QolorTOPIX Episode 9: Michael Chybowski, Lighting Designer and Author of: What Is Lighting Design? A Genealogy Of People And Ideas

Hello and welcome to QolorTOPIX, City Theatrical’s light conversations podcast series. Today we are joined today by Micheal Chybowski, who is a Lighting Designer, Author, and Educator in the Theatre Arts. 

Michael has received the American Theatre Wing Design Award, an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence, two Lucille Lortel Awards for his work in New York, and a Drama Desk nomination for his work on the original production of Wit, the Pulitzer Prize winning play at the Union Square Theatre in New York. Michael also designed the subsequent US National Tour and its London West End productions. 

QolorTOPIX Light Conversions podcast series by City Theatrical features some of the most unique lighting professionals in the entertainment lighting business. QolorTOPIX conversations range from every sector of light, from film & video, to television, theatre, dance, music, themed entertainment, art, architecture and more. QolorTOPIX is hosted by the City Theatrical Marketing team. The podcast series explores the lives of amazing practitioners of light, by discussing their careers.

Thank you for listening to this episode of QolorTOPIX Light Conversations podcast series. Please join us next time for another exciting conversation with one of our customers or collaborators. Have a great day!

QolorTOPIX is hosted by the City Theatrical Marketing team. The podcast series will explore the lives of amazing practitioners of light, with the goal of discussing their careers, projects, favorite tools, and vision for the future of the lighting industry.

Chapters

• 1:27 Introduction
• 2:46 Favorite Project
• 3:09 Favorite course to teach
• 3:46 Lighting for Isaac Mizrahi fashion show
• 5:04 Favorite tech table snack
• 6:12 Why did you write this book?
• 8:52 What is your process for writing like?
• 9:54 Appendix 1: Genealogy of American Lighting Designers.
• 15:47 New research or theories that are interesting to you?
• 17:24 Important takeaways for your readers?
• 18:46 History of Lighting Design
• 19:31 Women in Lighting: Jean Rosenthal
• 22:45 Who should read your book?
• 24:47 Other research interests
• 26:46 Michael's aesthetic as a lighting designer
• 28:48 Kangaroo Island
• 30:40 Common elements among shows
• 33:10 Collaborations
• 36:21 Favorite City Theatrical Product: Beam Bender
• 38:12 New technology predictions
• 42:33 Advice for new lighting designers
• 43:40 Quote to ponder, from Joel Rubin thesis
• 46:36 Making the cultural shift for lighting theory

Transcript

00:00:00 - Jackie Morreale (JM): Hello and welcome to QolorTOPIX, City Theatrical’s light conversations podcast series. My name is Jackie Morreale, and I am representing the City Theatrical marketing team. I am joined today by Micheal Chybowski, who is a Lighting Designer, Author, and Educator in the Theatre Arts. 

Michael has received the American Theatre Wing Design Award, an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence, two Lucille Lortel Awards for his work in New York, and a Drama Desk nomination for his work on the original production of Wit, the Pulitzer Prize winning play at the Union Square Theatre in New York. Michael also designed the subsequent US National Tour and its London West End productions. 

To start, Michael, can you please tell us a bit about yourself, including your: Full name, and place where you call home?

00:00:50 – Micheal Chybowski (MC): Michael Chybowski, I currently live in Coventry.

I spent many years in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, which was a very peaceful place with some of the best coffee in New York.

00:01:01 - JM: Absolutely. So how many years have you been designing lighting for theater, dance and beyond?

00:01:07 - MC: Well, I had to think about it. I think I lit my first show in 1977 in college and quickly found out I didn't know quite as much as I thought I did.

00:01:18 - JM: 1977. I bet lighting was very different back then.

00:01:22 - MC: I'm not so sure. Same ideas, different equipment. That was before even Altmans - we were still using die cast aluminum strand ellipsoidals.

00:01:33 - JM: Wow, help me quantify this. We're talking 40 something years in lighting design?

00:01:38 - MC: That's 23 and 25. It’s 48 years, yes.

00:01:41 - JM: 48 years in lighting design. What is your favorite show of all time?

00:01:47 - MC: There's a tie at the top, but I would have to say probably my favorite is the production of Parsifal that I got to work on at the Seattle Opera.

The second and third, you really can't rank them that way, but it’s anything I did with Laurie Anderson and anything I did with the Mark Morris Dance Group.

00:02:04 - JM: Very nice. Does that include a favorite project that you've ever worked on? Would one of those be it?

00:02:09 - MC: The Laurie Anderson ones were probably the Nerve Bible and Stories from the Nerve Bible and with Mark Morris Dance Group the dance called Grand Duo rises to the top, as well as a film that we made called Falling Down Stairs.

