One. The Lighting Designer


The lighting of it affects everything light falls upon:
 how you see what you see, how you feel about it,
 and how you hear what you are hearing.

  I am a lighting designer. The profession is only as old as the years I
have spent in it. This is astonishing when you consider the flexibility
lighting by electricity had achieved before I was born. I think it simply
never occurred to anyone until the 1930s that the lighting of anything
should be the exclusive concern of a craftsman, let alone under the
artistic aegis of a specialist.
 Lighting design, in which I pioneered, is still considered for the most
part somewhat less important than interior decoration. That attitude
is scarcely justified because light remains primarily important in order
for people to see what it falls upon. The lighting of it affects everything
light falls upon: how you see what you see, how you feel about it, and
how you hear what you are hearing.
 "Affect" is the key word. Change the "a" to an "e" and you get
lighting effects. Effects should be handled with all the care and used
with the rarity of fireworks. The most successful and brilliant work a
lighting designer does is usually the least noticeable.
 The use of light for anything must remain primarily social and logi-
cal. A major design feature is that light is a necessity, and you use it as
a necessity. The logical, basic function of light, of fixtures, of all arti-
ficial light, goes all the way back to the human demand and need for
visibility in order to see in the dark.
 On that firm basis, and when you have complete technical control
of your tools, your medium, you can design lighting for infinite
subtlety.
 I have been called a "bloody electrician with notions." That is not a
bad definition of a lighting designer. In the Tools of the Trade section
of this book, the equipment and the manner of using it by which cer-
tain of my own designs have been carried out are illustrated. Before
getting to that, in a time when equipment is becoming yearly more
pliant, I should like to expose as clearly as possible what these "no-
tions" are. Lighting design, the imposing of quality on the scarcely
visible air through which objects and people are seen, begins with
thinking about it.

Writers and painters have always understood how light affects

Jean's lights were never simple. They
were complicated because Jeannie con-
sidered the most important lighting was
lighting air, not scenery or people. The
air in one of Jean's shows vibrated with
the emotion of whatever the particular
scene was about. You can't do that with-
out a lot of equipment so there was
always a bit of an argument with the
carpenters.

-- Lucia Victor

what it falls upon, how you see and how you feel (and how you hear).
 All literature is full of light. No novelist who controls the lighting of
his lifelike universe is apt to set a tender proposal in a blaze. Or to pre-
sent tragedy without appropriately shading it. If sad events are fiction-
ally brightly lighted, the light falls subjectively on the scene, merciless
and not benign.
 Artists see the air they see through. Naturalistic painters, seeking the
essence of what inspires them, may wait for months to catch the ideal
light on a particular landscape. Portrait painters use light to reveal the
character in faces. In the twentieth century painters began consciously
to create arbitrary sources of light within their canvases, an important
step in the direction of abstraction.
 Dramatists, dependent on others to carry out their intentions, indi-
cate appropriate light and weather to set their scenes. Shakespeare,
whose stage was open to the arbitrary sky, filled his spoken words with
subtle light. In the nineteenth century, when "special effects" were
added to stage illumination, there were times when Shakspeare's poetic
subtleties were lost against lurid, realistic sunsets or deluged by light-
ning.
 In the twentieth century, Eugene O'Neill wrote his stage directions
with as much care as his dialogue. For the opening of Mourning Be-
comes Electra he asks for a "luminous mist" and stipulates that "the
.windows of the lower floor reflect the sun's rays in a resentful glare
[italics mine]."
 What a challenge to designers who refrain from using steam for mist.
It requires from us what the light-conscious scene designer Robert
Edmond jones pleaded for: "the artist's approach." Without it, we offer
nothing. Yet the humble word "approach" should be kept in mind.
  In the past thirty-odd years, during which I have designed the light-
ing for over three hundred shows, the separate program credit "Light-
ing by --------" or for those scene designers who prefer to do their own
lighting, "Scenery and lighting by --------" has become a standard
acknowledgment. It is important to rememher that lighting is a con-
tributory art, a high craft serving the creative purposes of other men.
We need the artist's approach, but to impose a separate artist's ego
through light on the artistic whole becomes destructive.
 Only when you know that necessity remains the guiding factor and
when the techniques and functions of lighting are under your com-
plete technical control may you adopt even the artist's approach safely.
The minute you fuss around with light, use it arbitrarily or egotistically,
decoratively or in a tricky, arty manner, you get a kind of aggressiveness
that is not only unattractive in a show and distracting, but equally an-
noying in a house or an office.
 Why on earth, for example, are so many modern offices lit with
downlight! Because it is a pretty design idea and it became the fashion
to put a lot of fixtures in the ceiling and turn them on. The fact of the
matter is that no office worker can stand downlights. They have head-
aches. They are always moving their desks around to get out of the

