Pillow Posts -- 6/26/07

Today we began to work on load-in for Aurélia Thiereé, and we have a huge amount of work to do; we're transforming our studio theatre into a proscenium space. We've hung a giant main rag in the front, and we're working on hanging a black curtain in back and several sets of legs.

The purpose of all this, as Aurélia's technicians so eloquently put it, is to "hide the magic." In other words, they're blocking off as much of the audience's view as they can so that the gizmos and gadgets they use aren't revealed. And boy, do they have a LOT of gizmos and gadgets. We were taking a break at one point today, and suddenly Aurélia comes in and asks us to help move a crate that was in the sun, because she was worried the contents would get too hot. We opened the road case, and inside were at least a dozen string puppets made in part out of plastic pop bottles. This is going to be an awesome show.

In less happy news, I'm not going to get to run sound for Aurélia; apparently their system is complex and it took their sound guy like a month to learn, so I don't get to operate the sound board during the show. It's too bad, but I still get to learn a lot, and I will get to be in the booth during shows.

Also on a less happy note, the intern who had heat exhaustion also had something more serious: he has a congenital heart defect which had gone undetected until now, and so he won't be able to continue working with us. We'll all be sad to see him go; it's not fun to lose a member of what has by now become a very close group.

Pillow Posts -- 6/24/07

Today was the last performance of the State Ballet of Georgia, and I'm really going to be sad to see them go. I find their culture fascinating; they have an alphabet and language all to themselves, and they are incredibly family-oriented, as I already mentioned. We had a cookout-style dinner after their performance, and although I was shy at first, I finally summoned up enough courage to sit down with a group of them to eat dessert, and I'm really glad I did!

For my trouble, I learned some of their names, how to say "goodbye" in Georgian ("car-gat"), received compliments on my pronunciation of "Tbilisi", their capitol ("Tbee-lee-see"), which they also gave me a postcard of, on which Nina pointed out where her house is in it. She also gave me a hug, which was nice of her--as I said, they're very family-oriented; how many other companies do you think there are where you can sit down with a world-renowned ballerina and eat ice cream and play with a cute baby?

Nina's daughter Elena is the most adorable baby I've ever met in my life, and she's incredibly lucky to have more than 20 extra mothers and fathers. Sergei, the principal dancer, was playing with her last night, and he put a big foam makeup pad into his mouth and made growling sounds with it to try and get her to laugh. This was backstage, during the curtain call, and he was all decked out in sparkling sequins and rhinestones and dancer tights while he pretended to be a dog. Elena smiled, but I nearly died laughing.

Here are some photos of the company after the show today.

The dancers from Balanchine's Mozartiana. The little girls in front are not actually Georgian; the company requested we find them girls, so these kids are imported from the School of American Ballet in NYC.


A group shot of most of the company after Petipa's Don Quixote had finished. Nina is the woman in the lower left wearing the crazy red tutu.



A few of the dancers from Trey McIntyre's Second Before Ground posing. Apologies for the goofy exposure; I had to take this quickly because it was in the middle of an intermission, and we needed to clean up all the confetti that you can see scattered on the ground.

Pillow Posts -- 6/23/07

I'm really going to miss the Georgians after they leave tomorrow. This week started out tense, since neither we nor they were quite sure how to act around each other, but once we got the first few shows out of the way, everyone relaxed and we all began to do what people do best: connecting. They began showing us their newspapers and their money, and teaching us their language. There's something intensely human about meeting people from the opposite side of the globe and realizing that they're pretty much the same as you are.

I'll try and do a full wrap-up of the pieces they performed on Monday; right now it's late and I'm really cold, since the breakfast nook where I'm typing this has no heating (although, like most of the buildings around here, it does have mice).

Pillow Posts -- 6/22/07

In each run of a show, there is always a night that just doesn't quite go right. Tonight's performance was that night.

To start off, the weather today has been capricious at best; without exaggerating, I can say that I have seen blinding sunshine and torrential downpours within 15 minutes of each other. About the only thing constant about the weather today was that it was cold and windy, which made for an unpleasant dancing environment inside of our barn, which has no heating and doors which do not latch shut.

While I sat outside holding the exterior doors of the theatre shut and trying to make sure that the tarps we use to cover our outdoor backstage crossover didn't blow away in the gale force winds, all kinds of drama was happening inside of the theatre. One of the dancers became dizzy and nauseous, and the state news network of Georgia was constantly trying to film onstage, which a) isn't allowed, and b) was preventing us from putting on the next portion of the show. Not only that, but there was a minor sound screw up, where the sound stopped and then restarted.

But hey, it's live theatre--these things happen. You just work through it and go on to the next show. Still, it's kind of a downer when everything seems to happen at once. On the other hand, I'd probably prefer one bad night with a bunch of issues to four good nights with one minor issue each.

Pillow Posts -- 6/21/07

Theatrically, today was a slow day; the State Ballet of Georgia is very self-contained, so they don't require much effort from us in order to keep things going. However, today was a bit frightening in another way: as I was walking over to Inside/Out, I saw one of my fellow interns being wheeled into an ambulance. That was frightening; the verdict is that he was suffering from some sort of heat exhaustion, so that kind of hits home that we all need to stay hydrated (which I of course never do).

In other news, happy birthday Ehren!

I'm very happy to be in show mode--I don't have to be anywhere until 10:30AM tomorrow!

Pillow Posts -- 6/20/07

As I mentioned before, the State Ballet of Georgia has a very different way of working, but now that I've gotten to watch the way they work for a while, I really like it. Theatre in America is very impersonal; authority is usually pretty strictly divided, and the emphasis is usually on efficiency. We joke around, but the measure of how good you are is how quickly and perfectly you can accomplish the task at hand.

State Ballet of Georgia, however, has kind of a My Big Fat Greek Wedding approach to theatre. I can't understand what they're saying, but most conversations usually involve two or three people talking simultaneously, all repeating the same thing over and over, and I assume that the last person to repeat their thing wins. They brought along a baby (the principal dancer's), family members, tons of crew of various types, and apparently a bicycle, since I don't know how else they could have possibly come up with one on the first day they were here.

The end result is that their dance company is more like a giant extended traveling family than what I would normally think of as a dance company. Yes, I'm sure that American dancers become very close to the people in their dance companies, but I don't think that they bring babies and their spouses along for the ride whenever they travel. It was very heartwarming to watch, because they would all celebrate after they finished each dance, whereas the professional American dancers I've seen so far simply throw on their street clothes and go home as fast as possible; it's a different attitude, certainly.

Pillow Posts -- 6/18/07

Gala is finally over! We worked from 9AM Saturday to 2:30AM Sunday, and we still had a full day of cleanup to do once we all woke up again on Sunday. That should give you some idea of the magnitude of the event, so you can appreciate that we're all very glad to have made it to the (comparatively) stress-free regular festival season. Also, I am going to skip numbering the days of my posts since I can't for the life of me remember what day it is now, and I'm too lazy to calculate from previous posts, especially since the day of the post doesn't always correspond to the day it was posted.

This post is mainly going to be a wrap-up of the Gala event. The event was broken up into two major parts: an event which occurred outdoors and two events occurring indoors. The indoor event was a variety show in the Ted Shawn Theatre, for which I worked deck crew. I didn't really get to see much because I was in the wings backstage, but I could hear and see enough.

The first act was the premiere of a new work by Yuri Possokhov, performed by the Ballet School here at Jacob's Pillow. We bring in high-caliber dancers for 2-3 week school sessions taught by illustrious faculty all throughout the summer, and these particular students were lucky enough to get to perform in the Ted Shawn. I loved the piece--it was fast-paced, humorous, and creative; every time Yuri used a common choreographic element, he would follow it with a twist on that element that I usually hadn't seen anyone do before. The audience loved it too--the dancers received thunderous applause.

The second act was a duet by the State Ballet of Georgia (the country, not the state). It featured their two principal dancers, and it was absolutely stunning. The talent of the two dancers made the ballet school students, many of whom dance professionally, look nearly amateurish by comparison. The male dancer jumped high enough to dunk on an NBA basket, and you could feel the reverberations of his takeoffs and landings through the wooden floor, and probably throughout the theatre. The woman was also excellent; at one point in the dance she walks out on stage and proceeds to spin in circles at high speed for about a minute; all of the crew were totally floored.

The third act was supposed to be the video whose screen caused so much trouble, but after all that work, the video projector crapped out and we couldn't show it. A lot of folks were rather unhappy about that.

The third act was instead Rennie Harris, who is the father of hip-hop as a choreographed art form. I couldn't see his dance very well because it contained many small, quick movements that were best viewed from the front, but I heard that he and his dancers performed some amazing stunts with various parts of their bodies, including at one point, Rennie dancing with his jaw, which he was somehow able to isolate and move in ways that no one had ever seen a jaw move before. They also received thunderous applause.

