "All Bob's Women" finally got started at
10:10pm, forty minutes late! A reviewer for "All Bob's Women" was in
the audience for that show and the forty minute wait was prominently
featured in his writeup.

I was really amazed at the casual treatment of scaled drawings in
London. The set was moved downstage by that meter without anyone
ever saying a word to me; and when we had to move an electric pipe
downstage that same meter so that the lights could focus properly, no
one took responsibility for the set move. However, that all said, I
know that everyone on the crew worked extremely hard under a
tremendous amount of pressure that had been put there because of the
situation. Because we had used a Strand desk on Broadway, we were
able to use the New York show file in London with little trouble.
Our very capable programmer, Howard Hudson, did a great job on the
desk in Palette mode and our electricians, Cameron Bannister and Nate
Seekins got all the electrics sorted under very difficult and tight
circumstances.

In the end, "All Bob's Women" closed after just a couple of
performances, so that when I left London, it seemed that everything
was much more relaxed. I had been most worried about maintaining
the show given the massive change-over (including re-plugging mults
into the very limited dimming system, testing moving lights for both
productions with no onsite master elec, maintaining focuses for the
fixed rig, and of course watching gel and lamp burnouts), so the
closing of the other show, while I felt bad for them, meant only good
things for Jay's production. But alas, it did not matter. We
closed shortly afterwards, before I even got home from Europe.
That, is show business.

Working in London

Clifton Taylor — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:46:00 GMT

Well, its official: "Jay Johnson, The Two and Only," a little show for which I designed the lighting on Broadway in 2006 is going to London! It begins previews at the Arts Theater at the end of June, and everyone on the production is so happy this is happening. Jay won the Tony in 2007 for best Special Theatrical Event and he's been on a US tour since his broadway run. I've lit for Rambert Dance Company, been on tour with some american dance companies (and others have brought my work without me), and lit a few industrials (for Hasbro Toys) in the past, but this is my first theater show in London. I sent off the light plot today and we tech the week of June 22. If you live in London, come by the theater and say hello!

Control Desks continued: Displays

Clifton Taylor — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:35:00 GMT

Earlier this week I wrote a little bit about the new GrandMA2 console and the command line interface. There was a long bit of history in that post, but I put that there to remind us all of how we got to the place we are today with lighting consoles. One thing that I've learned from years of working in Europe and Asia and South America is that the way we work in the US Theater is unique in the world. Perhaps less so today than 10 or 20 years ago, but we still have some unique working methods. For making theater lighting in a well-off country, I think the US system has some great advantages both for the designer and the production, but the fact is that we do many things differently in the US than in other places.

One of the biggest differences that I've found is the separation into different positions that we have come to expect between the Lighting Designer and the Programmer and/or Operator. In many places, these various functions are performed by one person who stays with a show over its entire life. I'm not saying this is always the case, and certainly, in many places in the american theater, there are plenty of designers who operate their own consoles, but in general, in the US professional theater, these are separate functions performed by several people. This separation of function has created the need for our lighting consoles to deliver remote display function to the designer. Before the ubiquity of the networked systems that we have today, remote video was delivered to the design table via a video cable. The screens on the designer's desk showed us exactly what the programmer of the console saw on his monitors. And with the simpler desks (only conventional dimmers, maybe some scrollers) this was fine. With the command line displayed, the designer could help the programmer create exactly the cue that he or she wanted. The programmer remained in complete control of every function of the console and could remain responsible for every aspect of the desk.

The introduction of automated luminaires, borrowed from the concert world, created a sort of crisis in for theater lighting designers and electricians, which is only now beginning to be resolved: they couldn't easily be programmed on the desks that had been built for the theater. For more than 20 years, the solution on broadway has been to bring lighting desks that were actually built for the concert world into the theater to program and operate the moving separately from the conventional lights. The advantage of this system is that along with the desk, we can justify to a producer that is necessary to bring in a specially trained programmer to deal with the automated lights. With 2 desks and 2 programmers (conventional and moving lights), technical rehearsals can be more efficient. Also, because of the extensive training that the moving light programmer has necessarily received, he or she can be a creative asset to the lighting designer, offering solutions and ideas to the designer at a high level. So on Broadway, the standard for many years has been a Hog II console for the moving lights and an Obsession console for the conventional lighting. The two consoles would be linked by a MIDI connection, and the Obsession GO button would trigger the GO on the Hog cue stack.

With the concert systems, the programming interface has traditionally been graphical. Utilizing touch screens and operating in a non-linear manner, they do not lend themselves to providing remote display monitors like we are used to from the conventional desks. On the broadway musical "Hot Feet" that I designed a couple of years ago, I had a monitor from the moving light console showing me its cue list, but nothing more. I could see what cue the moving light console was outputting to the stage, but not much more. In fact, I was completely dependent on the (thankfully extremely talented) programmer to execute programming decisions properly. In a way, this was a great thing. I could concentrate on THE STAGE, and let go of needing to see a monitor. But it was a luxury afforded on Broadway and rarely in regional theater or off-broadway. When you can afford it, this system works. It is efficient and there is an entire community of designers, assistants, programmers, electricians, shops and producers on broaday who have become comfortable and familiar with this configuration of hardware and personnel. However, there are many situations in the world today where one wants or needs moving lights where the economics of the particular production do not allow for this elaborate set-up or the personnel to create, program, maintain and operate it.

