Wenger | J.R. Clancy: When creating a show, it is crucial to ensure that no one is “in the dark”. Though, beyond obvious physical visibility, lighting design “adds a layer of realism. It puts people into the world”. This week, we interviewed theater electrician and lighting designer Quentin Kurtz, who is actively working in New York City in the technical theater scene.
2 comments:
The close relationship between Scenic and Lighting is always noticeable. As from my experience, most conflicts and battle are arisen from these two departments. Both scenic designers and lighting designers always have the elements they are attaching to. It’s quite tricky to decide which side should make some compromises. So, I agree with the idea about keeping in mind about flexibility all the time. And have transparent communication between all the departments. During the communication, it’s important to be objective to address the facts and production-related concerns without personal emotions. Treating everyone like equal level collaborator instead of enemy has different opinions that you want to fight back for. And I am also kind of surprised by the sentence in the passage that “Unexpected challenges are ALWAYS going to be scenic elements. ” I don’t know if better collaborative in aesthetics side for lighting designer and scenic designer can prevent this from happening.
One thing that Quentin Kurtz mentioned is that scenic elements often cause the most surprises for a lighting designer as they often cause the most need for adaptability and flexibility of a plot and the design as they won’t ever truly work as designed to every little detail and dimension. This made me curious about the propagation of error within a production itself and how small errors occur, who knows about them, and whether they get communicated or not in a particular process. It seems that some of these errors are layout errors where scenery is genuinely misplaced on stage, whereas others are construction errors or retrofitting that may not even be communicated to a TD and are instead just a result of what needed to be done by a carpenter to complete a scenic element. Ultimately, propagation of error in scenery should try to be communicated as much as possible to the lighting department so that they have the advanced time to react if need be. Many of these errors are easy to miss, but encouraging this culture and standard of work will surely promote collaboration and a higher quality product.
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