What the fuck is naturalism anyway? (Or, lighting is political.)
The sticky question of style and signalling with light.
The function of light in performance is at the very heart of what we do as lighting designers. Often, this question of purpose is a very philosophical one, in which we are all to quick to settle into a long-term relationship with. I am truly obsessed with this interrogation, especially when the matter of purpose becomes intertwined with notions of value. What makes this design better? Why does this design read as more classy? What even is classy light?
These questions seem ever more pertinent within the current ‘age’ of design. Designers have never been so revered (or at least it seems to me) and with this age of design comes a new wave of aestheticism in the mainstream. You could suggest that this stems form audiences exposure to glossy cinematic epics. Theatre is now at a place technologically where it can start to rival that. The question of whether theatre should attempt to emulate is a juicy topic of contention — but not one for now.
What follows is my attempt to summarise my journey with this relationship. I tend to think quite a lot about the emulation of natural forms of light a great deal within my work. This has gradually crept up on me, and has much to do with the influence of photography as a key reference point throughout my process. I’m using the ‘naturalism’ as a frame for this conversation as it’s the easiest way in — I’m aware of the laziness in this.
This is of course, solely my experience as a theatre maker that tells stories through the medium of light. I actively encourage other responses. It’s all bloody subjective in the end, isn’t it!
I’ve managed to avoid many of the classics thus far. This I suppose is much to do with my foundations in performance forms that live primarily beyond text. For the longest time my focus was on the physical, and this extended to my aesthetic appreciation. I wanted it synthetic and emotive. Sharp lines. Sterile angles. An act of construction.
I would throw scorn upon naturalism at every turn. This of course is a fallacy. Theatre is an artificial act, there is no way of truly making it natural — and even if you did, the chances are it wouldn’t be legible. For so long I resisted the idea of emulating nature in light, it didn’t fit in with my sterile box with my sharp lines and my need for expressionism. I remember at the same time being completely taken aback by the beauty of James Farncombe’s work on ‘Juno and The Paycock’ at the National Theatre. The sheer appreciation of ‘real’ light entering a space was staggering. It felt like a love letter to light, and the colour palette was exquisitely treading the line between the natural world and an indication of emotive temperature.
When I first discovered the work of Gregory Crewdson, I knew the game was up. With his highly framed imagery that possessed a real love of light, and a colour palette forged from the natural world with emotive undertones.
At the time I was lighting a play that unfolded a great deal around a table. I was searching for a way for the table to be the anchor in all of the images in the stage picture. This image really did it for me. It’s the clarity in where the light is coming from– this is something that had always felt important to me, i’d always seen light on stage something that had to posses a clear intent around direction. Images like Crewdson’s however, demand you pay attention to the quality of the light, as often within his compositions the quality is right but the colour palette is imbued in a wonderfully nuanced fashion.
What do we mean when we talk about quality of light? There are lots of characteristics of light — the angle that the light approaches from, the colour or colour temperature of the light, and the intensity of the light. But quality — thats something different. Quality is how the light reacts with objects within space, best expressed as a hardness or a softness. Put simply quality of light is defined by the size of the light source in relation to the object. For example, if you were being lit by car headlights (a relatively small source of light in relation to you) then there would be a hard shadow behind you, whereas if you were outside on an overcast day (the overcast sky is large in relation to you) then there would be not strong shadow behind you.
Therefore, you can begin to use quality of light as shorthand for spacial dynamics without necessarily needing to create a full ‘naturalistic’ stage image. As soft or diffuse light is something we associate with the natural world and vast landscapes, it can be used to signify an open space, an endlessness. This structuring of qualities of light is something that has begun to creep slowly into my work. By creating rules around the quality of light you can free up strong theatrical light gestures for explicit moments or structural impact.
Abstracting naturalism then was the next step. Heiner Goebbels lays it all out in the title of the preface of his wonderful book ‘Aesthetics of Absence’.
When a tree is already being mentioned, you don’t also have to show it.
Here comes the grind — what makes theatre, and any other act of live performance so beautiful and relatable, is its immediacy and physical closeness. I like to think of the process of making theatre as one of sharing a story with an audience. This is an important distinction, sharing — not showing. Showing supposes an us and them, a here and there. I’m interested in situations that only supply a here and and us.
Something of a hybrid was ‘Alligators’ set in an apartment somewhere in London, the audience are looking over the walls into the apartment. We’re asked to make a choice, a judgement a the end of the play. Light’s job in this production was to create a concrete reality and then begin to subvert it — cast the seeds of instability and doubt. The structural rules of light in this production echoed the two states. Concrete and fluid. The concrete state had the flat presented in its naturalistic entirety — light made sense. However, in moments of doubt, something of that is lost. In the image above you can see Sally (played by Susan Stanley) bridging two worlds — her hands lit by the light hanging above the table and her neck and head lit by a diffuse smokey blue, it seems to leave her swimming in the room. Night is not a warm smokey blue, and it makes no sense within the context of the room. But having structured the qualities of light — this becomes imbued with a greater meaning and allows communication of some things beyond text. What it is to be emotionally present in a space? Presenting that with light goes far beyond naturalism. It’s also a state of ‘feeling’ that’s hard to express in words alone.
