Dance and Light

The Partnership Between Choreography and Lighting Design

Kevin Dreyer

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000649857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Dance and Light examines the interconnected relationship between movement and design, the fluid partnership that exists between the two disciplines, and the approaches that designers can take to enhance dance performances through lighting design.

The book demystifies lighting for the dancer and helps designers understand how the dancer/choreographer thinks about their art form, providing insight into the choreographer's process and exploring how designers can make the most of their resources. The author shares anecdotes and ideas from an almost 50-year career as a lighting designer, along with practical examples and insights from colleagues, and stresses the importance of clear communication between designers, choreographers, and dancers. Attention is also given to the choreographer who wants to learn what light can do to help enhance their work on stage.

Written in short, stand-alone chapters that allow readers to quickly navigate to areas of interest, Dance and Light is a valuable resource for lighting design classes wishing to add a section on dance lighting, as well as for choreography classes who want to better equip young artists for a significant collaborative partnership.

1

WHY DO WE NEED A BOOK ABOUT DANCE LIGHTING? OR, IF IT IS ALL DONE WITH THE SAME LIGHTS, WHY IS DANCE SO HARD TO GET RIGHT?

If you ask any lighting design teacher to recommend a good source of information about lighting, they will generally point to the same half dozen or so books. They do a good job covering the basics of lighting, and that is why so many teachers use them. The main drawback as far as I am concerned is that in virtually all of these books dance lighting is relegated to, at best, one chapter. I have been designing dance for many years but I never thought I was doing anything that unique. I used many of the same principles as most other dance lighting designers to the point where it bordered on the formulaic, except it wasn’t. I had a clear point of view but that didn’t mean that the way I was doing it was all that different. This started to change when I was asked to give a three-hour presentation on dance lighting for the 2009 LDI conference and trade show, an annual gathering focused on live performance design. I remember starting by asking how many people in the audience had ever lit a dance piece. Virtually every hand went up. I then asked how many of them had been taught how to light a dance piece and virtually every hand went down – and I began to realize there was a gap that needed to be filled.

For many years now dance lighting has been considered a sub-specialization in lighting design and by and large it was assumed that if you knew how to light one kind of performance you could light any kind of performance. The curious thing about this business is that while I can assert that this sort of an assumption existed, I can also tell you with confidence that lighting designers tend to get pigeonholed. Early in my career I was identified as a dance lighting designer. I found it very hard to get jobs designing straight plays and virtually impossible to get musicals. I did migrate into opera but only on a very limited basis. The great irony of this is that I received my design training from Carnegie Mellon University, a university without a dance program; I was trained exclusively in spoken word theatre.

So why was it that no one seemed to think there was a need to train designers in specific areas of lighting despite their being recognized as having areas of specialization? I have never been able to find a satisfying answer to that question. I have some ideas, and by and large they fall under the heading of economics, but I am not convinced that is the only reason. After all there are separate acting programs focused on straight plays and musicals within single theatre training programs – why not lighting design? Sub-specialties are recognized in other fields; it is about time that it happened in lighting.

I have seen and met many people who called themselves dance lighting designers, who worked in dance, and yet they had no real concept of what it meant to light dance. They didn’t think you had to do anything different, except maybe pick different kinds of color. It was always amazing to me when I would run into these folks and I soon discovered they had something in common – they all wanted to be doing something else. I often wondered how they had gotten into the position they were in and why they tried so hard to keep it. Dance lighting will never make you either rich or famous. I also wondered why no one seemed to notice their work was not really that good. You could not clearly see the dancers, there were streaks of light across the bodies that broke the line of the movement, and sometimes the scenery had better lighting than the dancers. It is harder to work with a moving target than you might assume.

