Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Light is quite tactile to me. It has shape and dimension.
The most successful and brilliant work a lighting designer can do is usually the least noticeable.
I call the art of theatre a "dirty art", since there are so many people involved who have needs and whims to be satisfied.
After years and years of accumulating papers, I keep feeling that I should give them to the library or something because they are beginning to overwhelm me.
Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction.
I always say, or have said in the past, that ninety-nine and forty-four-hundredths of the audience does not pay any attention to the lighting, but one hundred percent is affected by it.
Lighting affects everything light falls upon. How you see what you see, how you feel about it, and how you hear what you are hearing. Replace the 'a' with an 'e' and you get lighting effects!
I've often called the lighting for the stage the "music for the eye", because it has the same way of making an atmosphere, making a landscape, changing fluidly from one place to another without seeming effort.
I like to think of myself as some of the Scotch tape that holds things together - I'm very handy to have around. But all that actors really need is a bare stage. Lighting is just one of the luxuries of the theater.
I believe in the hand-brain, pencil-to-paper-brain connection. In fact, I teach and I have the first year students do all of their drafting by hand to remind them that there is this physical connection between the two.
I know too many playwrights, or would-be playwrights, or would-have-been playwrights, that are around my age, who were bitter or have gone to something else because they got such a raw deal from critics, and some are quite wonderful writers.
Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone.
I feel also that the rhythm of a production is made by the lighting. If it feels like it's too long and too slow, it may well be because the light is changing in a way that makes the audience feel that way. Definitely I feel that light and music are very closely related.
There is a way to support the art and to allow and encourage the art to flourish while being critical. In fact, I find in teaching that self-critique is one of the best ways to have your art grow, but if you start tearing yourself down then, it's not going to go anywhere. I feel the same about critics. I feel that's happening all too often.