The desire for a theatre of the here and now has had me going round in circles. The idea of sharing means that, in my eyes, I have a responsibility to manage the relationship light has with an audience. That’s now a key part of the way I think about how shows should be encountered. Does the light include or exclude the audience? Once you usher in such questions whilst making work, you also then have to hold yourself accountable for your design actions. Do I have the right to frame this story in this manner? Do I have the right to tell you what to think right now? These sorts of questions are ever more prevalent in a theatre landscape that is becoming more aware of it’s moral responsibilities to both it’s audiences and wider society.
There are two approaches to this dilemma that i’ve been trying in recent years. Firstly — if the production is dealing with an incredibly complex issue that delves into moral dilemmas that I have no real right to comment upon, then I let it breathe. Returning to Haifa was a prime example of this, my job was to allow room for the anguish and not apportion blame. Hard with a drama exploring the human injustice of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The design was concerned with offering a space to share, people came into focus and people came out of focus. The words needed to do the work.
There were echoes of this too within the design Naomi Kuyck-Cohen and I created for Trap Street. Curating a space for conversation on social housing that refused to fetishise concrete or belittle the tenants of social housing into becoming little more than caricatures. A fight against signals and signifiers!
The second, and more challenging approach is to actively embrace a shared space. I’d love this to be the way in which all theatre happens, but it’s not right for every story. Occupying a space with an audience is to include them — to actively share. It becomes a challenge in that you have to work so much against the unseen rules and semiotics of what it is to even step onstage and speak within a theatre. It this work it becomes even more crucial to set up the language with audience early on. In this scenario, they never leave — or that is to say you don’t let them.
It becomes about sharing a world. The emotive temperature of the scene continues to spill out into the audience, there is no real separation. Again, with this sort of work I find the need to try and shy away from qualities of light that feel too theatrical, so everything is grounded in the world of softness, which in a weird way somehow honors the age old gesture of sharing stories around the camp fire — and in some way acknowledges that we are small as individuals, but have more in common than that divides us.
I Won’t Make It On My Own, was a collaborative project that I worked on during my time as a Nuffield Laboratory Associate. We were tasked with producing a piece of work that had a dialogue around what is made in Southampton now. The stimulus for the project became small acts of creativity. It was about what we share as a community. So together we were exploring the act of creation. It held a special kind of respectful calmness. That extended to the way we treated the audience in space.
Often in these cases you end up with a very different relationship with theatrical image making. Somehow the form can’t take being pushed to extreme images you feel some how cheated. Your rule breaking just creates more rules!
Perhaps… I think. I’d be able to light this sort of work better if I wasn’t so drenched in the troupes of traditional theatre making. Furthermore, if I hadn’t become so obsessed with justifying the dramaturgy of every beam of light that enters the theatrical space.
I adore the work of Quarantine. What it is, what it stands for. I’ve been jealous for sometime about the relationship light has amongst it all — free from the trappings of theatre light. At this juncture I could quite easily go off on a detour about what post modern theatre has done for lighting — but I’ll save that one for another time. There simply isn’t time to untangle the confusion between post modern theatre and the sleek and cold European aesthetic.
What I’ve come to relish in my job is the unrelenting and continuous conversation with form. Sometimes the thing is light emulating the natural world. Sometimes light speaks exclusively to emotive motivations — Or simply the need to share a story.
Being true to the story — a journey I struggle with still. Aesthetic principles can really get in the way of telling the right story — and that, in my opinion means the design is failing. It’s taken me years feel able to release bombastic colour on stage. Sometimes of course the need for vibrant images is ernt simply through the need to elicit joy. And that is perfectly acceptable. Recent productions of 1972 The Future of Sex and A Kettle of Fish have forced me to engage with colour in a more direct way. It’s been terrifying — and an awful lot of fun!
I’ll leave you with a quote from Fabrizio Crisafulli in ‘Active Light — Issues of Light in Contemporary Theatre’ which has been one of my very favourite explorations of the poetics of light that I’ve come across.
…stage light should take on a role that is similar to that of the natural light in the world. The issue isn’t imitating natural light, but rather the ability of of light to become a vital substance in theatre, even in it’s most abstract interpretation. An essential, primary and generative element. Light could free itself from the effect-producing and illustrative role, and the layout function, prepared in the final days of rehearsals, where standard practice relegates it, and which hardly work with theatre’s ability to echo reality.
So then, the journey is not over — my relationship with the purpose of my work will continue to change. Standing still is the true crime.
After all — everything is in motion.