And in these places - outside of Broadway - designers today can often get some moving lights into their plots, but cannot afford the separate console or the highly trained and specialized programmer. In these cases, we find ourselves in the position of NEEDING to direct and monitor the operator/programmer in the function of all the lights, including the automated ones. For this reason, I have long favored consoles that can operate the moving lights via a command line that I can monitor. This was the idea behind my earlier post, and it is why I prefer systems like the GrandMA2, the EOS and the Strand 500 series. It is a practical desire, so that as a designer not sitting with the console, I can help the programmer create the looks that I want.

Now, this is a post about monitors, and I'll get back to that, but there is one more bit of history and background that needs to be covered: Networking. As personal computer technology has progressed, we have become used to operating in a networked environment with our laptops in our offices. Network capable lighting desks have been around for quite a while now and the networking model offers many potential advantages: first and foremost is multi-tasking. In a networked environment, an electrician can be working on a focus with an assistant or fixing a lamp and bring up channels independent of the main desk. This way, a maintenance issue doesn't have to stop a programming session. To implement this, lighting desk manufacturers have generally adopted a 'multi-user' model, allowing each user access to the common DMX output stream while separating the command lines that create this common stream into separate environments. On the face of it, this is an elegant solution from an system designer's point of view because of its symmetry. Every person in the theater who needs a monitor from the lighting console is a separate (and equally capable) user with his or her own processor, preferences, monitor screens, and command capability. In such a system, adding additional users is as easy as adding an additional PC running specialized 'virtual console' software to the network. Both the network infrastructure and computer hardware are standard issue and relatively inexpensive.

But this model has some problems. In the theater, we don't easily fit into this symmetric model. Here is a schematic drawing showing a typical user set-up with a pre-networked conventional desk in a theater:

before networking, the designer's monitors (9 and 10) and the stage manager's monitor (11) were direct copies of the primary control desk's monitor 1 and 2. Everything that happened on the control desk's monitors was seen by the designer.

Most installations though nowadays, including temporary rental installations such as exist on Broadway, are networked. With consoles that can handle moving lights, there are many more monitors available to the desk, including some with touch-screen interfaces. Text has gone the way of DOS and all monitors now display information graphically, giving the programmer and designer potentially much more information in the same screen real-estate. A modern typical setup for a show might look something like this, with all the positions connected within a local network:

Each of the processors can potentially be in command of the system. Each user has preference control over their own screen layouts. But in the theater, most times, we don't want to give every user the same command capability. Furthermore, the users shouldn't be entirely separate. Each person has unique needs from the lighting control system.

Let's concentrate for a moment on the bottom part of the drawing, the Primary control desk and the designer's desk. The primary desk in this example has 4 video monitors, and the designer's desk has 2 monitors. As a designer, I actually DON'T want to know everything that a programmer/operator can know from his console. I want to spend most of my time looking at the Stage, not processing information on a monitor. Primarily, I would like a CUE LIST and a secondary screen that MOST of the time would display the INTENSITY LEVELS of lights.

With a network setup such as I've drawn, I am, as the designer, actually seeing information from a SEPARATE computer on the network. And because of the way that most console software is currently written, I can either be a separate USER, with complete control over the screen layout and my own command line *OR* I can be set up to be a mirror of the primary console. If I set up my desk to be a mirror to the primary console, I can see the command line of the primary desk (a really good thing), however, the screen layout may not otherwise be to my liking, because with still only 2 monitors, I would have to choose which of the primary desk's monitors to mirror.

What I actually want as a designer is for the modern console to at MOST times, replicate the RESULT of the pre-networked computers. I want to have one monitor show me a cue list, showing the active cue, the cue that is in blind or in the 'programmer' section of the console, and the times of the cue. On the other monitor I want to see the PRIMARY CONTROL DESK's command line. In addition, most of the time, as a default, I want to see a layout of intensity channels on the second monitor. I want the operator of the primary desk to have PAGING control over this display (like we are used to in a pre-networked desk, like on an Obsession console). But I also want to have the ability to Page the screen myself at the design table so that I can look at a cue's total intensities while not bothering the operator. I want both ways of paging simultaneously. I specifically do not want my own command line or control over the system, however, it would be useful if, in addition to local paging, I (or more usually, my assistant, could look at cues in blind independent of the primary control desk. To add one more twist to it, I want the programmer on the primary console to be able to show me other things from his console at times. Perhaps its all the attributes for a moving light, or all the timing information for a specific complex cue. But most important, the operator should be able to return me to the default setup with one or at most two easy keypresses whenever I ask, over-riding anything else I might have been doing with my monitors.

This is admittedly a strange setup if one thinks in terms of symmetric users on a network. It is in fact a sort of Hybrid User that has a few functions that are locally controlled, but also can see the command line of another user.

At the top of the drawing, in the backstage area, is still the stage manager desk. This should be like the designer setup in that its another hybrid. I want this user to have a cue list most of the time. But even here, the operator of the primary console should be able to temporarily cause this monitor to display other information from the console. Many times, cue notes happen backstage before the show begins and it would be useful if this display could show a designer standing at the stage manager's desk channel levels or moving light information. Again, though, it should be easy for the operator of the primary control desk to return this monitor back into a cue list with one or two key presses.