The fourth act was Bill Irwin (look him up on Wikipedia if you don't know who he is), whose performed a piece that was part hip-hop, part clowning, and part ballet. Because of the clowning element, a lot of the piece was invisible to me because he worked with facial expressions and hand gestures, but I could tell the audience was enjoying it, because they kept on laughing. Bill Irwin, incidentally, is an incredibly nice man; he kept his dressing room clean, he was happy to chat with the stage crew after the performance, and he made a point of eating in the dining hall with the rest of us so that he could meet people.

The last act was the performance of two solos by dancers from the Alvin Ailey company. This piece was a little bit special: because Ailey went to school at the Pillow and because Revelations, one of the company's signature pieces, premiered at the Pillow, having the Ailey company perform at the 75th anniversary was an important event. Because the performance, was meant to emphasize the continuing importance of the Pillow, somebody decided it would be great to open the back doors of the Shawn theatre to show off the natural surroundings of the festival. However, getting those doors open is no easy task. We used lit backdrops for all the other pieces in the program, and because we are in a barn, and have no space to fly an entire backdrop into the air, we had to do something else. In order to solve the problem, we created a sequence that was nearly as choreographed as some of the dances.

First, we closed the main curtain so no one could see what we were doing; Judith Jamison, artistic director of Alvin Ailey, made a speech, which we used to cover our noise. Next, we dropped the two pieces of fabric which made up the backdrop onto the floor. Three people fed in the ropes to drop them, and two others made sure that the fabric folded nicely and didn't catch on anything. We used carabineers to attach the pipes the fabric was hanging on to our ropes. Once the fabric was on the ground, we quickly unclipped the carabineers and the people who fed in the rope pulled the dangling ropes out of sight of the audience. While this was happening, two people were unfolding a long piece of black fabric to cover the white fabric of the backdrop while it was on the ground, and two others had unlocked and were pushing open the giant barn doors. As people finished their various jobs, they then changed the colors in the side lights to the colors requested by the Ailey company.

We had only rehearsed the whole sequence once, but it went smoothly, and by the time Ms. Jamison finished her speech, the goods were dropped and the door was open. In fact, we had a minute to spare. The audience applauded the open doors when we pulled back the main curtain, and that was the best applause of the night, because it was all for the backstage crew. You don't see our performances, but you see the effects of them.

The Ailey pieces were both beautiful, and I would love to watch more shows by the company. That was my last job of the night, except for operating a confetti drop, which mainly involves pulling a string.

The outdoor events were more varied. There was a giant tent, of which you will see pictures soon, filled with lighting instruments and chandeliers. The banquet was held there, and there was a big band playing music, and a high-priced auction held by a Christie's auctioneer. There was also a drumming ensemble, and before the Ted Shawn show started, a woman named Nanine Linning did a performance which featured her hanging upside down from a chandelier, dancing and pouring bottles of champagne. Her show caused the most problems; she never received her foot straps from her homeland in the Netherlands, so we had to construct some for her to use. Then, we had a big afternoon thunderstorm, and the whole event had to be moved inside--quickly. No one was sure if it would even happen, but eventually they got her up in the air, and it sounds like she was well-received. I hear she was rather scantily-clad, so that probably helped.

Anyway, that ridiculously-long post covers most of what I know about the Gala. Now I'm just going to post a few pictures of the event so you can see the tent in all its glowing glory.

This is what the tent looked like midway through the week.
And this is a moth that was hanging out on a screen earlier this week. I thought it was cool, so I snapped a picture.

Pillow Posts -- Day 25

If you know anything about me and theatre, you probably know that I hate projectors. Video projectors have a maddening tendency to be about ten times harder to get working than you anticipate they will be, and I have never worked in a theatre where they worked quickly and easily. The Gala show is no exception, except the thing causing problems was the screen, not the projector itself...

The first thing we did, naively, was to simply hang the projector screen from a pipe. That didn't really work, because with the weight of the screen and our 100-year-old fly system combined, it was impossible to move the screen with less than five people, and even when we did move it, it made a horrible grinding noise and you could hear lots of grunting and groaning from the people yanking on the ropes. Since it has to move quickly and silently in the middle of a show, that option was immediately disqualified.

Next, we tried rigging a fly system onto the fly system; we attached three pulleys to the pipe, and to them we attached the screen. So we had a screen on a pulley system on a pipe on a pulley system. That allowed us to move the screen more easily, but once we got the screen off the floor, the weight of the screen hanging off the side of the pipe caused the pipe to rotate inside the knots holding it up, which suddenly made it impossible to move once again.

We fixed that by attaching smaller pipes to the big pipe, which, when the big pipe tried to rotate, would smack into the ceiling and prevent said rotation. These smaller pipes, unfortunately, made it impossible to fit the big pipe in between several other pipes which were hanging on the ceiling. So then we got out two more pipes and used them as spacers to push the other pipes out of the way.

After all that work, we were finally able to get the screen all the way into the air, only to find out that it hung below the proscenium by about 1.5 feet, meaning it would be in full view of the audience. So we set about rigging a small curtain that would hang below the screen and block the audience's view when the screen was out. When we finally got that hung, it was too short, and wouldn't have blocked anyone's view.

That last setback happened today, after we had spent many hours over the past three days working on all those solutions to problems caused by prior solutions (I skipped a few, at that), so it was no surprise that Ben was about to jump off the top of the Shawn by this point. Finally, however, Jim French, our lighting designer and stage manager, suggested bringing in a smaller screen. This seemingly-obvious solution had apparently been vetoed by someone higher up early in the tech process, which is why we hadn't already done it. We brought the smaller screen in, assembled it, and had the whole thing done in under an hour, and it fit perfectly where the bigger screen had not. Beautiful.

Pillow Posts -- Day 23

I spent nearly all of today focusing lights; that's pretty much it. Basically, it involves clambering around on really tall objects and pointing lighting fixtures in their proper directions. Either that or you sit on the bottom of the tall object and keep it from falling over (otherwise known as "footing" it).

The gimongous tent on the lawn is up; I took pictures, but I forgot to bring my camera with me to the Campus Center, which is the only place I get Internet access, so I'll upload them tomorrow. There was also a cool moth perched on one of the windows of the dining hall; I took pictures of it, too.

Lastly, the weather here is disgusting. It has been in the 50s and drizzling all day, and it doesn't appear that it will warm up any time soon. The forecast high for today was 64 degrees, but I don't think it came even close; I was freezing all day.

That's it; Gala is Saturday--the pressure is on.

Pillow Posts -- Day 22

Today was the first day of regular season--we're prepping for the Gala on Saturday, which is our giant (and I do mean giant) fundraising party to mark the opening of our season. I'm the crew chief in the Ted Shawn, which means I'm basically second in command. It'll be interesting being in that position for Gala, since there are so many more performers than normal.

To give you an overview of the Gala, it has three stages.

Stage one is happy hour. Some dancer/performance artist will hang upside down from a giant chandelier suspended above our Great Lawn on a truss and pour champagne for the guests as they walk underneath her.

Stage two is the Gala performance in the Shawn; that's my bit. There will be a video screening, performances by the Alvin Ailey company, a world premiere performance by the ballet school students here (they started learning the piece today--I don't envy them), a guy whose name I can't remember, and a surprise guest. The tough part about that will be doing all the quick changes between pieces; the projector screen is proving particularly troublesome, because we haven't yet found a way to gracefully get it onstage for the movie and then offstage for the next dance.

Stage three is the actual four-course dinner, which is held in a 170-foot by 60-foot enormous freaking tent with chandeliers. There will be a drumming group leading everyone toward the tents from the theatre (this is mostly a crowd-control aspect, not a performance aspect), followed by an auction which includes a $30,000 diamond necklace, and finally, dancing to music by a big jazz band.

As you can probably tell, it's going to be a huge deal. I'm excited, although I'm a little sad to miss the lady hanging upside-down from a chandelier. Further details as events warrant.

Pillow Posts -- Day 20, Post 2

Today was a very short day; we only put in about seven hours of work, mainly because the staff were just as hungover as most of us were, so they didn't want to do much. However, they did tell us that they thought the party last night was the best they had seen, possibly the best in Jacob's Pillow history (the party has only been going on for ten years or so). All the other arts organizations were very impressed; one guy told me that he was afraid it was going to be in a log cabin, but that he was pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, all we had left to do to get into festival mode was put down marley on the Ted Shawn stage, and put up the hard flats. Starting Tuesday, it's festival time. But for tomorrow, I'm going to sleep in, and maybe read a book.

Pillow Posts -- Day 20

We had an awesome pirate-themed party last night, and we invited most of the other Berkshires arts organizations. Mark described it best when he said "You know you had a good party when half the staff are unable to help you clean up the next morning."
However, I think the best way to show you the party would be to post some photos.









It's true--tech people throw the best parties.