00:02:23 - JM: Seeing the photos on your website, it looks beautiful, so I can see why that's among your favorite projects. What is your favorite course to teach?

00:02:32 - MC: I teach a course in lighting design for what I call hybrid theater or nontraditional performance lighting design, for projects that really don't have a category. Some examples include a project I had worked on with Isaac Mizrahi and one with Mark Morris Dance Group. Isaac was doing his first ready-to-wear fashion show in 10 years although I didn't know it at the time. I got an e-mail from him one day that said, “Michael, I got this idea for a fashion show and none of the fashion lighting designers will know what I'm talking about. Do you want to try?”

00:03:03 - JM: I'm going to take in the big guns. Wow. So how was the show for Isaac Mizrahi? That must have been a cool project.

00:03:09 - MC: Isaac had this idea that he wanted, in which the models come out in first, ultraviolet light, second, with a kind of yellow light that he had seen at an installation at the Museum of Modern Art, where you can see, but you can only see white and black and gray.

They would walk through that and then go into the runway, which was all stage light, and suddenly the color would explode. I basically had to reverse engineer what had been at the Museum of Modern Art and design the fixtures and track down all the people to fabricate them.

00:03:43 - JM: How interesting. So, it was a light installation I guess at the Museum of Modern Art? 

00:03:48 - MC: That was what Isaac had seen and again, he wanted to have the same kind of light. It turned out to be a thing called low pressure sodium that people don't use anymore because it only emits 1 wavelength of light: 789 nanometers.

00:03:50 - JM: Oh my goodness. Wow. But it gives you this incredible look that's so unique to itself, huh?

00:04:09 - MC: Unless you're wearing yellow, which is what that is, then you can't tell what color anything it is, because there's nothing for the pigment to reflect.

00:04:19 - JM: It must have looked so interesting with the clothes.

00:04:21MC: Hmm-mmm.

00:04:22 - JM: Interesting project. OK, so let's take it to the really serious stuff here. What is your favorite tech table snack?

00:04:27 - MC: I tend not to eat sugar because I crash in the middle of a call and that's the last thing I want. I mean, I guess the Jellybeans would probably be good if I had to.

00:04:42 - JM: Jellybeans? How interesting. OK, well, now I want to know your favorite book, and it can't be your own, although it obviously should be. What is your close second?

00:04:53 - MC: I tend to really enjoy things about the history of science; that's a little bit how I got in here. It's like the history of math, the history of nuclear physics, the history of particle physics, the history of quantum mechanics. These are all what led me to wonder about lighting design, and whether it has the same kind of development process.

00:05:13 - JM: Sounds like you very much think and research and write very deeply about lighting design and the world of lighting. Let's talk more about your recent book, What Is Lighting Design? A Genealogy Of People And Ideas.

What led the way into this book, with your research and math and science and physics. Why did you write this book?

00:05:35 - MC: I guess the short story is: I wanted to be a math major and that's what I was when I got into college. But a bunch of friends of mine had been in the high school drama club. I had never been able to work on the shows, but, I was in the theater by myself one afternoon and I saw this ladder down left. I wondered what that goes to, because there was a door. So, I climbed up and opened the door. 

There was this big room full of the old auto transformer dimmers. I just thought it was the most amazing thing ever! When I got to college, I signed up for all my math classes and then looked on the campus map and found the theater. Them I wandered over there and walked in. There were some people working and they said, “Can we help you?” I said, “Yes, I want to learn about lighting.” They said OK… and I pretty much never left. 

About a year and a half into it is when I designed my first show. I had such a terrible time because I didn't realize I didn't know anything. But when it was over, I realized if I could have that much fun having such a terrible time, this must be something.

00:06:43 - JM: So, the theater bug bit you and you were in! Lighting was your thing.

00:06:50 - MC: What that led to, though, is when I was in grad school, I had always, always wondered who thought of all this, with all the mathematics stuff. I had one open slot in Graduate School, and I thumbed through the catalog and I happened upon a history of mathematics course. So, I took that. I had so much fun. I would just go hang out in the history of mathematics library in the afternoon and pull books off the shelf.

00:07:14 - JM: Some of your earlier chapters in the book that really delve into the history.

00:07:22 - MC: Yes, a little bit. Mathematics underwent the same developmental process from the Renaissance on in the 1200s, a comprehensive formal education and mathematics was the first three books of Euclid's Elements, which was written about 350 BC. There are 36 books. So, they were a little far behind. No original mathematics had been done in about 1,200 years.

00:07:48 - JM: Is this light reading for you? The 36 books from Euclid from 350bc? I'm already impressed, but now even more so.

00:08:00 - MC: No, but geometry and lighting design do have a lot in common.