.....

I am the lighting director for a large dance festival here in New York and in Orange County California (Fall for Dance). The New York festival hosts 30 dance companies in 6 unique shows and we are in a constant state of tech with guest designers and company lighting directors coming through for their few at the design table to light their piece within our plot. Over the years, we have developed a rep plot that incorporates a lot of moving lights and scrollers to make the system as flexible as possible. Most dance companies don't yet use moving lights in their own plots and most of the time, I want to mask the complexity of the system for the visiting designers so that they can concentrate on the already difficult task of replicating their company's cues in our rep plot. The moving lights that we have are mostly used for re-focusable specials or to create a system (ie backlight or pipe end sides) that doesn't already exist in our rep plot. The visiting designer doesn't need to be involved in the nitty gritty of the moving light setup and in fact on their displays, I would prefer if they only ever saw intensity information, the cue list and the primary desk's command line. This is not possible with the current console's such as the GrandMA or the EOS.

Now I know that this is a somewhat unique situation. However, I am only asking that the new technology that we have replicate the abilities of the old technology. All of us who have been around long enough in the theater have been looking at the Palette/Obsession layout for nearly 30 years. Why not re-create it with a modern console? Of course, extend it in ways described above and in a million other ways that concert designers, television lighting directors, architectural designers and non-US based designers want, but don't throw away how we have been working for such a long time.

Last year, we had an EOS console for the festival with various monitors on the desk. Because time is so short, most guest designers couldn't begin to learn the particulars of the EOS screen layout in a useful way during their session. Many designers ended up ignoring the console screens altogether because of the difficulty of parsing the information displayed and the inability to have the operator control paging. If the EOS had been able to do what I am asking, the work would have been much more efficient. This is not just an EOS problem though. The GrandMA or the Light Palette from Strand would not have solved this in an any more useful way.

Its not enough to say that every user is separate and can see the data in any way that they want. There are specific needs based on historical precedent, union regulations, and styles of working that make the setup of these displays more complex and ASSYMETRIC.

If you got this far, congratulations! Thanks for wading through it! I would appreciate your thoughts and comments.

Thoughts on Lighting Desks

Clifton Taylor — Mon, 26 May 2008 05:00:19 GMT

Before we had computerized control, we had preset consoles and piano boards. While the preset console did see a period of use on Broadway, in many cases, a leap was made directly from piano boards (resistance dimmers) to computerized control.

The story of the first use of computerized control on broadway is well documented. Tharon Musser created the lighting for "A Chorus Line" on Broadway in 1975 using a custom made lighting controller based on a PDP-8 Processor called the LS-8.

Four years later, Strand Lighting introduced the Light Palette, a console which truly revolutionized American theatrical lighting practice on Broadway and eventually throughout the professional theater.

Principally, what was revolutionary about the Palette was its programming interface. It featured a visible command line that had a syntax that closely mirrored the natural language conversation between a designer and an electrician.

CHANNEL 1 THROUGH 10 AT 80*

RECORD CUE 23 TIME 4*

This is almost exactly the same syntax that a designer would use to speak to an electrician operating a resistance board, and the use of this syntax in the lighting desk made it very simple and intuitive to operate. Consequently the Strand Light Palette quickly became the standard console throughout the country.

In addition, the Light Palette was a "Tracking" Console. Before computers and before preset consoles, when stagehands manually operated a bank of resistance dimmers, "Tracking" was the standard practice. This makes sense when you think about it. Here is an example. Let us say that you have a cue 1 recorded that has dimmers set at different levels for a night scene. There is moonlight through a window, there is blue fill light, etc. The second cue happens when an actor enters the scene and turns on a practical lamp. The only thing that we want to have happen in cue 2 is the practical lamp turning on. All the other dimmers should remain at their previous state, and "Track Through" into the current cue.

the instructions to the electrician operating the resistance dimmers would record all the states of the dimmers for the 'moonlight' scene for Cue 1.

the instructions for Cue 2 would direct the electrician to add only the dimmer for the practical lamp to the scene.

On a manual system, it would be confusing and redundant to restate all the levels of the 'moonlight' scene, because these levels weren't changing when the lamp is turned on.

This is a natural and intuitive way to operate stage lights. If for instance, later on, the designer wants to change the light that is coming in through the window in Cue 1, this change should naturally "Track" into the next cue as well. With a preset console, the revised level in the window light would have to be updated in every subsequent cue until the scene change. To me, this is counterintuitive.

The Strand Light Palette successfully replicated this longstanding manual practice in software and consequently became the standard way to operate stage lights in the theater. In fact, this interface became so ingrained and useful that it has been replicated, with varying degrees of success, by many subsequent console manufacturers. It remains the standard on Broadway today, embedded in the ETC Obsession 2 console and the newly available EOS.

This past week, I was invited to see a preview of the new grandMA 2 console at ACT's offices in New Jersey. I can easily say that it is a very elegant control desk which further extends the state of the art in lighting control, and I look forward to being able to use it on a show soon. It is a major upgrade to the nearly 10 year old grandMA lighting console. It significantly expands the control capacity of the system with faster networking, increased channel capacity, more refined programmer interface and more robust command line syntax.