Pillow Posts -- Day 18

Since the forecast for tonight is not only dark, but also stormy, I think it's time for...a ghost story! WOOOOoooohhhhh!

One warm June afternoon, the first after a long cold snap, Derek, Ben, and Rachael were running Ethernet cable out to the sound booth in the Ted Shawn Theatre from backstage. Brad, the sound guy, had been playing music over the newly-installed sound system all afternoon, but by the time the trio arrived at the mezzanine in front of the booth, the CD had ended, and the theatre was silent. Suddenly, Rachael exclaimed

"Oh my gosh! For a second I thought there was someone in the sound booth!"

It was probably just the arrangement of the shelving, Derek thought to himself, and went back to trying to untangle the Ethernet cable, which had turned out to be quite stubbornly twisted. Soon after, however, the unmistakable sound of a speaker thump, like a gunshot and a bass drum combined, sounded in the otherwise quiet theatre, and afterward, a loud buzz could be heard coming from the onstage speakers.

"Ben to Brad," radioed Ben on the two-way Motorola radio that all staff members carried, "We just heard a pop from the speakers in the Shawn, and now they're buzzing."

"I'm on my way," Brad replied.

Brad soon arrived in the theatre, and after checking the onstage equipment, walked up the sloped floor of the theatre house toward the booth.

"I found the problem," he yelled out once he arrived, "The power cord to the sound board came unplugged." Power cords, however, don't just unplug themselves--Brad raised his own radio to his mouth.

"All call on channel 6--was anyone in the Ted Shawn booth a couple minutes ago?" But the replies came back negative; none of the Jacob's Pillow production staff or interns had been in the booth when the thump occurred, and no one had seen anyone there either. Except for Rachael.

This story is based on actual events, and in all actuality, the power cord probably did somehow unplug itself, because that can happen occasionally, and there really wasn't anyone in the booth at the time. Probably.

Pillow Posts -- Day 17

I am proud to announce that we are the first intern crew to ever load sound equipment into both the Duke and the Ted Shawn theatres in a single day! Personally, I don't think that's such a tall order, since there wasn't a huge amount of work to do, but since it has never been done, I guess it's harder than it seems.

Jin wants a shout-out, so here it is--hi, Jin!

My main rant today is about effort; one of the main things that earns or loses my respect in any situation is how much effort you put in. I don't care if you manage to get the job done (much), but I do care that you make the best attempt you can at doing it. The problem today was that one person on my team was more interested in explaining not only why she couldn't accomplish the task at hand, but also how unpleasant she found the entire situation. It was demoralizing and frustrating for everyone she was working with, and it made the work go twice as slow, as we dutifully tried to turn her whining into a learning experience which she didn't want to have.

Even if she really was, as she claimed, too weak, too scared of heights, too incompetent, or too whatever to finish the job she was assigned (which she wasn't, because she managed to get it done after much prodding), she should have tried her best to do the job, rather than incessantly explaining why it wasn't possible after one half-hearted attempt. Complaining and stalling does nothing but slow you down and make other people feel bad, and it's the worst way to be unproductive. If you can't get the job done, fine, but give it your best shot, and then ask for help--don't just say "I can't."

One of the staff members made the point that in theatre, because everything is about your connections, you should view all jobs as never-ending interviews for future jobs. This girl would do well to remember that advice.

Pillow Posts -- Day 16

Today was a lot of fun--we hung two freaking enormous speakers way super-high up in the air. As strange as this may sound, I really enjoy clambering around in really high places. My parents would probably have a double heart-attack if they saw how high I was without a harness, but I like it. It can be scary when you're up there, but once you get down, you feel a nice sense of accomplishment. The only high place I never did get used to was the Grandel Theatre; their grid is freakishly unsafe, and no one should ever work there.

Tomorrow is sound load-in, and I'm excited; I like playing with sound gizmos.

Pillow Posts -- Day 15

Yesterday was my day off from work, so I took a day off from posting as well. All we did was go to a laundromat and then eat dinner at a sushi place in Great Barrington.

Today we hung most of the lights in the Duke. We didn't quite finish them all, but we got close. I need to get to bed, so I'll be brief, but I learned that lighting a backdrop is much easier if you reflect the light off a second white backdrop behind the first. Then the light is more even because it has traveled farther and spread out more before getting to the backdrop.

Today also marked the first time that I have seen a lighting instrument fall from a great height (In this case about 15 feet). You're supposed to yell "Heads!" when that happens, but what I actually heard was "F**k!" followed immediately by a loud crash. It wasn't anyone's fault--the clamping device that was supposed to hold the light to the pipe snapped in half. I've never seen that happen, and I hope never to see it again. Luckily no one was hurt (except the light), but we're all very careful to safety cable the lights before we tighten them down now.

Pillow Posts -- Day 13

One of the toughest things about working here is adjusting to the weekly work schedule. It's a Sunday night, and I'm looking forward to my day off on Monday. That's standard theatre scheduling, but it's certainly not what I'm used to coming straight out of college.

The other interesting piece of news is that we've been kind of screwed by our production company, Limelight Productions. They were supposed to deliver the lighting goods for the Duke two days ago, and we still don't have all the equipment. They've been sending it to us in bits and pieces as they get it. The bad news is, this has delayed our hang in the Duke by several days. The good news is, the Duke light hang had been moved forward because we, the production interns, were blowing through all of our assigned jobs so quickly. So we're behind schedule, but not really. The last couple of days have mostly been filled with odd jobs; I've organized gel, built shelves, and laid marley flooring.

That's really all I've got to write about today; we're having a birthday party for Hanna, one of the production interns, tonight, and tomorrow we'll celebrate our day off by doing laundry at the laundromat--exciting, I know. Oh, and it's also raining. A lot. The upsides to this are that thunderstorms are exciting, and that flashlights look really cool in fog at night. The downside is that everything is wet, wet, wet.

Pillow Posts -- Day 12

The best part of today was probably the rigging class; we got to learn how to run a no-counterweight fly system. For those of you who don't know, there are three major ways to suspend things in a theatre, if you want to be able to adjust their heights above the stage: a simple pulley system, a counterweight system, and a motorized system.

Motorized systems are really easy to use--you plunk a giant motor above the stage, and then you just press a button and the motor takes care of all the lifting. Motors used to have the problems of being expensive, slow, noisy and stupid--if they hit something and you don't shut them off, they just keep going. However, a lot of that is being fixed with newer models, and Ben thinks that most new theatres will be entirely motorized within five to ten years.

Counterweight systems work by balancing the weight of whatever is above the stage with weight loaded onto a "weight arbor". In the simplest version, called a "single-purchase" system, if the item you're suspending above the stage weighs 50 pounds, then you put 50 pounds on the arbor. If the item weighs 500 pounds, you put 500 pounds on the arbor. Once the system is in balance, even a child can operate a well-maintained counterweight system alone (not that you'd really want to let a kid do that). If you have trouble with the concept of a counterweight system, imagine a seesaw with children of exactly the same weight on either end. Their weights will cancel out, and the seesaw won't move under the influence of gravity, but if you apply the slightest force to either side of the seesaw, it will start to move.

The most basic fly system uses no counterweights; the ropes are attached directly to the pipes, and the system operators have to carry that much weight. This, of course, is what we have. Each pipe in our theatre is suspended by either five or three ropes, and is raised and lowered by teams of five or three people, respectively. This means that if a pipe weighs 50 pounds, each of the five people operating it must lift 10 pounds each. Unfortunately, pipes weigh more like 120 pounds (with nothing else on them), which is 24 pounds per person (not including friction, which is significant) for just the pipe, and it just gets worse from there. Not only that, but the five operators have to be well-synchronized, or the pipe will slant because some ropes will move faster than others. Our first training session made it clear that raising and lowering pipes in our theatres is going to require a lot of practice and a lot of muscle.

I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again--I'm amazed at the caliber of theatre that you can put on using technology which is quite literally centuries old. I'm also excited that I'm getting the opportunity to learn how to do things in a way which is a bit less sophisticated; as I mentioned earlier, we're fast approaching the day when technicians might go years without manually operating a fly rail, and I think it's good for everyone to get back to basics now and then; you gain a better appreciation and understanding for the more advanced technology you get to use. Additionally, if there were a sudden nuclear holocaust and we were required to rebuild from scratch, it would be nice to know how to build simple theatres. Not that you'd really be building theatres right after a nuclear holocaust anyway, but you'd get around to it at some point.

The rest of rigging class was more fun--we got to climb into harnesses and dangle high up in the air in the Duke theatre. It was fun for me because I enjoy rock climbing and being high, but some people were a little freaked out.

Pillow Posts -- Day 11

We've only been here 10 days, and some people are already starting to wear out. I heard some of the non-production interns talking at breakfast about how they have been so tired the past few days that they've taken to going to bed at 10PM or earlier. I absolutely cannot comprehend that--most of them are working standard 9-5 office jobs. I don't know how they expect to function after they graduate if they can't handle that.

