Stages Of Sleep No More, Part 2: The Lighting

When Doyle and Barrett first encounter a space, “We absorb the atmosphere [and see] what the building offers up to the show organically,” says Doyle. The Massachusetts school presented challenges to Punchdrunk’s traditional way of working because the designers couldn’t paint very much black, which is crucial to the lighting palette and the creation of a controllable atmosphere. Instead, the school “felt very clean and glossy.”

Photo Yaniv Schulman

Having a blank palette became a key ingredient when the team began looking for a NYC space. According to Doyle, “The main thing we were looking for was scale, size of building, and possibilities to move an audience.” The space, though less interesting than a school, could be more easily transformed. It served as a blank canvas for the work that let the show expand to fill several floors. In the series of interconnected old night clubs, Barrett and his team were able to achieve real darkness, which is crucial to Barrett for whom each light cue begins as a blackout. “We lost a little bit of the long perspectives and long corridors,” he says of moving from the school spaces. Thus the new space forced them to create new material.

In creating such truly interactive work, the Punchdrunk team has to imagine what the final character, the audience, will do. “Felix and I have created the structure of the show,” says Doyle, noting that this includes each character’s physical journey and whom they meet in order to anticipate audience flow and timing. Barrett and Doyle spend four to six weeks in the rehearsal room focusing on the choreography and action of the piece, working mainly via improvisation to create the choreographic language. In the case of Sleep No More, a significant amount of material was provided by the Macbeth text, but the creators still had to decide on tone, mood, texture, and energy. Doyle cites the dancers as huge collaborators in the process.

This provides a kind of skeletal structure to help work out where the audience is going. Because the NYC space was so much bigger than the previous Sleep No More spaces, Barrett, Doyle, and the performers created more characters to occupy the space, decreasing the ratio of performer to audience member. Ultimately, the performers, according to Doyle, “are the audience’s guide, without them knowing it, and the performers need to invite that level of curiosity from the audience.” The piece doesn’t work if the audience takes no initiative.

Photo Yaniv Schulman

One way of creating the space is through light and shadow. For an environmental piece for which the creators want to hide the mechanism in the shadows, darkness is critical, and in the rendering of a world of witches, ghosts, and mystery, it is as well. Barrett says he “always starts from pitch black” so that he can control the shadows and the unseen, not trying to deliberately highlight the performers; instead, sometimes it’s important that the worlds are lit, and the performers are in shadow. It is the space that must be created through light and to “function as a living and breathing space.”

According to Doyle, it took her a while to let go of her more traditional theatre background to embrace a world in which lighting the performers was not really a consideration. This is not to say that the light isn’t crucial. The darkness allows interesting action to emerge from the shadows, and, as Doyle points out, “What’s the point if we can’t see the detail?” The McKittrick is also a little bit like a Haunted House. I am not sure I would want to see it in daylight. It would ruin the mystery and the magic.

Working closely with designer Euan Maybank, Barrett creates a world using domestic and practical lighting, though there is a certain amount of cueing that exists in only six main spaces to move with the action of the scene. “That’s the painting,” he says. “That’s the layering.” Other spaces may have a few shifts, but many of the smaller spaces are lit in static states by period lamps or fixtures on rheostats. The lighting in the McKittrick has a narrative role, sometimes, like the performers. “It takes you by the hand and leads you, as well,” Barrett adds.

Photo Robin Roemer Photography

There is no control room in the McKittrick. Everything is automated so that the ETC Ion lighting console is driven by the sound, which runs off of an ADAT hard drive setup. There is a single “go” at the top of each performance. The sequence of lighting cues loops once per hour in the three-hour long performance. The performers’ relationships to the light cues are completely set; if they end up behind, then they miss a cue. “The lighting for the show is necessarily designed to playback from a single desk,” says Maybank. “The soundtrack for the show is synchronized throughout the principal performance spaces, playing back from a central hard drive, and as such, must be in sync with a single lighting desk also.” He acknowledges that not everything in the McKittrick can be so controlled. “There are exceptions to this, where we need manual control, for example in the bar with live musicians and also in the more intimate areas of one-on-one performance,” he says. “These areas will generally have equipment tailored for the specific space.”

A long-running show like Sleep No More puts added stress on its equipment. The theatrical equipment gets daily maintenance and can be replaced if needed, but Maybank points out that there is also equipment that is aesthetically ideal for the look but perhaps not designed to be used so consistently. “Some of our smaller theatrical and vintage practical lighting fixtures, for example, will need to be replaced several times in the life of a show because of the sheer number of hours for which they are used,” he says, adding that the team opts not to share a specific equipment list. “I generally prefer not to go into too much detail on the way we run the shows, as we have built upon quite a few years of trial and error to achieve the systems we use today, and although I’m sure there are quite a few people out there who would guess immediately how we do some of it, I feel it’s probably better to keep that number to a minimum,” he says. “I hope that doesn’t seem odd.” Everything at the McKittrick is still a little bit of a secret.

Read Stages Of Sleep No More, Part 1: The Space and Stages Of Sleep, Part 3: The Sound.

Natalie Robin is a NYC-based lighting designer, the associate producer and production manager of American Realness Festival, a founding company member of Polybe + Seats, an associate artist of Target Margin Theater, and an adjunct faculty member at NYU and Brooklyn College.