00:08:03 - JM: I know that you're a writer. You're also an avid reader. What is your process for writing like? Well, more specifically for this book, what was your timeline? What was your process? Let’s talk through it.

00:08:15 - MC: I first had the idea around 2002, or 2003. I started to do some research at like New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and over the early interweb, and then I interviewed Jules Fisher, Jennifer Tipton, Jim Ingalls, Joshua White, who did the Joshua Light shows at the Fillmore East in the 60s, because I met him when I was working on a show. 

My original idea was to do it by designer, and figure out what each individual designer contributed. That was just too daunting an idea because I would have had to go everywhere and spend a month in every archive I could find.

00:08:54 - JM: At least! 

I I'm holding a copy of Appendix 1, which is the Genealogy of American Lighting Designers. I'm just curious: This amazing family tree, as it were, of lighting designers and who came in as first generation, second generation, third generation, to now… was this the launching pad for the book, or was it the research that went into the actual writing? How did you start?

00:09:17 - MC: Well, I think I had always been curious about the family tree. I had asked Jennifer Tipton about that, way back at the beginning. She wrote 5 names on a little piece of paper and handed it to me. That was probably the Genesis or, the starting point.

00:09:33 - JM: It's so interesting how you mapped different people with each other. It sounds like you've worked with many of them on different projects over the years. 

When you first started interviewing folks that you were working with or in New York City or wherever they were working around the world, were they just basically connections that you had worked with, or did you reach out knowing that you wanted to put together a genealogy map like this?

00:09:57 - MC: At first, it was individual people that I knew really well. I sort of had a list, and then I couldn't figure out how to organize the book. Going through it by individual designers, there were a few who were sort of seminal, and a lot who contributed one thing or two things. 

00:10:18 - JM: I see your name right there, in the Yale School of Drama ‘87 list, not to expose your graduation year! I love to see that. I went through it with a highlighter and circled everybody that that we at City Theatrical have encountered and worked with and interviewed, and I love it. It took such a long time to go through it name by name, so I could only imagine what went into putting it together years and years, and you're still updating it.

00:10:44 - MC: Yes. When I finally figured out how to organize the book and put together the book proposal and got it approved, which was about 2017. I think some time in there, I started writing to everybody I knew and said, Where do you come from? Who trained you? Who were your assistants?

00:11:03 - JM: Exactly. Is most of it starting with the education, or does it kind of flow into assistantships? Who works for who on Broadway or on various shows? Or is it just more organic than that?

00:11:15 - MC: I think it's more organic than that. Before 1982, most people who established themselves in the profession didn't go to school. I was right on the edge.

I remember when I was trying to figure out if I should go to grad school, Pat Collins was doing a show where I was working in Alaska. I said, OK, now's my chance. I'm going to ask her. So, I sat her down and bought her coffee and asked her if I should just move to New York and try to assist or go to grad school. Her first response was, “Why do you want to do this? Do you know how hard this is?”

Pat recommended assisting, just skip the grad school route. I later found out she had been at Yale for a year and then decided that wasn't for her and moved to New York in the mid 1950s. Since about 1982 or so, it's switched over gradually, so that just starting out as an assistant is really almost impossible - you just need a leg up before you get there.

00:12:13 - JM: Yes, I guess everybody gives advice to the best of their ability. It sounds like you knew the right answer for you and it worked for you, and definitely gave you a leg up. After many years of many different projects, it sounds like it was the right path for you!

00:12:29 - MC: It worked. I graduated into the 1987 stock market crash and the AIDS epidemic. It was five tough years of trying to just meet enough people.

You do shows with people, and then they would die. There used to be a network of $500 shows that would get passed down from the people they were a couple of years ahead of you in grad school. Then half the theaters closed in 1988.

00:12:54 - JM: Mm-hmm. Scary times. Sounds like if you made it through and you really loved it, and you honed your crafts, then from those five years became so many more and wonderful experiences.

00:13:05 - MC: I had a lot of help! 

00:13:15 - JM: I'm just curious. Are there any special memories, experiences, people, other than Pat Collins, who pointed you in the direction of writing this book?

00:13:19 - MC: Not the writing of this book. This is just something that I'm really interested in, how people have ideas, and how complexity forms. If I had another life, I would probably try to join the Santa Fe Institute, because they study complexity.

00:13:35 - JM: Oh, interesting. People as complex characters, and what makes them that way?

00:13:42 - MC: Or complex systems, like the one of the founders of it back in the mid 1970s, I think, was Murray Gell-Mann, who was one of the people who discovered Quarks. He got bored with quantum physics, and he wanted to study complexity instead.

00:13:57 - JM: Interesting. That would be a change. This school was founded on this concept of this person finding quarks and going into complexity. So, what would interest you by way of complexity as a lighting designer?