The production interns are a bit different--we're all used to working extreme hours, so no one has hit the point of exhaustion yet, but most of us aren't used to tech week conditions (10-hour work days) for more than a week or two at a time. No one is worn out yet that I can tell, but I think the prospect of three full months of this schedule is daunting for many folks, and I have already heard some complaining about the hours. We're also a bit disdainful of the non-production interns; they're great folks, but they're not working anywhere near as hard as we are, by any measure, so it's a little aggravating to hear someone say "I was so tired, I went to bed at 10PM" when you didn't even get done working until that time, and you both started at 9AM.

Personally, I'm tired. I got a full eight hours of sleep last night, and I was exhausted when I woke up. I'm going to head to bed immediately after I finish writing this and see if I can manage to get in nine hours instead of eight. However, my exhaustion is the good kind--I feel like I'm learning a lot and accomplishing a lot, and since I don't really have any other concerns besides working in the theatre, I'm not feeling particularly stressed.

I'm not stressed because I know that I don't have any looming commitments; I don't have to worry about school or grades or problem sets or studying for tests or any of that. I'm able to throw myself completely and totally into tech work, and I function best when I can immerse myself in an activity like that. My entire method for coping with the stress of school for the past eight years has been to block out distraction and future commitments as much as possible to avoid being overwhelmed. Not having anything that I need to block out is blissful. Well, as blissful as 60-hour work weeks can be.

Pillow Posts -- Day 10

The one thing I wanted to remember to say today is that I heard an unintentional chiasmus-ish thing. A couple of the staff were throwing a football near the tech break room, and at one point, the ball went astray, and I heard the phrase "that ball is headed where your head is", which I thought was a wonderful little play on words.

When we weren't spouting witticisms (and believe me, a tech crew does very little besides spout witticisms), we were hanging a ton of lights in the Shawn. I'm guessing I hung about 40 myself. They each weigh about 25 pounds, so I'm guessing I'll be pretty sore tomorrow from all the lifting. However, the Shawn finally looks like a theatre, because it has curtains and lights all over the place.

This is becoming a regular occurrence, but I'm going to gush about how awesome our tech crew is. Brian, our lighting guy, told us that they had budgeted until 4PM tomorrow to get everything finished--and we're 98% done already. Ben, the Shawn tech coordinator, told us that at least with regard to lighting, the staff think that we're at the level of a professional crew, and they're going to treat us as such, which is pretty cool.

Thunderstorms out here are wicked cool; we're high up, so we get lots of lighting strikes. That in itself isn't so interesting, but when you consider that all the buildings are basically wooden barns, with exposed wiring and piping, it gets much more interesting, because there are many metal objects, such as water pipes and support trusses, that could arc electricity in the event of a direct hit on a building. That's why when a storm is about to blow in, we can't just keep working--you don't want to be standing on a metal ladder, grabbing a metal pipe which is hanging from the ceiling with metal airplane cable, when lightning hits the roof. So we all went into the nearby Bakalar dance studio and sat in the middle of the wood floor. Even so, there was some minor arcing of electricity (I think just from random static buildup, not from lightning), into the building from outside near the gutters.

Pillow Posts -- Day 9

I have very little to write about today; we spent the day cabling the Shawn, which is a fairly simple process repeated dozens of times. We have a dimmer room, where all the power for our lights comes from, and we basically run electrical cable from the dimmer room to the various points on stage where we need power for lights. It is very large, very heavy electrical cable which can carry a lot more power than your average Home Depot extension cord, but it's nothing complicated. That's pretty much it, but when you have around 300 electrical circuits, that's a lot of cable to lift and attach to things, and a lot of work to make sure it is organized. To give you an idea of the work involved, it took about 15 people nearly 11 hours to get almost finished, so that's roughly 150 hours of work time.

I was stuck in the dimmer room the whole time, organizing cable and plugging things in, so I didn't have to do much heavy lifting. That will change tomorrow when we hang lights; I have been informed that since I was in the dimmer room for this part of load-in, I'll be up on a ladder for the lights part. That's fine with me, since I love hanging lights.

Other interesting tidbits include the giant barn doors in the Shawn falling off their tracks (apparently this happens pretty regularly), the Mimulus truck nearly crushing our break area next to the loading dock (also regular), and the toilet in our cabin backing up (hopefully not regular).

Pillow Posts -- Day 8

Strange as this may sound, I think that one of the things that is going to be most educational here at the Pillow is how low-tech everything is; we're running a world-renowned dance festival using, in several cases, 1930s theatrical technology. We have better lights, better sound, better electricity, and better lighting boards, but the stage, the rigging system, and the real guts of the theatre are almost exactly the same ones that Ted Shawn and the Men Dancers would have used 70 years ago. The stage is a bit bigger, and a lot of the equipment has been replaced (70-year-old curtains, anyone?), but our work is still, in essence, an exercise in putting on a world-class performance inside of a heavily-modified barn.

This situation allows me to get a really good look at the fundamentals of theatre tech; tomorrow, for instance, we are creating a lighting system from scratch, from the dimmers on up. We don't even have fixed circuit locations--we have to create them by running multi-cable from the dimmer room to various locations on pipes. We spent today labeling all of the cable that was shipped to us so that we will know where everything goes. In many theatres, cable is seen as semi-temporary and changeable, while dimmers and circuit locations are mostly permanent. In the Shawn, nothing is permanent, so we have to re-create everything anew at the start of the season. I'm confident that I'll be able to build a complete lighting system out of almost anything, in almost any space, by the end of the week.

I would also like to say that it is finally hitting home how important this festival is; we watched a video showing Alonzo King saying that he has always wanted to make a "pilgrimage" to Jacob's Pillow. I'm doing tech at the place that Alonzo King considers the dance equivalent of Mecca, and that is simply amazing to me.

Lastly, having a competent (and large) tech crew is a thing of beauty. We had a lighting class today, and the final project was to hang, cable and rough focus four lights. We have all worked extensively with lights before, and I would guess we had the lights up in a minute or two, and down in 30 seconds. That's much faster than anything I ever saw at WashU where it was just me and Sarah working most of the time. Even during strike, when we had lots of help (usually), everyone else was so slow that things still took a long time. Obviously not their fault--they're actors and dancers, not techs. Having a crew of entirely tech people is incredible and wonderful.

We have been absolutely tearing through the work they have assigned us, to the point where they started assigning us random odd jobs to do today because we finished all the major work they had planned. That's how I know we've got a quality crew. Beth (a fellow intern) commented a couple days ago that she wishes we could stay together as a crew, and I agree that we would make an awesome tech crew; we have a ton of knowledge, and I think this summer is going to be excellent because of that.

Pillow Posts -- Day 7

I may not be able to play much frisbee this summer, but it sounds like I'll still end up in pretty good shape. Rocky, who was an intern two years ago, and who is now the technical director at the Duke, told us this morning that when she was an intern, she put on 25 pounds of muscle over the summer. If I follow in her footsteps, I'll end up at 160 pounds of pure beefiness. Of course, I never gain weight, so I'm not sure that the Pillow is going to be any different for me.

Today was our second day off; we went hiking this morning to an absolutely gorgeous mountain top, which overlooked Williamstown. Then we went to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which is apparently one of the biggest contemporary art museums in the country.

Two interesting things happened at Mass MoCA, as it's called. First, we deconstructed a sculpture which was made out of mostly blue gel; we pretty much agreed that a lavender-looking gel was probably Surprise Pink. We're total theatre nerds.

My favorite exhibit, however was a huge installation in a warehouse, which included a small house, a trailer, and a car, among other things. However, the artist was apparently horrible to work with, and he requested things that were way over budget such as a burned and bombed-out 747 fuselage. So the museum filed a lawsuit to be allowed to open the exhibit without the artist's approval, because in his mind, it wasn't finished without the 747. While they were waiting, they opened the exhibit anyway, but with tarps blocking your view. However, because it's a contemporary art museum, even an art piece covered by tarps could be considered art, and it's possible that the artist was intentionally being difficult, and that the real art piece was the museum's reaction to his work methods. It's a little bit mind-boggling.

Anyway, tomorrow I go back to work.

Pillow Posts -- Day 6

I'm going to try and bang out a post in ten minutes before we head out to see Pirates of the Caribbean tonight. Today was the first of our two days off; I went shopping for some work gloves in the morning, hung a clothesline so I can air-dry my t-shirts, and hung around one of the nearby small towns for a bit. After that we worked on renovating the production break area for the rest of the day (and by "the rest of the day" I mean we sat around talking for a couple hours, worked until we finished, and then sat around talking for a few more hours). We tore apart a big wooden spool (it was rotting), and then constructed an umbrella stand / table out of remaining parts and some pieces of an old wooden chair.

