The 10th anniversary of the Fall For Dance Festival, which runs through October 5 at New York City Center, opened with two evenings hosted by The Public Theater at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, the original home of the much loved New York Dance Festival, which ran in the 1960's and 1970's into 1980.
“For the event at the Delacorte, we of course had to make a completely separate plot from City Center,” notes lighting designer Clifton Taylor, who serves as lighting supervisor for the festival. “Being an outdoor venue, there are no overhead pipes or backgrounds. Mark Mongold, the director of production for City Center, laid out a dance space in the center of the semi-circular amphitheater space which was 53' wide by about 30' deep. We decided to use a grey floor because it holds up much better under very sunny skies, allowing for afternoon rehearsals with bare feet—not getting as hot, it also doesn't stretch out as much as a black floor would in the sun."
The decision was made to keep most of the Delacorte rig from the summer theater season of Shakespeare In The Park. “There are six towers arranged around the back of the seating space each maxed out with 5° and 10° units, which we were able to recolor, re-channel, and focus for our needs,” adds Taylor. “We brought in all of the sidelight and backlight equipment and trusses and dance towers to place these lights. Early on, we made the decision not to have any wings or flats to try and re-create a proscenium space. I always hate those kinds of things in an outdoor space! Even so, to cover the stage space we needed six sidelight positions from each side to get around the problem of the extreme side sight lines of the theater. In place of straight backlight positions, we constructed two very tall towers on either side of the stage to give us three colors of diagonal backlight. We called these structures the 'Truss Monsters' and they proved to be extremely useful both as a backlight position and as a device to frame the space and concentrate the energy of the stage within the vastness of the Central Park greenery.
“I was very lucky to have the help of Laura Bickford on the lighting team,” Taylor continues. “She is the new lighting director for New York Live Arts and has extensive touring experience with several companies. She joined the Fall for Dance lighting team of Kate Ashton and Nick Kolin this year specifically to assist with the Delacorte.” The event featured four dance companies: Elizabeth Streb's Extreme Action Company, Ron Brown's Evidence Company, New York City Ballet, and Paul Taylor. Each company had unique challenges in the lighting, which we had to solve together with the lighting designers and lighting directors of the companies.
“Streb's piece requires a four-level high scaffolding structure at the back of the stage from which the performers jump and fall,” Taylor explains. “Robert Wierzel originally designed the piece with HMI and Vari-Lite equipment, which we didn't have access to for this event. During tech, we found that it was more important to get the intensity right than to make the color perfect, so instead of color correcting the incandescent ellipsoidals, we ended up pulling the color from most of the lights. They used some moving lights and practicals in several effect patterns, which their lighting director Adam Greene pre-programmed. The scaffolding had to be designed to break apart and move to the sides of the stage for the rest of the show and the changeover choreography almost became another piece in the show!”
Ron K. Brown's company performed “Upside Down,” with lighting by Brenda Grey (who recently joined the Guggenheim's theatre staff). “The piece calls for a cyc, multi-colored backlight, and a large number of shapes on the floor from overhead, none of which we could do in the Delacorte! For the cyc, I came up with the idea to create a space behind the stage for a lot of stage fog. We were able to light this fog from a ground row position which was below stage level by a series of 60 very narrow pars in three colors. It became a very interesting kind of cyclorama! Instead of the overhead positions for the trapezoid shapes, we used the theater's two tall side towers and interleaved the focus so that across the stage, the light for the shapes came from several directions,” notes Taylor. “It wasn't the same as the original, but it was an integrated piece that though different from seeing it indoors in a proscenium stage, retained the feeling and intention of the original design.”