00:14:12 - MC: Just how ideas form and how they interlock with other ideas to form bigger ideas.

00:14:20 - JM: Does it have to do with influences from other people or things or just within oneself?

00:14:27 - MC: All the sciences, and all of mathematics, and probably all art, or any kind of human endeavor is built on something that somebody else thought of. Then something happens and a new way of thinking about it happens. Then there's a reaction against it. Then there's a few people who go, Wait a minute, there might be something to that. 

And a new structure happens.

00:14:52 - JM: I think in your book, you have a really good finger on the pulse of history in terms of trends and theories and how lighting has changed the way that we think about things in theater. Were there any particular trends that you found in your research or theories that were really interesting to you?

00:15:10 - MC: The research really clarified something for me that I didn't really understand before I started. We're in the third version of what lighting design is about, and it's all based on what the dominant culture thinks is important. 

In the Renaissance, light meant freedom and knowledge and joy, because people were free to think again and explore again after 1,000 years of, “You must not.”

That reached its peak in the Baroque, where it was just, Exuberance, Exuberance!

Then along came Isaac Newton, who figured out how gravity worked. There was a rule for it, and we could all understand it. And there it was! It was so popular, that there were even books published called, Newtonianism for Ladies.

00:16:02 - JM: Oh, just for the ladies, huh? Yes. 

It was amazing to me, how much detail you went into talking about some of the older periods, right. Going through the Renaissance, to Baroque, etcetera. I remember a detail about quantifying color based on locations, like a sunset in Naples, you had as an example. Such specific examples of light and mirroring nature and different ways of thinking about it and how it affects stage overall scenery.

I'm curious, what are some of the important takeaways that you want your readers to have gotten from this book? Because there's so much information there.

00:16:47 - MC: Here's an example, and it actually continues the thread that we were just talking about. So, we have exuberance and freedom and joy. And then after Newton, everybody started going, Nature, Nature! We have to study nature. People wanted to replicate natural light. That was the big goal. 

Then right when that all was almost possible in the early electric years, there was another group of people who went, “We have got nothing to do with that. We want to use light as architecture, to express thought, to explore what's going on in people's minds, to reflect that.” That was the beginning of what we do now; that's been developing since around Adolphe Appia at the turn of the 20th century. I guess the trend has been going towards having absolute control of the light over the stage. Now that we've gotten there, what I want people to take away from the book, is that realism is a tiny, tiny subset – although an infinite subset – but a tiny subset of what's possible with light. There's a vast realm of possibilities. The only thing that limits lighting design is how well you think.

00:17:58 - JM: That's so interesting. Going back in history now, this trend that was different, that was about looking internally, are there any components of that that interest you in your own lighting design now?

00:18:09 - MC: There was a quote from Jean Rosenthal in her book that she published just before she died where she was looking back on the history of lighting design in her lifetime. She was saying that during the depression, when they didn't have any money for scenery, they had to rely on lighting. She was saying that the pool of light is the beginning of modern lighting design- coming from behind, in front, the side, from any angle, gives its own plasticity and form, and communicates by itself. I think that's what I'm talking about. 

Then another quote from Belasco’s electrician who said, “Nothing gets over the footlights more speedily than thought.” Right?

00:18:54 - JM: Speaking of Jean Rosenthal, and as a woman in lighting, I was drawn to her quote on page 304 in your book. She said:

When I began my career, the theater had not accepted women as the designers, stage managers, et cetera. It had remained a closed male world. My only real weapon in the battle for acceptance was knowledge. I knew my stuff and I knew the technicians knew this. I honored truly their knowledge and their program, and gradually they came around. 

I can only imagine what it was like for her in this field, trying to make this possible for other young lighting designers and on women in lighting design. I appreciate the complexity and people who went out there, like Jean Rosenthal, to break barriers and change things in the way that we think about our craft. And people like you, Michael, who write about it and honor them and have made an effort to talk about this in such depths, that it's not just about the aesthetic, it's about the thinking that goes into the lighting process. 

I'm just very happy to meet you and listen to you and think more on it! I know your work is beautiful, when I look at pictures. But to think about what goes into it and the thought process and what you're trying to do is really beautiful to hear about.

00:20:03 - MC: Thank you!

00:20:04 - JM: Absolutely.

00:20:05 - MC: One of the interesting things about women lighting.

I was just talking about this the other day, because it's pervasive in our culture now. Tharon Musser was quoted as saying, “The reason that women were lighting designers is because it didn't pay. A man couldn't raise a family on what you could earn as a lighting designer, so that's why women ended up doing it.”

And when I was graduating from college, and thinking about going to grad school, I was actually worried because all of the really giant lighting designers, like Tharon Musser and Jennifer Tipton and Beverly Emmons and all that crowd, outnumbered the men, 3-to-1.