Tomorrow we're taking a trip to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and then Brad, our sound guy, is going to have a barbecue at his house. And after that, it's back to our regular 9AM-10PM work schedule.

Pillow Posts -- Day 5

We've done a ton of work in the past two days. Yesterday was our first major work day, and we did a bunch of rigging, cleaned out the Duke, and countless other miscellaneous projects. The production staff said they were very happy with the work we did, which I'm actually not too surprised about--it has been pretty clear since the first day that even the least experienced production intern has done plenty of tech theatre work; most of us are tech majors of some form, and several people have significant professional experience. In short, we have a top-notch tech team.

Today was "cleanup day," otherwise known as "get-the-festival-looking-like-a-festival-rather-than-a-farm-day." We washed windows, extracted chairs from the Pillow Pub, and vacuumed the Shawn lobby. Among other things. The place looks mostly ready for the general public now--it has been a pretty amazing transformation.

I don't really have anything else to write about today, except that I haven't yet decided whether I hate black flies or mosquitos more. Black flies are like little vampires--they puncture your skin and then crouch at the edge of the wound like little vampires, lapping up the blood. It's absolutely disgusting. Mosquitos, on the other hand, come in swarms, and their bites are itchier.

Pillow Posts -- Day 4

Pillow Posts -- Day 4

Today is history day! We had a lot of history education yesterday, and I want to pass some of that history along to you all, because the significance of this place to dance is huge. I'm going to quote a few dates and figures--they may not all be precisely correct, but they'll be accurate to within five years or a decade or so.

Jacob's Pillow was originally a farm; it was bought by Ted Shawn in the late 1920s, and he used it to start the company of all male dancers which would become known as "Shawn and His Men Dancers." Dancers at that time were almost exclusively female, in the European tradition, and so having a troupe of male dancers was quite a sensation. The dancers were amateurs, many of them athletes from a college where Shawn taught.

The Men Dancers were working together at the worst time in the Great Depression, so they farmed their own food and worked together to erect buildings specifically for dance, including what is now the Bakalar Studio. In order to raise money for the company, they held parties in the Tea Garden, shown below, where the dancers would serve tea. Shawn would give lectures on his choreographic methods, after which the dancers would do a performance. The audience members were usually rich old dowagers, and the mens' costumes were rather scanty, so, according to one of the Men Dancers, it became a rather popular event quite quickly. A photo of the Tea Garden is below.

The Ted Shawn Theatre, shown below, was built in 1930, and it is the Pillow's main performance space. It seats about 650, and over the years, it has seen performances by nearly every major name in dance. It is traditional for performers to sign their names on the walls of the dressing rooms, so you can see names like Merce Cunningham, Alonzo King, and Alvin Ailey on the walls, to name a few (I haven't actually found these names, but I know they've performed here, so I assume they're around). The weathervane on top is modeled after a pose struck by Barton Mumaw, one of the original Men Dancers, in a piece choreographed by Shawn.

For the techies among you, the Shawn, as we call it, has a fly system, but because the roof is shaped like a barn, we don't have any fly space to speak of, so we can't fly out large objects. Also, the rigging system is single purchase hemp rope, which is about as low-tech as you can get with a theatrical rigging system. This means that the people pulling the ropes carry the full weight of whatever is being flown. If what you are flying is 500 pounds of rice, they have to hold up 500 pounds. The rice story is not just a random example; several years ago, a Korean company wanted to drop 2,000 pounds of rice from overhead like snow, and they actually did it.

The reason the Shawn is low-tech is not for lack of money; it's actually deliberate. Not only does the Pillow staff deliberately cultivate a rustic feel, but since the entire campus has been named a National Historic Site, there are actually limitations to how much the existing buildings can be changed. It's kind of an interesting side effect of historical significance--you can't changed anything.

An interesting note about the Shawn is that because it is built entirely of wood, it is apparently a great venue for rhythmic dances such as clogging and tap because audience members can feel the vibrations of the dancers' footfalls in their seats. I say apparently, because I haven't seen any shows in there yet, obviously. There aren't any pure tap or clogging groups on the roster for this summer, but I think some of the companies will be percussive in part, so I hope I'll be able to report on the accuracy of that claim.

The Doris Duke Studio Theatre, shown below, was built in 1990, but as you can see, it closely matches the styling of the Ted Shawn Theatre. This is due to the low-tech atmosphere I mentioned above. Both the inside and the outside have bare wood paneling, and it even has giant barn doors, like the Shawn. However, it has a permanent grid, unlike the Shawn, and air conditioning, also unlike the Shawn. We'll be doing some interesting things in there this season, like flying people. The theatre was originally conceived as a flexible seating space, but apparently no one ever wanted to change the seating layout, so at some point they decided to simply make the seating arrangement permanent.

As a side note, one of the pianos on the stage is apparently an 1850s Steinway Grand. I'm very excited to hear it play.

Pillow Posts -- Day 3

Pillow Posts -- Day 3

We didn't do very much today; we continued to have lots of orientation meetings and tours, but we did no actual work--that starts tomorrow. Apparently there will be bears on campus at some point, and I got bitten by a black fly, which leaves a really annoying red bite mark.

The adventure of today (well, last night, actually) was trying to figure out how the shower works. Most showers can be grokked by simply jiggling every knob you can find until it does what you want (this applies to most machinery in general, by the way). However, this faucet did not give up so easily. I could turn on the water, and I could change the temperature, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to get the water to come out of the shower head instead of the bathtub faucet. On the following pictures, I have marked all the different things which do not accomplish that goal.

So what does work? You have to grab the actual faucet head and pull down. You know, the faucet head, the part that is normally made out of solid metal and which doesn't move and which normal, intelligent people would never ever in a million years assume to be any sort of water control because it looks like it's a single piece of steel.

That's pretty much all for today-- I have a lot to write about the history of Jacob's Pillow, because we learned a lot about that today, and it's really fascinating, but that's going to be a pretty long post, so I'm going to delay that one until I have a little more time, which may not happen for a couple weeks.

Our work schedule for the next few weeks looks something like this:
9AM-11AM
15 minute break
11:15-1:15
Lunch
2PM-4PM
15 minute break
4:15-6:15PM
Dinner
7PM-11PM

Sounds like fun to me!

Pillow Posts -- Day 2

Most of the rest of the interns arrived today, and they all seem to be a really cool bunch. There are people from all over, and everyone is very friendly and willing to introduce themselves. I've made a special effort to try and remember names, and I think I've got about 50% by now, which is excellent for me, since I usually only get one or two on the first day at a new place. Luckily, we'll have nametags starting tomorrow.

We had our first extensive tour of the Pillow today, and I'm pretty happy with the facilities. They're much different than you might expect for a world-renowned festival; everything is consciously kept to a very rustic feel, and the construction is almost exclusively bare wood. It makes the place feel a little less sophisticated than say, the Power Center in Ann Arbor or the Edison in St. Louis, but the spaces themselves are clearly quite capable of putting on just about any performance.

The main thing that is different from what I expected is that because this is a summer festival, absolutely everything has to be loaded in from scratch to the theatres at the beginning of each season. This includes marley flooring, curtains, lights, sound, and even dimmer racks. There are eleven tech interns and nearly as many tech staff, but even so, with two major indoor performance spaces, one outdoor performance space, and two indoor dance studios, getting this place ready for festival time in two weeks is going to be a huge undertaking. Everyone tells us we'll be working around the clock for that time, which I completely believe.

We were informed on the campus tour today that bears are quite common. If I see a bear, I'll be sure to take a picture before I run screaming into the woods.

A group of us went jogging this evening, and we were nearly run over by a giant dump truck whose driver somehow thought that driving with his lights off on a winding mountain road would be a good idea.

My observation for the day is that theatre is a small world. One girl I met goes to Western Michigan and knows Matt Baker and David Curwen. I knew Matt in high school, and I designed lights for David's dance at WUDT this year. Another girl went to Webster in St. Louis and knows Pat Vacek and Cecil Slaughter. Pat is my former roommate's younger brother, and Cecil is an instructor at WashU.

My second observation for the day is that people repeat themselves. I met one guy who I swear is the twin brother of Scott, a guy I knew at WashU. They don't look much alike, but their speaking patterns and physical movements are almost identical. Another girl could be the twin sister of Ayesha; it's uncanny. I'm sure that this is my pattern-seeking brain forcing people into bins (read On Intelligence for more about that), but for now, the resemblances seem uncanny.

My reading for my trip yesterday was Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham--it's a pretty good book if you're someone who wants to learn more about the minds of computer geeks, or if you're a computer geek who wants to learn more about the minds of other computer geeks. I finished that this morning, but luckily, Cameron (operations coordinator) informed me that there was a box of books for a book exchange. Unluckily, they were all mystery novels. Not that I have anything in particular against mystery novels, but I like having variety. I picked The Third Truth by Michael Bar-Zohar and started reading. It's decent; nothing too original, but nothing outright bad, either.