I think that with both this desk and the new EOS console from ETC, we are *beginning* to see a kind of convergence of the previously separate interfaces of moving light consoles and theater conventional tracking consoles. I should state here that I am NOT a programmer, but a lighting designer, and consequently my desires for a console are from a specific point of view, which naturally could and should differ from the point of view of a programmer. I was very lucky at the grandMA demo to have two wonderful programmers with me, Paul Sonnleitner and Bobby Harrell. Both Paul and Bobby have programmed on Broadway for me and Paul works with the grandMA folks on the designs of their consoles.

After the demo, we got into a discussion about the desk and I said that I thought that there should be more work on the programmer interface, specifically to make the syntax more robust. One problem that we have today in the theater is that if we use moving lights on a show, we need a highly trained programmer to put the show together. In New York, even off-broadway, this is not a problem, as we are lucky to have so many very skilled and talented programmers freelancing. However, in a regional theater or other venue outside of New York or LA, these folks are few and far between and often have to be flown in for the technical rehearsal period. This fact, along with the cost of the moving lights themselves, has traditionally limited the adoption of intelligent light technology in theaters outside of the major markets. Last season, when I lit "Treasure Island" at Houston's Alley Theater, I was very lucky that a local, and very talented 'Hog' programmer was available. Otherwise, we would have had to bring in someone from out of town. The Alley is one of the premiere theaters in the US and would have been able to bare this expense, but when I worked at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park previously and was asked by the director to incorporate moving lights into the production, we all had to suffer through trying to program the moving lights on a theater console with no moving light support. That was not an optimal situation.

The brilliant thing about the command line interface that was started by Strand's Light Palette and is currently expressed in the interface of the Obsession is that generally the programmer has only to type what the designer says. It can happen as fast as the designer says it. In its attempt to recreate a natural language conversation, the interface is elegant and easy to grasp.

What I wish would happen in the next generation of consoles is a deep and rich expansion of this idea. If I have moving lights on a show currently, I can say to the skilled programmer, "make fixtures 1 and 3's gobos rotate slower." Very quickly, the programmer has to know, or be able to figure out, which gobos are currently selected and rotating for fixtures 1 and 3. He has to know which direction the specific gobos are currently rotating and he further has to know what kind of fixtures 1 and 3 are because the interface for slowing down a rotating gobo differs greatly depending who made the fixture and, in some cases, even the specific model must be known and understood because the way a gobo rotates can be different between models of the same manufacturer. That is alot to figure out or know, and it has to happen very quickly because the designer and the director want to move on.

All of this, the computer could 'know'. In fact, this kind of 'figuring out' is something that computers generally do VERY well. From a programming standpoint, it is like a query into a database that joins the data of the current state of the lighting with the data of the operating specifics of the luminaires with the command line directive.

I propose that the computer should figure out which gobos are rotating in fixtures 1 and 3 on its own, it should be able to determine the method for slowing down that rotation regardless of their direction, and it should be able to execute that command from a directive as simple as:

FIXTURE 1 AND 3 GOBO ROTATE SLOWER*

Now this is just one example, but I'm suggesting that every function of every type of light be virtualized in this manner. As a designer, I shouldn't have to care that gobo rotation is parameter 13 on moving light x. Today, I can either get the producers to hire a very skilled programmer who does know these specifics and can keep up with me saying "Slow down the gobos in fixtures 1 and 3", or I can learn that it is in parameter 13 myself and walk a less-skilled programmer through the steps to slow down the gobos.

I believe that if a console had a command syntax that was this robust, moving lights would suddenly become available tools to every theater because an console operator could (again, as on conventional consoles) reliably type into the console what the designer naturally says. Of course, I'm not suggesting that this high level interface REPLACE a more specific and exact lower level command interface, nor should it replace a graphically oriented user interface. Rather I think that the three interfaces should ALL be available to the programmer simultaneously. This way, a designer or programmer could approach the desk at his or her own skill level. This kind of interface would harness the long-standing and deeply-embedded designer and stage-hand skill set for programming conventional tracking lighting consoles, while naturally extending these skills to a world of intelligent lighting.

I must say that I also don't believe that having this kind of high level interface would put skilled programmers out of business. I think its well established on Broadway that the programmer is much more than the person who figures out that parameter 13 has to move closer to 50% to slow down the gobos. On the shows that I have been lucky enough to work with very talented programmers, they have added tremendously to the overall creation and polish of the lighting and were in every case invaluable collaborators in the final product. I do think that this kind of robustness would speed up the work in the theater, and would free both the designer and the programmer to work on creative issues and solve deeper problems.

Now of course both the EOS and the grandMA are attempts at this very thing. And in fact, this whole article might exasperate the creators of these desks because it is precisely what they are attempting to do (along with many other incredible and wonderful improvements) with their latest releases. But I can say that neither console has embedded in their command line syntax this level of programming. Yet.

But hopefully, this is where the consoles will be soon.

Comments?