00:20:48 - JM: Interesting.

00:20:49 - MC: I was worried that because I was born male, I wouldn't be as good a lighting designer as I wanted to be.

00:20:55 - JM: Interesting.

00:20:56 - MC: One more thought on that… the weird thing that happened was, lighting design became a legitimate profession sometime around 1980. Before that it was something that the parents would go, “What? No, you're not doing that.” 

Then by about 1990, all of the big designers were men. Men had completely taken over. 

Now, I think we're shifting back. I think that, especially with the Union investing heavily in supporting women and supporting people from marginalized communities, I think that's a giant, giant step in in trying to open this back up again.

00:21:15 - JM: I think equity is a wonderful thing to have in lighting design and theater. 

Speaking of inclusion, I am not a lighting designer by background or by education, I've been very fortunate to learn my way as working with City Theatrical for the past eight years. And even still, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your book!

I'm trying to think big: I think everybody who's a lighting student or a lighting professional in any way should read your book. But I'm just curious, are there any others, any other design styles or professionals that should be reading this book and your genealogy?

00:22:08 - MC: I didn't want it to be just a textbook. It was written for anybody who's curious about this topic. I definitely think it would help some directors, choreographers, other designers. 

A lot of people think that lighting designer is like “voodoo”; they have no idea. With that thing on your head and you're mumbling. Anybody who thinks lighting design is voodoo should read this book. 

00:22:38 JM - Maybe some mathematicians out there, too. I was thinking since your background is in math or science.

00:22:44 - MC: I wanted to write it like a detective story.

00:22:49 - JM: Interesting! To try to get to the bottom of it.

00:22:51 - MC: Uh-huh.

00:22:55 - JM: I'm looking forward to “what's next” from you! Since writing this book, What Is Lighting Design? A Genealogy of People and Ideas, is there anything that you are interested in researching or writing about next?

00:23:09 - MC: One of the things that became really clear when I was writing it is that lighting design is only a product of the Western approach to education and art.

There's something fundamental about the way the Western culture thinks about light and shadow. You know the artist Caravaggio. Everybody looks at that and says, “Oh, how dramatic.”

00:23:37 - JM: Based on the contrast?

00:23:38 - MC: Yes. I think that and Euclid's elements, like geometry, if you combine those two things as well as perspective painting, you end up where we are.

I'm curious how these kinds of ideas translate into different cultures who have different ways of looking at light.

00:24:04 - JM: Are you interested in Eastern perspectives, or just other than Western perspectives, and how it's been used over history?

00:24:10 - MC: Just other than Western. Here's an example: When I was at Jacob's Pillow with Mark Morris’ company, they asked me to do a little lighting workshop for the interns every summer.

We would go through, pull all the color and go through the light plot, and show everybody what each angle did. When we got to the diagonals, the diagonal backlight from up right elicited a different response than up left. Up right always felt like either God or the sun, and up left was always slightly diabolical or menacing. 

It was different for the people that were raised in the West and the people who were from the Far East. It was the opposite.

I didn't know whether that was because that's the way they're trying to read or what. I would like to set up another plot and do that again, in a kind of controlled environment, with some psychologists or neuroscientists, and try to figure out like what's up. 

00:25:10 - JM: I would love to read that study, that's so interesting.

00:25:17 - MC: Mm-hmm.

00:25:18 - JM: Then it becomes a scientific study where you can gauge reactions based on the person's perspective.

00:25:26 - MC: Yes. I was just interviewing a potential grad student the other day and he's from Nigeria. I asked him to describe how they use light. A lot of it was color coding, like clear light is happy or joyous. They use red light for scenes because they want people to feel a sense of menace or danger. 

We wouldn't do that at all because we would say we're telegraphing or telling the audience how to think. It’s really just a completely different way of looking at it.

00:25:55 - JM: I hope that you work with this person. Sounds like a very interesting perspective. 

Let's talk about you as a designer. How would you describe your lighting aesthetic?

00:26:09 - MC: Well, when I first read the question, I thought, I'm a chameleon. I try not to have one because every project demands something else.

00:26:19 - JM: I thought you were going to say that, because the end of your book, you say that you have to be able to see and be aware, right? So naturally, every project would be a little different. Even just browsing through your photos, you're absolutely able to adapt to whatever the content of that show is.

But if you had to put it into three words or a sentence, if I really pushed, what would they be?

00:26:45 - MC: I knew that wouldn't go over big.

I think that I'm very geometric. I think of space in three dimensions. When I walk into a theater after I've done the plot, I can look up and see a wire frame diagram of how the light can travel. 

