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May 2012

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Theatrical Lighting

Making the artistic aspects of the lighting design drive the technical aspects.

by Greg Persinger

Over the past 18 years I have had the privilege of working with some great lighting designers and have survived working with others that call themselves "designers" but left everyone wondering where the design was at the end of the project.

One particular show I worked on had one of those "designer-in-name-only" types that incessantly fiddled, tweaked, and dinked with the lighting-only to create a pile of mush on stage, which she affectionately called a "lighting design". Everyone else called it ugly.

It was her first major project with a moving light rig augmenting her theatrical lighting rig, and instead of concentrating on lighting fundamentals she was, in her own words, trying to do "cool things" with the moving lights and couldn't be bothered with the basics.

Through the whole project she constantly ignored the most simple and basic of lighting concepts, and the poor results showed it.

The late author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn had this to say about basic fundamentals. He says,
"Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals."

Of course, you have to know what the basic fundamentals are to be able to apply them. When doing theatrical lighting, the fundamentals can be broken down into four basic purposes of using lighting. These are visibility, selective visibility, mood, and modeling.

Visibility

The first and most important purpose of lighting is visibility, which, in its most basic form, is nothing more than lighting the people and things on the stage so they can be seen.

Richard Pilbrow, one of this century's foremost authorities on theatrical lighting design, describes the importance of visibility in this manner: "Ninety-nine percent of the time it is the designer's duty to light the actors clearly so that everyone can see them. Only for very particular dramatic effects can the actor be under-lit. If the audience has to strain to see the actor that is speaking or singing, the lighting-no matter how beautiful it may look-is a total failure."

Selective Visibility

Selective visibility is the next purpose of lighting. In selective visibility we use light and the absence of light to focus the audience's attention on the action. We do this by lighting the areas of the stage we want the audience to look at, while leaving the areas that we don't want the audience to look at dark.

Mood

The next purpose of light is mood. Mood is using the color and intensity of the light to affect the mood of the audience. Here we want to augment the mood of the dramatic moment. For example, if it is a happy moment in the drama, we want to augment the moment with bright and cheerful lighting as well as bright and happy colors. In contrast, if the dramatic moment is sad and gloomy, we would want the lighting to reflect that and we might use a much lower light level and darker colors, such as blues and greens, to signify the sadness.

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Greg Persinger is the owner of Vivid Illumination. He can be reached at greg@vividillumination.com.