Broadway Lighting Master Class

Clifton Taylor — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:52:49 GMT

Beverly Emmons and I taught our color lecture again this year at the Broadway Lighting Master Class. This is such a great event and I thought the questions after the lecture this year were the best ever. We've been teaching this class for over ten years and Jules and the magazine folks encouraged us to extend the scope of the lecture if we could. We decided to include some new segments on mixing incandescent and arc sources, 'sea changer' color changers and LED sources. PRG, Color Kinetics, Ocean Optics and Wybron all donated equipment and services for the lecture and both Beverly and I are really grateful for their help.

There is never enough time and even though we've been doing it for a long time, it always happens that we run out of time during cueing. Part of it is just the joy of looking at color effects on stage without the pressure of a tech situation, but also, the new equipment this year took more time to cue into our lecture. In the color lecture (this year we called it Color Therapy) we look at light on the stage (rather than photographs of stage lighting) and talk about what we're seeing. How color is mixing together (or not) and how different colors relate to each other.

In a recent interview with a write from the NY Times, I said that I was interested in 'chordal' relationships among colors in light. It was not a formed thought when I said it, but the more I've been thinking about it, the more I think that color palettes are related to chords in music. I wonder if anyone has ever done a scientific study of this? I imagine that one way to do it would be to optically scan paintings from different artists into a computer and have a computer measure the colors in the palette of the work. Perhaps there would be a numerical relationship between how colors appear next to each other or within compositions that would become apparent over a large survey of art. This is similar in many ways to the work that Josef Albers did in his color study paintings, but I'm thinking of a larger survey of many different painters.

Now, to get back to the color lecture. Every year that we do this, I'm reminded of the vagaries of what we do. Everything changes in our lecture when a lighting unit is mis-tuned or the wrong lens or 750w vs a 575w lamp. If you're dealing with subtlety, everything matters.

In our work, everything onstage matters. Fight for the time to make it right. Use the time that you are given in the most productive way: actually looking at the stage and experiencing the light directly.

REM DIM on ETC Express(ion) consoles

Clifton Taylor — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:23:00 GMT

This from Paul, who was on a crew a couple of weeks ago. We were using an ETC Express console and the subject of "REM DIM" came up. I said that the consoles couldn't do it and Paul set out to write a macro to simulate the function. Its not perfect. You must be in BLIND to use the macro (counterintuitive). But it works.

Here is the MACRO function:

[AT] [FULL] [REC] [GROUP] [1] [ENTER] [STAGE] [CHANNEL] [1] [THRU] [192 or whatever is the max on your system] [EXCEPT] [GROUP] [1] [AT] [0] [0] [GROUP] [1] [AT] [FULL] [BLIND] [CHANNEL] [1] [THRU] [192 or whatever is the max on your system] [AT] [0] [0] [REC] [GROUP] [1] [ENTER] [UP] [CHAN]

Clever, yes?

The New York Times Article on Dance Lighting

Clifton Taylor — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:41:33 GMT

Last week, the NY Times published a wonderful and serious article on
dance lighting. Incredible! I urge you to read it here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/arts/dance/04sulc.html?scp=1&sq=tipton&st=nyt

I think it brings up some excellent points and ideas. I don't think
that the public is even aware of what we do, let alone aware of the
issues that are brought up in the article and I just love that they
published it (kudos to Roslyn Sulcas the writer). It is the kind of
article that I wish the industry press would publish, but never seem
to. I hope that it sparks a discussion about what we do and the ways
that we do it. I think that lighting has arrived at the point that
scenery has always been. it IS fashion, and this is a natural
progression of the art form I think: we're skilled enough now and the
technology changes quickly enough that stage lighting can have a
'period' reference and a 'trendiness', if you will, to it. What I
find interesting is that fashion, in lighting and other areas, without
anyone really knowing or acknowledging it, is often driven by
technology. Forsythe makes his (I think wonderful and interesting)
choices because the equipment (borrowed mostly from the movie
industry) exists and is available to him for the first time. In the
90's every musical on broadway had congo blue in it, because the
equipment was for the first time available to us that could put out a
credible amount of that deep color. Now the same thing is starting to
happen with LED's, and our color sense will develop with this change
in equipment.

Tom Skelton defined a period of stage lighting in dance that was
heavily colored. This was possible for him because deep color
polyester was just coming onto the market, replacing the very pale and
fade-prone gelatin that preceded it. Once every ballet in the world
(it seemed) had this deep color, other designers and choreographers
came along and completely rejected the use of color and would only
allow so-called "White Light" in their post-modern ballets. Both
trends were valid and both were fashions.

Upcoming Event in New York: Bar La Barca

Clifton Taylor — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

upcoming in New York: 'What Next?' premiere screening at MOMA, Wednesday May 21st

Clifton Taylor — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:40:53 GMT

body message not retrieved

Color Conversions

Clifton Taylor — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:34:00 GMT

This was an email from my friend Jay this week:

I was posed with the question the other day if I had a RGB to Gel
conversion chart, and I don't and can't seem to find one on the
internet. I was wondering if anyone has one, or is everyone having to
spend the time trying to mix the colors to get the initial color
groups on colorblazes and whatnot. I have tons of CMY charts, just
not RGB. Let me know if you have one.

Jay

And my response:

Jay, this is a black art! The problem is that with LEDs the intensity
of the light is inherently mashed up with the color values. ie
Intensity goes away as an independant parameter. Because of this you
will find that you will have to mix everything anyway as there will be
little difference in your results for two gel colors that are related
in hue but differ in saturation. Good luck, sorry to not have the
correct incantation for you.