I'm also interested in just the quality of the air. Especially with color mixing, which I'm not very good at compared to people who were trained before computers. I guess aesthetically, I tend to be very active. 

I don't look at lighting design as storytelling. I think that's bunk. I try to build a world where whatever behavior is happening seems inevitable, if that makes any sense. Look at whatever quality the world has. You can see the people acting in it and think, “Oh, of course they're doing that, because the world is like this.”

00:27:45 - JM: Exactly, because you've created that world with light. 

The air quality, it just piqued my interest. 

I know that you've worked in Alaska, which is very different than Midtown Manhattan. Are there any air quality differences that you've noticed in different places around the world that affect your design plot? Or how you go about lighting those behaviors and bringing them to life?

00:28:11 - MC: I try to have a visual memory but I'm not as good as Jean Rosenthal, she said she used to take mental snapshots and could “download them to print” whenever she needed to use them.

I noticed when I was on tour in Australia and we went to this place called Kangaroo Island for the afternoon and they had this promontory called the Remarkable Rocks. We climbed up there, and yes, the rocks were remarkable. We were looking out over the southern Pacific Ocean, and it reminded me a lot of what the water was like, the air was like in La Jolla.

00:28:46 - JM: Interesting, in California.

I'm just curious, were there kangaroos on Kangaroo Island? I need to know. 

00:28:52 - MC: Of course, yes. There were, there were nice, tame parking lot kangaroos, and there were pretty nasty wild ones.

00:29:00 - JM: It’s a different world down there, huh?

00:29:04 - MC: Hmm-mm.

00:29:05 - JM: The air quality when you're looking at the ocean in Australia somehow reminded you of La Jolla?

00:29:11 - MC: Yes, the crystalline quality of it.

I left Alaska in 1984 to go to grad school, and I came back in like 1992 to tour with a dance company. As soon as the plane door opened, I got automatically high because it smells like no other place – it brought all these sensory impressions back.

00:29:38 - JM: I can imagine. Just getting off the plane after not having been there for all those years, brought everything back immediately?

00:29:43 - MC: Hmm-mm.

00:29:46 - JM: Are there any common elements that you bring from that dance show in Alaska to another dance show, or from one theater in La Jolla to Australia or New York? 

Are there any common elements that go from one show to another with you?

00:30:03 - MC: It's a two-part answer. Probably 1 is, the most fun I've ever had in my career is during the times when I would be: 

-          lighting a normal play one week, 

-          right after that I was wandering over and doing a show with Laurie Anderson,

-          then I was flying out to do some kind of regional opera, 

-          then I was flying back to New York to do to light a dance for Mark Morris's company, 

-          then go to do a piece of regional theater right after that.

Each has a different need. Some projects are based on words, some are based on music, some are based on neither – you're trying to evoke some kind of mental space.

More than anything else, the interesting thing is to be able to cross-pollinate between all those different kinds of things. To bring something from this dance piece you did to this realistic play that you're doing. Mix color or use angle in the way you're mixing color in the same way. Everything's going to weave together.

00:31:12 - JM: As someone who has always been much very into his education, do you learn something from each of your projects that you do, that you hold from one to the next? Is that what I'm kind of reading between the lines?

00:31:24 - MC: Yes. A friend of mine, ML Geiger, who teaches at NYU, said that the only way you learn how to light shows is to light shows. But if you don't learn something on every show, then you're not trying hard enough.

00:31:42 - JM: Makes sense to me. Speaking of learning and your aesthetic and your mind space, when you're going into designing a show, is there a certain lighting method or medium that you prefer to work with, or just a type of show that you really like doing?

00:31:58 - MC: Every new show is a different situation with a different group of people with a different objective, and it's pretty much you walk into the room, going, OK, how do you want me to think about this? Just trying to be as open as possible.

00:32:11 - JM: Do you enjoy the collaboration process? I know theater is a big collaboration.

00:32:16 - MC: Yes, very much.

00:32:20 - JM: With so many shows to choose from – and you already told us about some of your favorites – now let's talk about the people. Do you have any teams that you really love to collaborate with?

00:32:33 - MC: I've probably lit somewhere between 55 and 60 of Mark Morris' dances. Sometimes, he asks me to listen to the music and come back and we talk about it and I tell him what I think and ask him, “What do you think?” Then he’ll go, “OK, that sounds good.” It’s a wonderful experience working with Mark Morris.

The same with Laurie Anderson. Laurie takes 10 people to keep up with her. When I was working on Moby Dick, she was stuck in one section of it. We had a little meeting, with all the projection people, the sound people, the lighting people, and the sets of people. All the people were there, and we were all talking about it, making suggestions. Then we noticed that her eyes were out of focus, and she had sort of drifted off. So we all stopped talking.