Dance aficionados, choreographers, dancers, and on occasion critics could tell you when they saw bad dance lighting. Most of them have an idea when they have seen good dance lighting but are less confident about it. Almost none of them could tell you why. In fact, it is the elusive “why” that prompted this book. I was recently part of another session on dance lighting at LDI that was called “Why Is Dance Lighting So Hard to Get Right?” We came in with a number of ideas and had covered most of the topics and toward the end we opened the floor up for questions. Most of these were along the lines of “I was lighting a piece and the choreographer asked me to do …” – fairly predictable. Then as we were about to wrap it up someone raised their hand with a question. They asked us to describe what bad dance lighting was and how to get it right. Everyone on the panel hesitated. The answers started out from the same direction as the now famous statement from Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart: “I know it when I see it.” Ultimately we did hit on some more specific examples and they have found their way into another piece in this book.

Lighting designers can quickly tell if there is a problem, and I have read some very astute critics that got it as well; but if there are still concerts with bad lighting it either means not all artistic directors can see it, or there are not enough people who know how to do it correctly. We all hope that the right people are able to make that distinction. There have been times when I was not sure I had hit the mark and there have been others when I heard words that confirmed I was doing it right. I was touring with the Nikolais Dance Theatre and on one of the very rare occasions that Alwin Nikolais (Nik) was not with us we performed in a municipal theatre in Roubaix, in the north of France. After the performance a man came backstage and introduced himself as Alfonso Cata. He demanded to know who had done the lighting for the performance. I had no idea who Alfonso was but I later learned that he was the artistic director for Ballet du Nord, the resident dance company in the theatre.

I told him that the designs were Nik’s. He said he knew that but wanted to know who had actually done the lighting in that theatre. I told him I had, and he said “Good, you will design my next concert. I have been performing in here for years now and tonight was the first time I could see the dancers.” I told him I was interested but it would all depend on my availability. He confidently told me when he set his mind to something he generally got it. Sure enough, in May of 1984 I was back in Roubaix to light Alfonso’s production of Sweet Carmen, the first of almost a half-dozen pieces I would design for his company. After we opened Carmen Alfonso told me that his former lighting designer had sat next to him during the dress rehearsal. After a few minutes he had leaned over and said “I see what he is doing. He has put all of the light on the dancers.” Alfonso said that before he had a chance to react this fellow then leaned in again and said “Too bad he didn’t light the scenery, it is hard to see.” It turned out he was also the set designer and made sure his own work always looked good.

One could argue that it is largely a case of aesthetics or personal taste but in fact there are several common mistakes that are made in dance lighting and many challenges. Certainly, the single biggest error, at least to my mind, is underestimating the task at hand. Lighting for dance is not really that easy. If you have been trained as a designer in a college program where there is no focus on dance, you have to be ready to let go of some significant assumptions about lighting. Other common pitfalls include knowing that you need lights on booms but not necessarily knowing what they should light, believing that McCandless-style front light is also the best answer for dance, or deciding that really saturated color makes it “dance lighting.”

It is true that all lighting is done with the same lighting instruments, but one quick look at a light plot for a play and a good dance plot and you will be immediately struck by several obvious differences. The choice of color, the use of scenery, and certainly the location of the lighting instruments will differ to a certain degree. These are all clues that the designer is thinking about the space and the subject being lit differently. The answers are not all to be found in the plot. Look at the stage managers cue sheet, see how many cues there are and how close together they come within the dance piece. Try to understand the pace or rhythm of the dance from the placement of the cues. The biggest difference is only apparent in a performance, that is when you should be able to see how differently the lights are used to create the stage pictures.

I am left then with the question of how best to fill the gap in the training we offer new designers. I could simply offer formulas – how many units per boom, how many colors in back light, how to focus seamless washes, how best to use front light, and so on. The “how to” sort of answers. But the point of this book is not just to tell you how to create a good light plot for dance but rather to try to help you understand why it is a different process and why we make the choices we do. Because if you do not understand why I am putting the lights where I am then it will be much harder for you to create effective light cues that will help the audience understand what the choreographer is trying to do. So how do we answer the big question of “why”?

To start with, we should all be able to agree that the basic function of lighting is visibility. This is true of architectural lighting, industrial lighting, and theatrical lighting. What elevates lighting to the realm of lighting design is the process we are working to understand. It is the need to make choices, choices driven by an artistic or aesthetic set of circumstances – this is the job of a designer. Lighting consultants who work in the industrial market have guidelines, generally established by safety groups such as OSHA, that determine the minimum number of foot-candles at a given work site; a very clear-cut and measurable standard for appropriate visibility. In general, that is where the process ends for them. They are interested in clear visibility because to them areas of darkness can lead to accidents. No one is likely to argue the case that this is an aesthetic process.