Picture for the day: the view from the back of the house at the Inside Out stage. This is where we will be holding free outdoor concerts.

Pillow Posts -- Day 1

I am now broadcasting live from Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts! The trip here, despite being composed of a plane ride, followed by a bus ride from the airport to the regional bus depot, followed by a three-hour layover, followed by another bus ride, followed by a car ride to the actual site, was pretty stress-free.

I arrived by about 4:30, and I met a bunch of the staff, who all seem to be really friendly, including the tech folks, who have that same combination of laid-back joviality and quirkiness that I have come to associate with tech people everywhere.

The housing is one step above Interlochen (they have heat!), for those of you who have lived there, but it's not a hotel or anything. I'm in a double room, in a cabin with four double rooms. I count five intern cabins total, but there are only six or seven male interns (out of 31 total), so it's possible I may not have a roommate, assuming they don't have co-ed cabins.

My big observation so far is that the East Coast is nothing like the Midwest. Everything is much more compact here. There seems to be a much sharper boundary between civilization and wilderness. In the Midwest, you have to drive through innumerable ultra-generic middle-class subdivisions with meaningless names like "Marmoset Valley Heights" before you can get away from the urban sprawl, and even once you manage that, you're really in farmland, not wilderness.

Here in the Berkshires, on the other hand, there are only buildings where there are roads, and there are only roads a) in towns and b) connecting towns. Everything else appears to be nothing but trees. Despite that, I'd be willing to bet that they have about the same overall population density on a statewide level that we have in the Midwest, because they cram more people into smaller areas. I kind of like it--urban sprawl bugs the heck out of me, and trees are pretty. I hope I'll have time for hiking.

I'm one of only two or three interns who arrived today--the rest are showing up tomorrow. Everyone has told me to get settled in and enjoy what they say will be my one and only quiet evening of the summer. I just read the orientation packet they gave me, and the last page was a list of tips for surviving the summer. The number 7 tip?
"Breath. Often. Deeply."

Broken pictures in old posts

I just realized that due to me canceling my .Mac subscription, many photos from my earlier posts have disappeared. If anyone makes a request, I will fix them, but not until after the summer is over. Sorry about that.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I'm heading to Jacob's Pillow tomorrow; my flight leaves at 10:18AM EST. I have been reading a brochure about their coming season, and here are some performances I am really looking forward to:

• Aurélia Thierrée of France, who works using techniques from acrobatics, clowning, and puppetry.
• The U.S. premieres of two Netherlands-based companies, Nederlands Dans Theatre II, and Club Guy & Roni.
• The U.S. premiere of Mimulus, a Brazilian group which combines tango, theater, and contemporary dance.
• Hubbard Street Dance Chicago--I've heard these guys are great, and I'm excited to see them.

All the other stuff on the program looks great as well, and I will blog about as much of it as I possibly can. Pillow policy is that I may take photos for personal use, but that I may not post them to the Internet without permission. I plan to seek permission to post pictures here, but if it is denied (as I expect it will be), I will probably just send pictures to anyone who asks. Please subscribe to my RSS feed; I expect this summer will be an exciting one!

Blogging Jacob's Pillow

Well, it seems that my attempts at blogging about theatre during this school year have been a miserable failure. The problem with doing theatre is that it's usually so life-consuming that you don't have time to do other things, such as write about it.

However, I'm hoping that will change this summer. From May 22 through August 30 I'm going to be doing dance tech up at the Jacob's Pillow dance festival. I'm told we get Mondays off (whee!), so at the very worst, I should be able to manage weekly blog posts. I'm sure I'll be learning a lot, and whatever I learn, I'm going to put here, so that you all can keep track of what I'm up to.

I'll try to take pictures too, so it'll almost be like I'm sending postcards, except I only have to write them once--see how efficient the Internet makes me?

Anyway, for the next few weeks I'm going to be concentrating on important non-theatre things like graduating. But I hope to really bring this blog to life this summer.

HickoryDickory Wrap-Up: Lesson 3

This is the third in a continuing series of lessons learned during HickoryDickory.

The third lesson I learned was that angle affects reflection. We're all taught in middle school science class that light bounces off of objects at the same angle that it hits, but for me at least, I had never really thought about how that rule applied to objects that didn't have a mirror surface. Unsurprisingly, it holds there as well.

For this show, I used a light yellow-green color (Straw Tint, I think) from one angle and a pinkish color (I don't remember the name) from the other angle. The pink and the green combined to create white, and the end result was a warm, comforting light that brought out the warmth of the actors' skin tones. The set, which was mainly a warm yellow, looked very good. However, there was one wall of the stage that didn't look like there was any of the pink color hitting it at all; it had kind of a radioactive green glow to it, even though I was certain that there were two colors of light shining on it.

I finally figured out that the wall looked radioactive because it was slanted. It was at about a 45-degree angle to the audience, so when I shined two lights onto it from 45-degree angles, one light was perpendicular to the wall surface, while the other was barely skimming along that surface. The yellow-green light was the one perpendicular to the wall surface, so its color reflected more toward the audience, while the pink light reflected into the back stage area.

The solution? Switch the gels between the two lights hitting the wall. Then any actors standing in front of the wall were still illuminated by both colors, but now the pink light was hitting the wall straight on, while the yellow-green was reflecting backstage. The pink light looked much less garish than the yellow-green, so this toned down the wall while keeping the acting space colored the same way as everything else.

HickoryDickory Wrap-Up: Lesson 2

This is the second post in my sequence of lighting lessons I learned during HickoryDickory. The first lesson was about maintaining the contrast between the actors and their surroundings.

The second lesson I learned was about sunlight. There is a convention in theatre lighting that moonlight is blue. You can use blue light, and people agree to believe that it's moonlight, even though it looks nothing like the moon. However, I discovered that there is no such convention about sunlight. Everyone always stereotypes the sun as being yellow, so I tried to create a sunny look by shining yellow light through a gobo to give the textured pattern of leaves. I discovered that it didn't really look like sunlight through leaves, it just looked weirdly greenish and acidic. When I removed the yellow gel entirely (on Charlie's recommendation), it looked a lot better.

What really makes sunlight look sunny is the angle; if you have a strong white illumination that is consistently coming from the same direction, it looks much more like sun.

HickoryDickory Wrap-Up: Lesson 1

Well, it's been a long time since I've posted; I've had a very busy semester (gee, what's new?), so spending hours typing up blog posts wasn't high on my list of priorities. Next semester doesn't seem like it will be any different, since I will be doing three shows (possibly four or five).

For now, however, I'm on winter break, and I plan to write all the posts I should have written over the past several months.

To start, I'm going to cover HickoryDickory. When I last left you, I had just started writing cues with Bill. I don't remember too much about the process itself, but I do have some overall lessons that I learned. Some are more general than others, but I think they were all valuable. I'm just going to post one per day, so that way I can space out my content over a longer period of time.

First Lesson:

Lighting is about contrast. Those of you with more experience than I have are probably saying "Duh," to yourselves, but that was a lesson I had never really had an opportunity to see for myself until now. This was my first show done on a box set, which meant that this was the first time I ever had to deal with walls.

Walls, unfortunately, reflect a lot of light. In dances, walls aren't a problem because most of the light comes from the sides, so it never hits the back wall. In a black box with no set, the curtains soak up all the light, so it never reflects even if it does hit them. However, the walls on a box set are usually much more lightly colored than black, so they reflect more light. This isn't really a problem, until the walls start reflecting more light than the actors' skin.

Once the walls reflect more light than the actors, a strange effect happens: no matter how much light you throw onto the stage, the actors always seem to be a little bit dim. This is because given the same amount of illumination, the walls reflect more of it back to your eyes than do the actors, so when your eyes adjust to that brightness level, the actors end up looking underexposed, so to speak.

In the case of HickoryDickory, the walls were a muted yellow, which was almost exactly the same brightness as a typical pale white American. Bill thought everything looked okay, but I was constantly frustrated by how dark the actors looked.

There's no easy solution to the wall/actor problem, but the best thing I found to do was to use light from angles that hit the actors but not the walls, such as from the sides or from a very steep angle from the front. Angles like that create shadows in weird places, like in the eye sockets, so I had to fill those shadows with light from the front, which lit up the walls, but since the actors were already mostly lit, I could use the wall-hitting lights at a lower intensity. Since this lowered the illumination of the whole stage, I was in esssence tricking the audience's eyes into overexposing the well-lit parts of the actors in order to see the dimmer parts, rather than underexposing the actors because everyone's eyes were adjusting to the bright walls.