After a few seconds, she just sort of came back and said, “I think we should do this.” It was some synthesis of everything everybody had said, but only Laurie would have thought of it. Everybody was like, “Oh. That's why you're Laurie Anderson.”

00:33:48 - JM: She just got it!

00:33:51 - MC: That's really special to be around. She never stops and she's always thinking and trying to like figure out: what makes this special, what makes this unique, what makes this different from anything I've seen before.

You get a call from her every couple of months and it's like, “Come over to the studio and I'll show you what I'm doing with the projection.” So you come over and she shows you and she does little thumbnail prints of everything, and off you go to think about them. Then two months later, you get another phone call, you go back, and the same thing happens. Except everything is denser and more interesting. 

Then that happens a third time and a fair amount of things have changed, but you could see that it’s growing in front of your eyes.

00:34:42 - JM: It sounds like you want you love to work with people who challenge you, make you think, grow along with you, and help you to make the best possible design for the project.

00:34:56 - MC: Yes, I do. I find it frustrating when people go, “Well, you're the lighting designer. You figure it out.”

00:35:11 - JM: It's such a collaboration, right? How could you possibly work in a vacuum in that way? I'm sure you have solved many, many lighting problems, but, it's a nice feeling to work with the team of people that you respect and who challenge you to be better, grow, and evolve.

00:35:30 – MC: Hmm-mm.

00:35:31 - JM: Let's talk about the tech.

Let's talk about City Theatrical tech. Why not, right? Which City Theatrical products have you used, and which are your favorites?

00:35:44 - MC: The Beam Bender is probably my favorite. From touring and dance, when you can never get the shins low enough, and all the dancers have socks, and then everybody's coming to you and going, “Why do they have socks?” I think the Joyce Theater has had Beam Benders from like the second they came out.

Going out and walking in there and being able to turn the shins on and go, Oh, that's the way it's supposed to be.

00:36:12 - JM: That's always supposed to work! Dance legs illuminated. 

00:36:13 - MC: Plus, their feet, too.

I also used them in Beckett productions, because there was no room to hide the light unless I hung it straight down. And, I had to light nothing but a mouth.

00:36:33 - JM: You had a tight spot to mount it in a very tight area to light, so the beam Bender pulled through. That's nice. See that?

00:36:40 - MC: Yes. Mm-hmm.

After that, I think the Autoyoke was probably the best and most reliable version of that kind of thing I've ever used.

00:36:54 - JM: We have a lot of fans of the Autoyoke. It was very sad to make that product legacy a couple of years ago, but it's nice to hear that you're still a fan and it's one of your top products from City Theatrical. One of our first innovations, really.

Thank you for using our stuff. I'm so glad our Beam Benders are working for you. 

You have so much going on – so many projects, books, research – I can't wait to see what' next. Going forward, are there any trends in lighting technology that you're tracking or? Would be interested to see how they develop in terms of technology.

00:37:35 - MC: Probably I'm no different than just about every lighting designer on the planet, as I’d like a full spectrum LED array. I'm so tired of ice cold light.

00:37:49 - JM: Sounds good. We’ve got to warm it up, OK?

00:37:53 - MC: I mean it. It was a big jump from a 1K Altman to a Source Four. We lost a lot of, I don't know, not humanity, but the ability to make people not look gray.

00:38:10 - JM: Have you used the Source Four LED?

00:38:13 - MC: Yes, the threes are better than the twos in terms of just the ability to have distinguishable tenths. They're more delicate, which is nice.

00:38:26 - JM: If you had a magic wand, is there any one single piece of new lighting gear that you would like to see on the market next year?

00:38:34 - MC: That would be it, really. That would cure a lot of angst, the ability to make people look human and to have a much finer range of color rendition within it. A full spectrum LED array that's affordable.

00:38:55 - JM: Sounds good! I'll put in a good word. Wave the wand.

As we wrap it up, do you have any shout outs that you'd like to make to collaborators, mentors, students, other folks that you've worked with or who have helped you out along the way?

00:39:15 - MC: For helping me out along the way, I thank: Jennifer Tipton, Richard Nelson, who passed away in the late 90s, who was a giant, giant help. Jim Ingalls was a giant help too. Mark Morris and his company, Laurie Anderson. Then I think more personally, like M.L. Geiger, who was a couple of years ahead of me at Yale and she helped me a lot with the transition to New York. A longtime assistant by the name of Dale Knoth, who moved into television lighting. The set designer, Neil Patel, who's been a very close friend and collaborator since 1995, already 30 years.

00:39:58 - JM: I'm looking at this genealogy of American lighting designers again. Have you met each and every one of these folks in person, or had any communication with every single one of them, maybe some of the next generation?