When we move into the area of artistic expression things are much less clear-cut, individual opinions and the “eye test” matter much more. It is in this realm that the ability to see something as bad or good is so much more subjective and why the very direct question from our audience member about bad dance lighting received a very indirect answer. But there are certain criteria we can define, and the criterion of visibility is certainly one of those. There are even cases where the level of visibility represents a specific design choice, but in general that is not the totality of what we are trying to accomplish. This is what distinguishes design – namely, choice. Without clear choices we are falling back onto the way it has always been done as opposed to finding our own way.

The primary way in which information is communicated to the audience in dance is through the body, and the way in which the body occupies the space. This may well mean that our ability to clearly see faces or eyes is no longer the priority it is in a text-based theatrical production. It most certainly means we need to be able to address both the figure and the space the figure occupies distinctly and, from time to time, independently. This need dictates that we cannot simply use our lighting instruments in the same locations as we do for a traditional play, hence the difference between the two hypothetical light plots I described earlier. This basic idea about the different way in which information is being communicated to the audience is something that seems to have been missed in some of the poorer lighting designs I have seen. Or to put it another way, each form of communication or artistic expression deserves to be seen as different and the designer’s response should reflect that. Using the same set up you had the last time you were in the theatre is not the right way to do something new.

Another big mistake that I see in poor dance lighting is in the way the designer reveals the space in which the dance occurs. Dancers occupy the stage in a different way than actors. They don’t gravitate to down-stage center when they have something important to share. Sometimes the choreographer puts the critical moment as far away from the audience as possible. While blocking for an actor is critical it is also not as specific as choreography. This means that a dance lighting designer can be more specific in their cues because they can be fairly confident that the dancer will be within a foot of the same spot on stage every single time they hit a particular point in the music. I also believe that dancers are much more likely to know where the light is supposed to be and they will get to that place almost every time.

Most dance lighting designers approach light in very similar ways. We have come to accept certain conventions as foundational and we do talk with one another about theories or techniques for lighting dance. These relate to where lights should go, what sorts of colors should or should not be used, how best to focus the instruments, and how to figure out where a cue, or change in the lighting, belongs in a particular dance. These technical choices are what this book is about; but that is not all that I am trying to do. It is my hope that you will not only learn how to do these things but that you will also understand why we do them the way we do. Without an understanding of the “why” I do not think you can claim to understand “technique” – whether it is for dance lighting or classical music or painting.

I do not think that what is in this book is new; but I do believe that I may have a different way of thinking about it. I started designing lights in 1971; the earliest dance techniques trace back to the 15th or 16th centuries. Electric lights were developed in the late 1800s and stage lighting shifted to electricity as the century turned into the 1900s. My point in all of this is that it did not start with me and I have not really brought anything new to the process of lighting dance. The woman most people credit as establishing the first specific approach to lighting dance, Jean Rosenthal, wrote eloquently about the unique relationship between dancers and light. In her book The Magic of Light (p. 117) she opens her chapter on dance with the following quote:

Dancers live in light as fish live in water. The stage space in which they move is their aquarium, their portion of the sea. Within translucent walls and above the stage floor, the lighting supports their flashing buoyance or their arrested sculptural bodies. The dance is fluid and never static, just as natural light is fluid and never static.

From the first time I read this quote I was struck by its poetry. The wisdom it contains was something I came to understand a bit more slowly. Dancers have a very different relationship with the theatrical space than virtually any other performer and as a result with the lighting that seeks to define it. The idea of an aquarium created by light is poetic, but it describes a practical process of defining, for the audience, the space in which the dance is to occur. It also speaks to the philosophical concept of support. We are called upon to support dancers in motion and in stasis, and as any dancer will tell you support is the key component in partner work. So we are, in effect, asked to create lighting that will partner the dancer.