A Lesson in Lighting: Be Flexible

Today was my first day of doing lights for HickoryDickory with my director. I was petrified that he wasn't going to like my design because it was obvious during the focus process that it wasn't turning out as I expected it to, and that, to me, meant that it wasn't good. However, it became pretty clear throughout the course of the day that my lights were actually in pretty good shape. I was able to accomplish most of the things Bill (my director) asked me to do, and we made really good progress. I was a bit surprised, since it seemed to me that my lights weren't going to work out at all, because they couldn't accomplish what I had expected them to in the way I had expected them to accomplish it. I mentioned this to Charlie, my mentor, and he agreed. He likened designing lights to creating a musical instrument: the construction of it is important, but equally and perhaps more important is the skill with which you employ the instrument you have been given. It's just that with lighting, you get to design the instrument as well as play it. So that's a big lesson for me; the realization that designing the lights correctly on the first try isn't a huge obstacle is extremely valuable, because it'll keep me from freaking out so much, and just allow me to design what I want to design. This time I spent a lot of time agonizing over angles and colors, and I shouldn't have. Colors can be easily changed, and angles probably won't survive the hanging process anyway, because something will get in the way, so you'll have to move stuff. Moral of the story: design something that you can use to accomplish the basic looks that your director gives you: sad, angry, happy, morning, afternoon, night, inside, outside, underwater, whatever. That's where the design comes in. Once you've got that, throw in some random stuff, because you'll need it--but make sure you have some sort of vague idea what you want to use it for. If you get some good ideas for specific effects, go for it; the small touches can really improve a play. Once you've got your lights, pick some colors that work well together, and then plop the whole thing on the ceiling and starting clickety-clacking on your light board.

HickoryDickory Lights

I mostly finished hanging my lights as of last night, and a lot of things didn't look the way I wanted them to. The blue color I used in my zooms just ended up looking really out of place when mixed in with all the warm colors on the set, and you could see where it was hitting, because there would be these patches of random coolness to the colors. Also, my idea for having fresnels mimic spill from windows onto the outdoors isn't really going to read, I don't think--you need blue in order to have night time, and as it stands, only half of the outdoor areas can be lit with blue. So I think I'm going to switch out the orange (Rosco 15) for some more of the blue I'm using for the moon already (Rosco 69, I think). Last, the sunlight through the trees (Rosco 12) effect looked like crap. I'm going to try switching it out for a green of some sort (Rosco 87, I think). I also need to move the sun-through-trees lights so that they're coming from the same direction. Next time I try to re-create a sun effect, I'm going to pay VERY close attention to the direction that the sun comes from; it really matters. Actually, in this case, it can just be diffuse daylight and that's okay, but I'm glad it wasn't supposed to be glaring sun. On the other hand, all of the choreographers in the department seem to want me to light their dances for WUDT. This is a good thing. Apparently they liked my work last year. So that makes me pretty happy.

Hanging Lights for HickoryDickory

I'm currently in the middle of hanging lights for the first drama of the year at my school, HickoryDickory, which is a great new show by Marisa Wegrzyn, who is a WashU alumna currently residing in Chicago. I designed the lights, and with tech week exactly one week away, it's time to get lights in the air. I'll post more on the design process later; right now I'm too busy to give much of an account. Today we started the light hang, and this is the first show I've done where I've had a significant amount of help with the hang. I was astounded at how quickly everything went. Just having five people or six people working instead of two or one made all the difference. You can assign one person to do all the bookkeeping and reading of the plot, so that the people doing the actual hanging just holler out for another light, and the person at the plot tells them where to go next. Meanwhile, she (it was a she today) can keep track of any changes that are made, all without the workers interrupting their progress to write stuff down. Moral of the story: Theatre is massively time-consuming, but if you have enough people, you can do a lot of things in parallel so that it doesn't take quite as long. I'm really excited for the show; if you have a chance to see it (i.e., you're in St. Louis), you really should. Show dates are Sept. 29 and 30, and Oct. 1, 6 and 8. 8PM Friday and Saturday, 2PM Sunday.

Thoughts on the Muny

Anyone in St. Louis during the summer probably goes to the Muny at least once. It's located in Forest Park, and it is one of the largest and oldest outdoor theatres in the world. During the summer, the Muny puts on a series of musicals, which this summer included Aida, The Wizard of Oz and The King and I. The Muny employs professional actors and technicians, and is probably one of the preeminent summer stock venues in the country. If you look at the cast bios next time you see a Broadway musical, chances are you will find that some of the members of the cast performed at the Muny at one time or another. In addition, 1,200 of the seats at the Muny (the ones way in the back) are free, so college students can afford to go see all the shows. Having said that, however, the Muny isn't all that great. The main problem at the Muny is the number of shows they do. In order to maximize profit, they cram seven shows into seven weeks, without skipping a day. This gives them less than 24 hours between the end of one show and the beginning of the next. In that time, they have to rip all the set pieces out, put in the new ones, program the light and sound cues, and put it all together into a show. Granted, everyone working at the Muny is very skillful, but even so, putting together a show in under 24 hours is a monumental undertaking. In order to make it work, they cut corners. The lights are bland and static, because programming complex cues takes time. The sets always have similar features, so that it's easier to build them and work the scene changes. The acting and directing isn't very inspired because there isn't much rehearsal time. All these things add up to performances which are enjoyable, and which involve people who are clearly very talented, but which are decidedly, well, blah. They're not sloppy, because the actors and techies are both too talented for that, but they're lacking the kind of intense, refined energy that you would see at a show that had more time to rehearse. Luckily for the Muny, no one really seems to notice. This is a general trend of theatre audiences in general; they have an astonishing capacity to be bored out of their minds for an entire performance, and yet when it's all over, only remember the sparkling, glitzy Act II finale. They'll give the actors a standing ovation and gush about how much they loved the show. I'm still going to go to the Muny for the rest of the summer, because I would never skip an opportunity for free theatre, but if you consider yourself a discerning theatre viewer, don't expect great things from the Muny.

Hanging lights with St. Louis Shakespeare

I spent most of my day today helping the St. Louis Shakespeare Company hang lights for their upcoming production of Ovid's Metamorphoses. They work in the Grandel Theatre, which is on Grand, just north of the Fox. The theatre's lighting grid is absolutely awful. There is no metal grating next to the hanging positions to walk on. Instead, someone put a whole bunch of two-by-sixes over top of the support structure for the grid. But they didn't bother to fasten them down. So when you're up in the grid, you're simply walking around on a whole bunch of loose boards, 50 feet above the stage floor. The boards are uneven, and being loose, can be easily moved. So it's easy to trip, and as people shift the boards around to make room for lights, giant gaping holes can open in the floor. Not only that, but as I was working, I noticed that one of vertical support struts, which was supposed to be supporting the weight of the grid, was loose. So loose, in fact, that when I tried to tighten it, it simply came unfastened in my hand. Luckily, the lighting grid didn't come crashing down, but it certainly doesn't inspire great faith in the safety of the theatre. Not only that, but some of the lighting positions aren't even over the boards. They're just sticking out into space. So to hang a fixture on them, one person has to haul the light into the air with a rope, while the other person hangs the fixture one-handed, since his other hand is clamped in a death grip to the nearest solid object, and only his hand is preventing him from pitching headfirst off the grid into the seats below. That person, this time around, was me.

A few instrument maintenance tips

I learned a couple things about destroying lighting instruments today. First: never put a 1000-watt FEL lamp into an old Altman zoom fixture. The bulb is so big that if you slide the back lens all the way back, it will contact the tip of the bulb, causing the lens to shatter because of the heat. We found nine or ten Altmans with this problem. Second: never put a 1000-watt FEL lamp into one of those teensy baby Altman fixtures--it will melt the reflector. As for theatre this summer, I'm currently helping with lighting at St. Louis Shakespeare, and they have a gorgeous theatre. I'll also be running the light board for Hot City Theatre's production of MOments in August.

Young Choreographers' Showcase

I recently designed lights for Young Choreographers' Showcase 2006 (YCS), which is a biennial dance show that WashU puts on to, well, showcase the works of student choreographers. Earlier this year, I designed lights for another dance concert, Style/Form, which was a senior thesis performance for Justin Huebener and Allison Califano. I didn't get a chance to write a post about it, but that show was a really great experience for me; I learned many valuable lessons about designing dance shows (see the post below this one). Style/Form also took place in the same performance space as YCS, which meant that I got to leave most of my lights hung. Since I already had most of the equipment already in the space, tech for YCS was a very pleasant process; there were no late nights in the theatre, and since I had tech support (in other words, warm bodies to do my bidding, and a budget), I didn't have to do everything myself. At least in part because tech was so nice, I think the lights for YCS turned out very well, and I just got hold of some pictures of the performance, so I'm excited to get those posted and discuss them a bit. I didn't take most of these photos; I believe I am within my rights to post them, since this size is freely available from David Marchant, the photographer, but don't ask me if you want to copy them or something--ask him. I did take the shots that are from Style/Form, however, and those are Creative Commons licensed, so do whatever you want (so long as you follow the license). Also, if you have access to a CRT monitor, I recommend it for viewing these photos--the colors will be much nicer on a CRT than they would be on an LCD.

