Dance, monkey, dance!

Kinda. This week the NC Dance Festival has its annual stop in Charlotte at the UNCC theatre, and for the second year I'm their lighting guy. It's a little bit of a stretch to call myself the lighting designer, because I'm working with someone else's light plot (the Liz Lehrman dance company just came through) and for half the pieces I'm not even picking out what the lights do. But it's a fun gig and the people are nice, not to mention the extra scratch is always helpful, so I'm working two jobs this week.

What I mean by someone else's light plot is that the touring company that just came through set up the lights for their show. Well, we decided that since they were a dance company, they'd probably have most evrything going on that I need for this gig, so I'd just use their design, with color and pattern changes as needed. So I did recolor most of the rig, and all the gobos are different, but the positioning and front light is all someone else's stuff.

But it's all in how I adapt it to my show. I'm using the same basic plot for the opera next week, but it will end up looking completely different, because I'll change some colors and the cueing will be completely different. Frankly, the dance festival runs over three nights, and if you came to the show on Thursday, Friday and Saturday it would look completely different because it's all different dances and thus different cues and setups.

Some of this is when I do my best work, when a choreographer comes to me and says "just watch it and make it look good, I trust you." So I get to interpret their movement and music and color the stage and the dancers accordingly. I've said it before, I'm not very good at lighting sets, but give me an open stage and some sidelight and I'm gold, Pony, gold!

Tags: lighting design