Finally Ms Rosenthal speaks to the most challenging aspect of lighting dance – motion. When we were getting ready for the panel presentation one of the participants emailed us all a note that said “And did we mention that dancers move?” Actors certainly move about the stage space, so this concept of lighting things that will not be pinned down to a single spot is not alien to lighting designers. But dancers move as a way of communicating images and ideas. Generally speaking, they also move more frequently and cover greater distances than actors. Movement is their language and it is up to us to reveal it in appropriate ways without distorting the meaning of what is being said through the choreography and the performance. Ultimately it is a different and unique aesthetic partnership, more so than virtually any other that exists in live performance.

If that were not complicated enough we create new dance works and designs while inventing a new language almost every time we light a piece. We come into the process without a common text. Dances do not start from a script as a play does: it is written with the dancer’s bodies in the rehearsal studio. And as if it were not already hard enough, most of the time they are creating a new way of moving that will fit the needs of their new piece of choreography. If it is new to them how can we possibly be expected to understand it? But if we do not try, we will not get anywhere.

We, the designer and choreographer, have to find a common language. The designer will often have to create their own script of the piece because they need a way to communicate with the stage manager so that changes in the lighting happen when they are supposed to. Beyond that it helps them communicate with the dancers and choreographer, so that we are hopefully all talking about the same moment in the dance at the same time. This script, for lack of a better word, charts the course of the dance, identifies shifts in mood or perspective, highlights key moments, and serves the necessary functions of structuring the design impulse and providing a communication tool. If it is done well it will be a tool that gets used by multiple people in the production. But even the poorest dance script will serve the lighting designer and improve the discussion with the choreographer. But to be clear – it is not a decisive record of the choreography, no one would ever dream of trying to teach a dance from the record the lighting designer makes. I will come back to this issue of communication and common language but there are other pitfalls to consider as well.

The role of the lighting designer changes from dance piece to dance piece. In some cases I have found myself called upon to create structure for a work, in others the focus was on storytelling. Sometimes I find I am called upon to organize the space in which the performance will take place and at others I have been asked to focus on supporting emotional communication. This is not unique to dance but it is more prevalent in dance. Sometimes I have even found that my role has been to follow specific technical instructions from a choreographer. (I will admit that I tend to rebel against those kinds of constraints and find ways to introduce my own ideas, as long as they do not do artistic damage to the work.) But even in those situations where I feel I am more of a technician than a designer I do find that dancers honestly respect the necessary partnership with light in ways that actors do not always understand – and that makes it easier to accept.

As an example, I was working with an actor on a production of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth. I had created a very atmospheric cue that relied on templates of Gothic windows coming in on an upstage diagonal as a diagonal backlight. The actor playing the king had a critical line to deliver on his exit and I asked the director if I could help the actor understand how to play the light so we would not lose the line. By the time I got to the stage the actor had found the light and was experimenting with how he could use it. I asked if he would like me to stand in the light so he could see, and he said yes. As I headed back out into the house I complimented him on how quickly he had discovered what he had to do to make it work; he smiled at me and said “I used to dance.”

Dance frequently has a greater need for lighting as the space is frequently empty of any specific scenic elements. Light serves to not only provide visibility for the dancers but can also take the place of scenery. Or at the very least define the space in the same way scenery might in a play. This leads to yet another difference. In a play scenery will often dictate where you can place lighting instruments and how those instruments can shine onto the performers. In the absence of scenery there are many more options available to the designer. These two variables are offset by yet another challenge – budget. Dance is generally produced on a very tight budget. This often means working within a fixed inventory, with reduced hours in the space as well as being asked to share it when you can get into the theatre. These competing interests have to be managed. The lack of scenery can be as much an aesthetic choice as a budgetary one. That same budget constraint probably cuts into those wonderful options we thought we might have in terms of instrument placement.

Cueing – the pre-programmed shifting of light in terms of color or intensity to signal a change of mood or location in the performance – becomes critical as the need to maintain interest in a plain black box falls to the lighting and the dancer. The ability to create a large number of changes and different “looks” to the stage also suggest abundant instruments in many locations. It also means that the designer is l...