Dry Tech on a New Play

Clifton Taylor — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:39:01 GMT

I find that I am most stressed working on a play in that time after
all the lights are focussed and before the show has been programmed
through the first time. As soon as something is in the console for
every moment in the play, I can relax and have a chance to regain my
sanity! It is tempting to think that there could be a way to reduce
this stress. A 'lighting dry tech' is one such strategy. The
fantasy behind this is to get the 'tedious' programming done before
the actors arrive and thus make the actual tech go more smoothly and
quickly. But I think most theater professionals have found this to
be counter-productive. At a recent lecture at the Guggenheim Museum
a month ago given by Jennifer Tipton for their "Works and Process"
series, she stated that she positively refuses to light without the
actors onstage. I have always agreed with this. What happens in a
dry tech is that you indeed do get cues into the console, but most of
the time, it is impossible to create cues that will actually survive
once the actors do arrive.

On a current project, the director insisted that we do a lighting dry
tech before the real technical rehearsal with actors began. I
strongly resisted this request but was unsuccessful in dissuading
him. After a long 4 hour session (there is a reason its called a
'dry' tech) we indeed got cues into the console for the first act of
the show, seemingly well prepared for the actors the next day. Of
course, as these things go, the actors didn't really do everything
exactly like the stage managers (or I) had recorded in our script
notes. Also, once we were onstage with the actors and the director
gained some distance from the scene, so many things changed about the
blocking. So even though I had cues in the console, each one has to
be updated and revised with the actual actors in the actual technical
rehearsal. This revision process was more complicated than
constructing the lighting looks from scratch because for everything
that was wrong, I had to figure out what is wrong, which light was on
that shouldn't be, what system was making that color on the set behind
the pink dressed actress (the assistant stage managers who walked for
us wore white t-shirts). The actors and the other collaborators had
to hear 'waiting for lights' from the stage manager just as often and
for just as long as if we had been lighting it from scratch. For me,
it was more stressful because of the process of 'damage control' as
opposed to constructing cues from scratch means that I spent much of
my very valuable tech time looking for problems rather than positively
creating stage looks. Editing vs. Creating too early in the process.

One other thing that I don't like about dry techs is the unwavering
concentration on lighting that occurs in that too-quiet and
unnaturally un-pressured time period. In a tech with actors, there
are all sorts of things happening. Maybe the subtlety of the way an
actor moves effects everything about a planned scenic move and my
lighting has to be built around that subtlety. Maybe there is an
issue with sound or blocking that has to be worked out. As the
lighting designer, I can use that time to catch up on solving my own
issues, or maybe get a cue or two ahead once a scene has been set-
up. The tech process - with the actors - has a reality and favors
gestural solutions. In a lighting dry tech, a cue that will
eventually be onstage for 2 minutes can get a kind of hyper-
concentrated consideration that can become over-intellectual and
mannered.

I'm not arguing for not planning. When I go into tech, I have a
good idea in my mind's eye what the cue should look like. But the
actual experience of looking at light on human beings in a theater
cannot easily be reproduced. Pre-visualization software shares many
of these same problems that I'm talking about here. Yes of couse,
pre-write your effects, moving light geometries, color string setups,
etc. But as for light on actors, we should only be doing this by
actually putting light on actors.

at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut

Clifton Taylor — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:09:38 GMT

The east coast premiere of a play by Craig Wright, "Pavilion" will
open on May 13 at the Westport Country Playhouse. Joanne Woodward
and Annie Keefe are BACK as artistic directors and this is the first
time that I've done a show at this wonderful playhouse since 2006.

from the marketing materials: Peter and Kari were the Class of 1988â€™s
Cutest Senior Couple. In high school, it seemed like everything in the
universe had been working to make their happiness possible. But at the
end of senior year, Kari became pregnant and Peter ran off. The
Pavilion takes place two decades later, in the mythical town of Pine
City, Minnesota, at their 20-year high school reunion. The two have
not seen each other since the day Peter leftâ€¦and now heâ€™s come to get
her back. The Pavilion is a play about time. It is about the human
condition, about mistakes and about regret. What happens if you made a
wrong decision in the past? What if you ran away when you should have
stayed? Can you change time and do it all over again, but differently,
if you and your old high school girlfriend want to just badly enough?
A masterful blend of comedy and drama,The Pavilion is both
hysterically funny and overwhelmingly touching as it deals with human
relationships on a cosmic scale.

If you're up in connecticut, come see the show!

http://www.westportplayhouse.org/shows/spotlight/3

Upcoming Concert with the Western Wind Ensemble

Clifton Taylor — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:04:06 GMT

Bar La Barca: Two Madrigal Comedies, 400 Years Apart!
A fully staged and costumed show featuring Eric Salzman and Valeria
Vasilevski's "Jukebox in the Tavern of Love" (2008) and Adriano
Banchieri's "Barca di Venetia per Padova" (1605).

Gala Opening Thursday, May 29, 2008, 7:00 PM

with performances:

May 30, 7:00
PM
May
31, 3:00 and 7:00
PM
June
1, 5:00 PM

The Flea Theater, 41 White Street, New York 10013

For information, give us a call at 212-873-2848. For tickets, call us
to reserve or purchase through www.theflea.org.

