(lack of) Subtlety in Lighting

Subtlety is perhaps the most forgotten element of lighting in the modern theater. Today with professional theater companies one style of lighting dominates the visual scene. It is agressive lighting designed to force a scene with strong, vibrant colors and hard directional angles. This style of lighting is undoubtably a hybridization of the entertainment lighting that evolv

ed with rock and roll crossed with the Jesus Christ Superstar to Wicked transition that took

over Broadway three and a half decades ago. With the advent of computerized control decks, moving lights, digital projectors, dichroic color mixing, and later LED fixtures, lighting designers embraced an over-the-top, intensity driven style designed to overpower the audience. This style of design can only be described as replacement lighting, where the natural emotions created by a production are forced out by a combination of sound and lighting.

Don't get me wrong, there is most certainly a place for elaborate, intense and overpowering lighting. The last scene of Next to Normal where the entire stage became engulfed in blinding light (created by over 300 250watt incandescent bulbs) was exactly what that produced needed at that moment, but not every scene, not every song needs to remind us of Oprah or CSI. What I am talking to is the tendency to homogenize the emotional response of an audience by locking down focus and creating a sensory overload. This is not theater.

Sleep No More

This winter, a British theater group changed american theater forever. If you were on the east coast you probably heard of the collaborative production of Sleep No More between the American Repertory Theater and Punchdrunk. The performance showcased the first modern attempt to introduce the American audience to immersive theater, and the show hit its mark. The power of Punchdrunk comes not from lofty Avant-garde theory designed to challenge us in vague abstractions, but from its remarkable ability to translate the underlying emotion or charge of a work into a visceral gut feeling.
The worlds created by Punchdrunk rely heavily on atmospheric elements to create that childhood sense of excitement, apprehensiveness, and wonder. The worlds resemble a dreamscape, where objects, actors and installations both are and are not at the same time. This recreation is supported by an elaborate and elegant technical backbone infrastructure. What makes many of Punchdrunk's technical challenges unique is their location. Sleep No More was performed in a converted 4 story schoolhouse in Brookline, MA lacking many of the amenities lighting and sound designers are used to, such as rigging, cabling, or large-load power distribution mechanisms. It is for these exact reasons that Punchdrunk represents the cutting edge of technical theater and a revolution within the performance industry.