00:40:14 - MC: Well, I'm not that old. I never knew Jean Rosenthal or Peggy Clark, even though they were alive during my lifetime.

I knew Pat Collins. I know Jules Fisher. 

Tom Skelton and I talked once on the phone. I was trying to see if he had any information about this dance that I was supposed to recreate. He said, “Nope, I don't, and good luck.” He was very charming about it.

00:40:55 - JM: There are so many people of influence that have come together here, and it's so nice to see how just a couple of names at the top have really led to this burgeoning industry. What about the next Gen? You said you have a great associate who's transferred over to the TV lighting world. Are there any new faces of the next generation that we should look out for?

00:41:22 - MC: They show up every year at the national design portfolio review, and the Hemsley portfolio review. That’s really where it's at. It’s exciting to see. I keep wanting to go and see something I've never seen before!

00:41:43 - JM: Is there any advice that you would give to somebody who's going to the Helmsley portfolio review, to give them an edge if they were to submit their portfolio?

00:41:56 - MC: A friend of mine used to say, “Be bold. Be daring.” Don't be shy. If you have an idea, how do you make it as strong as possible? Don't water it down because you are afraid people are going to get mad at you, or look at you funny or anything like that. Anything that we revere today started off as somebody's experiment yesterday. 

00:42:24 - JM: Now we've come full circle to your book! 

I can't wait to see what you do next. I would give you the exact same advice. I hope that you look beyond the Western view of lighting and keep pursuing your idea. 

Since you published this book and come out with the next one, that will really shape you the next wave of the industry and I wish you all the best. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with me today.

00:42:55 - MC: Well, thank you for having me and I really enjoyed talking to you.

00:43:00 - JM: Michael, is there anything else that you want to talk about today?

00:43:03 - MC: Yes, there's one thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about lately.

It's a quote from Joel Rubin's book, The History of the Development of Stage Lighting from 1900 to 1950, which was his PhD thesis at Stanford. I stumbled upon it at the Yale Library when I was in school there. He published it in 1952, right when SCR dimmers were starting to infiltrate everything. In it he said:

“It is difficult to postulate any vast change in stage lighting theory. Stage lighting is a limited art in that in its broadest application to play production it can do little more than enhance the element of spectacle. Lighting equipment has tended more and more throughout the years to explore this utmost limitation of lighting theory. Thus, while in the first half of the twentieth century lighting theory was the most important factor in the stimulation of technological progress, in succeeding decades this particular incentive will, in all probability, gradually disappear. With this important incentive lost, it will remain to be seen whether further technological progress in stage lighting apparatus will then degenerate into mere improvement for its own sake. This particular problem will be, it would seem, one for future generations of practitioners and inventors to solve.”

00:44:35 - JM: Do you feel it is true that this generation of practitioners is working on and trying to solve it, or are we going in a different direction?

00:44:44 - MC: I don't know. I think that even with all the fancy moving lights and optical systems and all of that, they're evolutionary steps in a basic idea that happened in 1930, and the computer is the same. It's insane how much control we have over everything. And the only limitation really is time.

00:45:07 - JM: Exactly. One hundred years later, we're making steps towards the same trend that has been in place, is what I'm hearing.

00:45:13 - MC: Pretty much. Since 1952, when he wrote this, it's my feeling that we've been through three periods of years in lighting design. I've been looking around for something like the fourth.

For about 20 years, and I think theater itself, has been stuck in a rut. I think there needs to be something new. I think it's going to depend on the way culture itself looks at light. Because that's the big shift that happened the last three times.

So it has to be something that fundamental, where people go, “Oh, it's not that, it's this.”

00:45:54 - JM: Do you think we, culturally, are ready for that, or a shift in how we look at light?

00:45:59 - MC: It depends on what comes along. I have gotten two glimmers of something where I've thought, “Oh, maybe that's it.” I think they both had something to do with the way we perceive time.

Robert Wilson is great at slowing time down. The Wooster Group is great for suspending time. I did a little piece of my own where I was trying to provoke people into visualizing where time comes from.

I think it's got something to do with that, but I don't know. It has to have something to do with the way of communicating something fundamental.

00:46:36 - JM: Do you journal? 

00:46:39 - MC: No.

00:46:40 - JM: Oh, I think you should, to keep track of all these great ideas and try to connect the dots. I would watch that movie!

Thank you again for sharing! I really appreciate you coming on QolorTOPIX with us today. I think that everybody and anybody – who is interested in lighting of any kind and history of math, science, lighting and how people shape their ideas and theories, and how that passes along from generation to generation – should absolutely buy your book. 

00:47:22 - MC: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

00:47:25 - JM: Absolutely. You too, Michael! Have a wonderful day. Thank you, bye.

00:47:27 - MC: You too!