Upcoming Opera Events

Clifton Taylor — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:53:33 GMT

I thought you'd be interested to know a little about THREE wonderful

and interesting opera projects that I'm working in the next couple of
months.

"Ariadne Unhinged"
Gotham Chamber Opera Company in NY
http://www.gothamchamberopera.org/upcoming.html

"What Next?"
MOMA screening of a new film of the
2006 Tanglewood Production
http://www.moma.org/calendar/events.php?id=8081&ref=calendar

"Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny"
at Tanglewood this summer
http://www.bso.org/bso/index.jsp;jsessionid=JXR3VV0OOMH1KCTFQMGCFEQ?id=bcat5240070

*********

"Ariadne Unhinged"
Gotham Chamber Opera Company in NY

Wednesday, May 7 at 7:30pm Opening Night
Thursday, May 8 at 8pm
Friday, May 9 at 8pm
Saturday, May 10 at 2pm
Saturday, May 10 at 8pm
Sunday, May 11 at 2pm

Music of Monteverdi, Haydn, and Schoenberg. In Ariadne Unhinged, Gotham's new version of the classic story,
three musical works from different centuries intertwine to reflect Ariadne's emotional and psychological states: Monteverdi's Lamento Arianna, Haydn's solo cantata Arianna a Naxos, and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

Presented by Gotham Chamber Opera
featuring members of Armitage Gone! Dance

Conductor Neal Goren
Production Karole Armitage
Scenic Design Vera Lutter
Costume Design Peter Speliopoulos
Lighting Design Clifton Taylor

CAST
Ariadne Emily Langford Johnson / Brenda Patterson

The Playhouse, Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, NYC

To purchase tickets, visit Ticket Central or call 212-279-4200.

http://www.gothamchamberopera.org/upcoming.html

*************
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
6:30 p.m.

"What Next?"

A World Premiere Film Celebrating

Elliott Carter at One Hundred

at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan

Theater 1 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1), T1

MoMA joins the Boston Symphony Orchestra in celebrating the one
hundredth birthday year of Elliott Carter, widely considered America's
greatest living composer. The evening features the world premiere of a
filmed performance of Carter's first and only opera, What Next?, by
the Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center under the direction of
James Levine. The forty-minute absurdist opera, partly inspired by a
scene from Jacques Tati's filmTraffic, features a libretto by Paul
Griffiths. After the screening, Mr. Carter joins conductor James
Levine and director/designer Doug Fitch onstage for a discussion about
the work.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/events.php?id=8081&ref=calendar

**************

"Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny"
at Tanglewood this summer

August 9, 10, and 11th, 2008

Conductor James Levine
Production & Scenic Design Doug Fitch
Lighting Design Clifton Taylor

http://www.bso.org/bso/mods/perf_detail.jsp;jsessionid=JXR3VV0OOMH1KCTFQMGCFEQ?pid=prod2110054

Lighting for Concerts

Clifton Taylor — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I was recently asked to consult on the lighting for a concert hall in the US. I'm very excited about the job because while I of course love doing anything new, I'm also an avid concert-goer here in New York and I have strong feelings about visual elements at live orchestra events. One of my favorite things about going to here live music is that it is a break from my working day, where I sit in a theater and look at, and create, stage lighting. The concert stage is a refuge, someplace where I can go and NOT think about the lighting, where I can just LISTEN to the music and enjoy a total aural experience. Often times, when concerts are lit, I have found the lighting to be a distraction. I'm not sure that I want a lighting designer to tell me that Arvo Part's Fratres should be blue. It reduces the possibilities of my own associations to see that choice. Of course, in the theater, this is what we do, and it is why we are paid by the audiences that come see our work, but the concert hall is different. Or at least has been different. New concert halls now are built with stage lighting in mind from the beginning. Zankel Hall at Carnegie here in New York, has a full complement of moving lights, template washes and state of the art control systems. Ditto for the Philadelphia Orchestra's newish home and the Segerstrom Hall in Orange County, California. So, how much lighting is appropriate for these halls?

The first absolute rule when working with an orchestra is to MAKE NO NOISE. That means fanless moving lights and systems with quiet motors. One of the reasons that my current assignment has come along is because their current rig makes too much noise and it is distracting to both the performers and the audience.

The second consideration is that this particular hall is an historic structure with neo-classical arches, statuary and other architectural elements that must be considered in relation to the addition of 100's of feet of trussing and robotic luminaires. 1st rule for any kind of designer: Do no harm. If the goal is to upgrade the visual experience of an event, don't obscure the great elements of the hall that already exist.

So, I want to make a system that will be quiet and tasteful, easy to maintain, as this particular orchestra does a different concert every night for weeks during their seasons at home. But I also need a system that occasionally will be able to assert itself. The lighting rig is there so that the orchestra can do special events during their seasons with more panache and style. If a major star is going to do a concert of broadway songs with the orchestra, there should be good lighting!