Exposure

Allison Califano

This piece was a repeat from Style/Form, and it was very fast-paced and angry. Allison wanted a leafy, foresty look, so she asked for patterns on the dancers, and in Style/Form, I wasn't able to get it to work very well. However, with a second chance at it, I used more saturate colors and changed the instrument focus a bit, and the leaf patterns showed up quite well this time, I think. An unexpected side effect of the bright green cyc is that whenever the dancers were in silhouette, they left weird blue streaks as they moved. It was clearly a trick of the eyes, but it still looked very cool.

Decompose. Recompose

Heather Wigmore

Heather didn't really have any clue what she wanted in the way of lighting, so I took the opportunity to play a bit, and use a lighting technique that I've seen Charlie Chapman use from time to time: having intense complementary colors from opposite angles. Where the lights blend, they create white, and the shadows cast by each light are actually the areas illuminated by the other color, so it actually makes all the shadows colored rather than black, which I think looks neat. I don't think I was completely successful in mimicking Charlie's work in this piece, but I still like the overall effect, especially on her face.

Alone Everybody

Laura Vilines

This dance was divided into three sections; I am posting pictures of the first and last section. This dance discussed themes of solitude and becoming part of a group. All of the lighting is very saturate because Laura wanted bright colors (look at the accents on the dresses). The first section is the orange one, and it was a short solo section for Laura; she stood in that pool of light and considered breaking out of it, but never really managed to. That's the solitude part. The second scene was blue, and involved lots of group work. That represented the group--what everybody else was doing. The third section is the red photo, and it involved similar choreography to the second section, except this time it told a story about a girl going from solitude to becoming part of the group. My lighting for this dance very closely mirrored the music; it was bright and fun and happy, and for the last piece ("It's Oh So Quiet" by Björk), I went with the mood changes almost exactly. This seemed to work, because the choreography was very open and forthright.

Drifting into Focus

Patricia Engel

The lights for this happened by accident--because of the white floor, any lights that shine on the floor are very visible. When I turned on the side lights with an intense blue color in them, I created those really nice-looking symmetrical scallops on either side of the stage. Because this was a very symmetrical, structured piece with music that sounded a lot like Philip Glass or Brian Eno, I immediately had a "eureka!" moment when I saw those scallops on either side. As you can see, Patricia's costume is pink and purple, so I used the blue scallops to accent her costume, and then I used pink in the mid and high side lights to make the costume and her skin seem warm and mellow. The eureka part was when I realized that her dance enters from the upper-right corner of the stage, moves downstage, and then goes back out that part of the stage. I followed the dance by turning on the alleys of side light one by one, from upstage to downstage, and then turning them off in reverse order, and I think it looked great. This was probably my favorite piece of the show.

Sorrows of the Past

Marquita Redd

This piece was about black people in the South getting lynched. It was a repeat from Marquita's thesis, but I didn't design lights for that, so I essentially re-created the lights from scratch, based on what she told me her original designer had done. I didn't really enjoy this piece, just because I thought the theme was overdone, but the lighting came out quite nicely; I've noticed that reds and yellows do a good job of accenting dark skin.

You Must Meet My Wife

Justin Huebener

This was another repeat from Style/Form, and I'm really glad I got the chance to re-do it--I just wasn't happy with the lights for it the first time, and I think they were much improved this time around, even though all I really changed was that I used more saturate colors. The picture, however, isn't from YCS, it's from Style/Form, so you don't get to see how much better things looked, sadly. Basically, this piece was about sexual repression in the 1950s, I think. That makes it sound rather pompous and dreary, but it was actually just a heck of a lot of fun; the dancers maintained expressionless faces throughout most of the dance, making robotic sexual gestures and movements, and everyone was cracking up the whole time. It was set to "Hey Big Spender" from Sweet Charity, and the dancers were pretty much acting out a weird robot version of that in big frilly dresses, so you can probably imagine how strange it was.

Nostos

Meredith Wilensky

This dance also included a eureka moment; when Meredith started asking for lights that kept her in a pathway up and down center stage, I realized that a rectangular path from the back would look great, so I added that as a special. Then I saw her costume, and things got even better, because as you can see, the fabric of her shirt was a translucent red material that glowed just beautifully under the backlighting that I had.

Unbounded

Jenny Boissiere

No, you're not imagining things; the dancers really are wearing blindfolds. Luckily, the blindfolds were thin enough that they could see through them reasonably well--so long as the lighting was bright enough. My first priority with this dance was clearly to prevent collisions, so I just picked colors that I thought went well with their costumes, and then turned everything up full blast. Not particularly creative, but it still came out nicely. The music for this was really cool a cappella beat-boxing. Throughout the dance, one by one, most of the members of the company took off their blindfolds. I thought it would be really cool to make them go dark as they took their blindfolds off, to kind of invert the audiences expectations of what happens when you remove an impediment to clear sight. However, that ended up being not really possible given the choreography, and it would have been semi-dangerous for the dancers who were still blindfolded, so I settled for just changing the color on anyone who wasn't blindfolded. By the end, only one dancer was left with a blindfold, and you can see in the second photo that I got my chance to make the blindfolded person light, and the un-blinded dark, which I was happy about.

Happening

Rebecca Hutt

This was a cute little piece that I really enjoyed. It had already been performed at the American College Dance Festival, so someone designed lights for it there, and I mimicked what they did based on description. I admit that I probably wouldn't have come up with this particular color scheme on my own, but I really liked it, and I'm going to add this type of look to my bag of tricks. I only wish the floor weren't so reflective, because the red on the back wall kind of turns into purple near the bottom, as it blends with the blue from the stage wash. And, that's all the dances in YCS 2006--I hope you've enjoyed reading about them! Just for fun, here are some shots that I took myself from Style/Form. My camera isn't great though, so these aren't of the highest quality.

Some Light Designing Lessons

I've done a lot more light designing over the past few months, and I've learned some useful rules of thumb:

1. Make sure your top lights are soft-edged, otherwise people will look like they're getting darker when they walk in and out of them.
2. When designing a dance concert, use VERY saturate colors. If you ever say to yourself "that's too saturate," then you're probably wrong, and it's just right.
3. Also when designing a dance concert, pick a palette of side light colors before you start tech with the choreographers, and stick to it. That way, if the designer wants green, or blue, you'll already have the gels sitting nearby, and you know they'll look good with the colors you have for your top and back lights. It's usually good to have a darker and a lighter shade of everything too.
4. Always make sure to hang, or have enough circuits available for hanging, a smack-in-the-face front wash. It'll flatten everything out when you use it, but directors and choreographers will inevitably tell you "I need to see their eyes". If you can bring the front wash in at a low level, it'll fill in the shadows under the brows, without compromising the modeling from your main lighting. This will make the director/choreographer happy, and keep you from looking stupid.
5. During the rehearsal process, arrange with somebody (probably the stage manager or assistant stage manager, or your assistant light designer, if you have one) to make a note of every time somebody stands on something. Unless the actor is really short, the extra foot or two of height will make most actors' heads disappear above your light if you don't compensate for that action.
6. Likewise, especially with plays and sets that have highly localized scenes where the action tends to be limited to certain subsections of the set, arrange to have yourself notified whenever the director blocks a scene that breaks those boundaries. This will always happen; 75% of the play will occur within your nicely-defined lighting boundaries, but at some point during wet tech, usually in Act 2 when everyone is tired and wants to go home, the blocking will call for an actor to cross between two areas, and it will look like they walked into a black hole for a second. If you're aware of the areas whose boundaries are broken often, you can smooth out their blending so that those dark spots don't have to be fixed later.
7. Make sure you know what your director wants. At least at my school, lighting designers are not necessarily encouraged to work as closely with the director as the scenic or costume or props designers, and I think that's a mistake. Even though most directors feel less comfortable with lights, you as the designer at least need to make darn sure that you're on the same page as the director as far as your concept of the play, and it wouldn't hurt for you to go to plenty of rehearsals too. That way, you'll design something that the director feels comfortable working with, rather than lights which the director feels hamper his or her vision.
8. Contrast can create the perception of darkness. If you have a VERY bright key light from a shadowy direction (side, top, back), it will tend to override some of your fill lighting and make the scene look like there is darkness where there isn't, because the eyes adjust to the brightest part of the scene. The solution here is not more light, because you will end up with everything at 100%, and it'll still look shadowy. The solution is to take the key light down a bit, and as it gets closer to the level of the fill light, suddenly those shadows will get filled in, and the scene won't look so stark.

I'm putting these down partially for my own benefit, so that I can remember them until they become internalized, but I figured that it's a good idea to have them out on the Internet in general as well, so that other new lighting designers can benefit.