The plain truth is that life has become so
crowded, so hurried, so commonplace,
so ordinary, that we have lost the artist's
approach to art. Without this, we are
nothing.
           - Robert Edmond Jones

The longer you're in the theatre, the
more you hate the heroics of individuals
and the more you respect people who
have a love of the whole. The phrase
"love of the whole" occurs repeatedly in
Miss Rosenthal's conversation and seems
to represent to her a spirit of unstinting
cooperation that she not only practices
herself but regards as embodying a moral
principle of some profundity, by which
good may be distinguished from evil in
nearly every area of human behavior.
-- Winthrop Sargeant

 direct light. We have the technical means now to reproduce natural
 light in most of its shadings and intensities and we live more and
 more of our lives by artificial light -- but most of it is bad light.
  There is no excuse for bad light. It is the result of poor thinking
 and impractical application. You must know what the lighting you
 choose will do before you install it. And that is the reason for a book
 about a lighting designer.

  The first question most people ask you about your profession, if you
 have succeeded in that profession, is how you got into it in the first
 place. The second is who you are that you got into it in the first place.
 I have decided to answer those questions -- partly at the insistence of
 my collaborator. So I will talk about myself, about J.R., in terms of
 how I grew up and became a lighting designer. After that, my profes-
 sional life has been almost the whole of my life, certainly the whole of
 what is relevant to this book. Since mine is a collaborative profession,
 it is relevant to talk also about the people with whom I have collabo-
 rated.
  Then I should like to do a quick survey of the history of lighting in
 terms of fixtures, the tools of lighting. This fascinates me. No craftsman
 or artist has less than a debt and a duty to study the past. I do not
 believe you can ever do sound work, let alone original work, without
 an understanding and appreciation of what was done before you. Any
 man's contribution is merely added to the contributions of his profes-
 sional ancestors.
  There are perfectly sound textbooks on the techniques of stage and
 architectural lighting. I think this book must be a personal approach to
 lighting. And the best way to approach the craft is through lighting in
 the theatre.

 All the arts and crafts collaborate in the theatre. You light the stage
exclusively with artificial light and can take no advantage of natural
light, as films may do. All the conditions of life are reconstructed in the
theatre, foreshortened and intensified in "scenes." All emotional states
are encompassed. Ranging through drama, entertainment, music and
dance, you cover all that lighting may contribute to life.
 If Bernard Shaw asks for "a fine spring morning beside a river" in
which to introduce the young Joan of Lorraine, you create one, in a
physically restricted place, on a stage. Once designed, your moist,
country morning air is preset to repeat itself for each performance
before yielding to "evening on the Loire" or "a restless, fitful windy
night, full of summer lightning." Even so cerebral a playwright as Shaw
indicates light to enhance the emotional content of his scenes.
 But Bernard Shaw would most certainly have objected if any syllable
of his had gotten lost because the lighting of the stage had preempted
an audience's attention. The lighting of anything almost never plays a
paramount role -- the lighting designer's business is to be as unob-
trusive as he is helpful.

 To light a show, any show, demands a mastery of technique -- you
must know the tools of your trade the acknowledgment that there
must be a technique, and a method of organizing your ideas. Other-
wise you get either a fancy, nervous design that obtrudes itself, or a
static, boring mess of light to see the stage by. (The truth is that natural
light is never static and that it is only very rarely nervous or sudden.)
 I really cannot stand people who go around lighting theatre produc-
tions in the disorderly way that many of them do, simply because they
do not take the necessary time or face the drudgery of analyzing how
each scene or episode should look, visualizing it from a lighting point
of view. Pyrotechnics, all too simple to achieve, seldom do more than
bring dramatic action to a dead halt, and what I speak of as "European
lighting" - a kind of tableau lighting -- does little more than make a
kind of nineteenth-century picture. object to scene designers who
light their scenery and forget the acto rs and to directors who light the
actors and forget the scenery.
 The basic concern in theatre lighting is with the dramatic intention
of a particular moment. The visibility, or the kind of light, in which you
see the actors and the scenery, the place, must have a logic. The logic
is based on lying all of these in with the idea of being there, in the
scene, in the first place.
 Lighting design derives its validity from the answer to the funda-
mental question why who is where in the first place. In the answer is
the logic of lighting. This logic applies equally to lighting in the theatre
or to street lighting or to lighting the interiors of buildings or to the
light by which you read a book in a corner.