As I'm working on this plot, my biggest problem is the noise one. Fanless automated luminaires are limited in power. Right now, I'm trying to figure out if I can get away with some VL3000Q's at the ceiling level - AWAY from the performers - to do patterns on the walls of the stage. Mostly, I'm using VL 500's for over the stage because they're so quiet. I would like to use Sea changers and lekos, because they're silent, but that will have to wait a little while until they're in rental stock more commonly. For specials I'm specing VL1000 t/s units, again because they're quiet. And I'm trying to get a bunch of the new silent Mac's for templates and effects in the auditorium area.

We looked at using LED's for this job, and the shop did a very nice demo in the space for us, but in the end, I think we've decided to wait on that technology for a while. I love the low power thing and I love the 'idea' of the units, but they weren't quite bright enough to replace anything - YET. I used alot of LED's on my musical, Hot Feet, and I thought they were great where we had them, but not this time around for the concert hall.

The Archiving Problem in Dance

Clifton Taylor — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

I work for a lot of dance companies. One of the greatest things about designing for dance is that one’s work has the potential to be around for a long time. Because of this, one has to be extra careful to take great notes so that the work can be reproduced at a later time, sometimes years later. At minimum, this is the paperwork that I try to save about a dance:

1. Cue Printout

2. Ascii Cue File of the Cues for the Ballet

3. accurate MAGIC SHEET which corresponds to the channels in the above cues

4. stage manager calling sheets (I try to ask for a xerox copy of their notes from opening night - even if their not ‘cleaned’ up!!)

5. Sidelight color change information

4. an archival video, hopefully with the headset chatter from the performance on one of the audio tracks so that a future stage manager could hear the calls

5. Copy of my original notes for the ballet

6. Any special focus notes, Length of the ballet, number of male and female dancers, sound notes and any other important information about the ballet (like special spike marks that may be needed, set placement, etc.

in addition, I try to also get a copy the original program for my files. Often I will put dancers names in my notes and it really helps when re-mounting to know that, for instance Mark is doing Kevin’s original role. Now a days I try to get all of these documents scanned into PDF documents (except the ASCII file of course). I’m just starting with one of my companies to put all of these files online so that all of our rotating group of lighting supervisors and stage managers will have access to the docs easily when a work is revived. I’m also hoping to put the mp3 sound files into this archive so that it’s accessible in case the mini-disk fails on the road. I use iWeb for this website, but I am finding I want a little better system for this web archive. I’ve downloaded the trial version of Dreamweaver but I’m afraid it seems too complicated. I’m imagining a system that is like a database manager for all the various files that itself would generate pages for each ballet in the rep and show which files are accessible on the site and which are not available or only available in hardcopy form. Can the new filemaker do something like this? Still looking for a solution. Any suggestions?

The Lowly Sidearm

Clifton Taylor — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Can I just say, this is one of my biggest pet peeves: a crew that mounts sidelights onto a ‘pipe and base’ boom without the aid of sidearms. It absolutely drives me crazy! In a dance concert, often with a one day load-in, this makes the lights very difficult to focus in a timely manner. By eliminating the sidearm, one eliminates the ability to easily move the light on both the pan and tilt axes. What happens is one of two things, either (a) the light ends up at some crazy angle to get the shot and then the shutters don’t really work properly because they’re not aligned to the floor and the legs or (b) an enormous amount of time is taken during focus to loosen the main c-clamp to rotate the unit on the boom itself. This is difficult for one person on a ladder to do because the light is heavy and a loosened clamp tends to move according to gravity, down the boom.

For goodness sake, get some sidearms! They’re cheap! Your guest companies will really thank you.

Broadway Lighting Masterclass 2008

Clifton Taylor — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:51:00 GMT

Beverly Emmons and I have given ‘the color lecture’ at the Broadway Lighting Master Classes since 1996. Its coming up in May again in New York and if you’ve never attended, and you’re interested in lighting design as its practiced in New York, you really should make the time to go. We’re re-focussing our lecture a bit this year to talk more about mixing sources (arc, incandescent and fluorescent) and automated color mixing systems (like the newly released “Sea Changer” color mixing system for conventional units). Today, Live Design magazine put out this nifty little interview article with Beverly and myself which you can read it here.

no meetings this week!

Clifton Taylor — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:00:00 GMT

well, amazingly, I have a week that is free of meetings! when I was younger, I used to stress about weeks like this, but now a little older, I know to use them to relax, reset and de-stress. I’m not totally off of course -- I’m working on 3 plots that are all due this week - but I’m also getting some hiking time in. Peter and I went out on saturday and it was a gorgeous day. There was still some snow hanging around on the north slopes, but it was warm and sunny. We hiked in the western catskills, in delaware county, and because of the empty sign in book thought we had the place to ourselves. On the way down from lunch though, we ran into a group of 10 backpackers on a big trip on their way up the mountain. Its so great to see the trails being used even in this uncertain time (for weather) of the year.

Tomorrow, I have 2 conference calls scheduled so I don’t think I’ll be getting out on the trails but wednesday for sure.

This is the first entry for my long dreamed-of blog. I’m hoping to use this weblog to talk about things that are going in my work and also in my life. I don’t tour so much anymore, but I do occasionally go out on the road with one of my dance companies and I’m always fascinated by what is going on in the world of production. I want to talk about these things too because I sometimes think we live in our little isolated islands and don’t know about better practices elsewhere. Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it. I also hope you’ll comment on what I write