New York City Ballet’s resident lighting designer Mark Stanley stepped into the spotlight with a program by 21st-century choreographers, including Peter Martins’ Morgan, Troy Schumacher’s Clearing Dawn, Liam Scarlett’s Funérailles, Justin Peck’s Belle Lettres, and Alexei Ratmansky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, which is the talk of the town, with projections by Wendall K. Harrington based on Kandinsky’s 1913 Color Study of Squares with Concentric Circles. The following is Live Design’s discussion with Stanley about the lighting design…
Live Design: Does each program fit into your overall rep plot for the season, and are there sub-plots for different programs... since you lit all of these I guess you didn't have to work around anyone else, do you ever "argue" with yourself over adding a light or space on the rig for specials?
Mark Stanley: NYCB has a uniquely true mixed rep system. While this season, all of these ballets will perform on the same program all of them will play on different programs in the future. We have an active repertory of over 250 ballets, and each must be designed to perform on any program, in any slot in the evening. What that means is that the lighting changeover has to be executed in the 20-minute intermission. You don’t know when creating the design what will be before or after the ballet in terms of the light plot. Our plot, paperwork system, and crew structure are all designed to accommodate a large changeover of color and focus in a short period of time. If the ballet is short and will play with only a pause between it and another ballet, the choices are even more limited. Being the resident designer with the company for as long as I have, and working with our lighting director Penny Jacobus for many years, we know how to make those choices work to our full advantage. The crew is an essential part of getting this to work. But there are still moments when there is a design idea that I know will be a challenge, or difficult to recreate in the future, and we all work together to find a solution.
LD: What's in the rig for the fall season, and anything new or different from past years?
MS: When Morgan was originally designed, we used a system of Wybron CXI scrollers to light each of the columns. This allowed me to continuously change color as the ballet progressed from night to dawn without hanging and focusing a lot of specials. The shops are no longer supporting those scrollers and so we went with the ETC Source Four LED Series 2 Lustr. I went out to 4Wall and in their demo room set up the old CXI scrollers and took the levels from the old color mix and created a similar set of color palettes in the LED. That way I could just read into the console the new values and have a starting point for remounting the design. It would have been very time consuming to do that in the theatre, and 4Wall was a huge help in making that happen Otherwise, the plot hasn’t changed much in the last few years. We just got 250 new Source Fours to replace some of our 20 year-old inventory, but that was a direct swap. We keep looking at LED strips and but haven’t found the perfect fit for our needs yet.
LD: Can you describe the overall intent and design for a few of the pieces on the program in terms of the lighting.. color choices, templates, movement etc.
Clearing Dawn: The first conversation before I even heard the music or saw the choreography was about the flying coats. The costume designer had suggested the idea, and we wanted to find a way to make that happen. Our TD and production manger devised a rigging system that would work quickly in a pause and the costume shop made a mock-up of the coat to allow us to experiment. So I knew the beginning needed to be mysterious and lit in a way to hide all the pick up lines. Once I saw the dance it was clear that a big contrast was required. The beginning needed to be dark, but also playful. The ballet had the word “dawn” but it wasn’t a realistic moment of time. So it was important to meld the upbeat contemporary energy of the piece with the prologue. I suggested that we hang a black drop that cut the cyc in half to visually separate the world of the hanging coats from that of the dancers. It changed the space from our typical large, lit scrim to a more intimate setting for the six dancers, but also allowed me to light them in a brighter, cleaner light than what was hitting the coats. It also gave the feeling of the low light at dawn without being literal. We started with an amber feeling in the cyc but quickly abandoned that for a more neutral gray/green that helped the costume color but also made the ballet more abstract.
Funerailles: I had just worked with the choreographer in January and I knew from that experience that he wasn’t afraid of darkness on stage. Between the title, the music, and the movement, I knew this would be in a dark world. But with the Steven McQueen costumes and the difficult partnering of the dance, it was important to see. The challenge was to find a color palette and light level that allowed both an extreme mood of death and foreboding but enough visibility for a 2500 seat theatre. I also knew that the ballet needed a visual progression and that light could help support an abstract, but implied story about these two characters, so it was finding the right moment for light to change dramatically within the style of the piece, and still remain true to the initial images of the ballerina emerging out of the void.
Belles Lettres: The first meeting with the choreographer is summed up by “warm glow.” He was very interested in this being a comforting, inviting place. But the music does take a dramatic turn and the dancing because more angular and intense as the various pas de deux develop. I used a shift from open beams of light to textured light and the introduction of subtle cool light in the background to gradually move from one image to the next. It was also structurally important to find ways to differentiate the geometry of the choreography and also the moments when the solo man was in a different time and space from the rest of the dancers, but still keep connected to the warmth and richness of the overall concept.
LD: How did you collaborate with Wendall K. Harrington concerning the projections for Pictures At An Exhibition? Color coordination? Light levels? Etc…
MS: Wendall and I did a piece together in December at La Scala with the same choreographer. We found at that time a similar sensibility and collaborative effort to bringing the lighting and projection together. Part of my job is to meld the world of the images in the background and the space in which the dance exists. Sometimes that is by contrast and other times by creating a harmony of color, shape, or texture between the two. Wendall does tremendous preparation before going into the theatre and shared the development of the projection images as she worked on them. This allowed me to build a parallel design that was in a similar palette and style to the projected work. One thing we learned in La Scala was the value of mixing light from behind the RP into the projection to help with color intensity and also shifting the hue to help unify or change the image from the downstage lighting. We worked in a similar fashion at NYCB with me adding light from behind to her projections that helped color and blend it with the lighting. All during tech we would talk about how much or little needed to be there from the lighting to help support the projected image.
NYCB has a medium grey dance floor that can’t be changed because of the repertory scheduling. This meant that we had to contend with more than usual amount of bounce light. We decided early on that keeping light out of the last wing, supplying as much color support as I could from front and back, and cutting as much side light off the floor as possible were all necessary to making this work. Those choices influenced the style of the piece and the design. But also created challenges. In the first solo, the initial light cues left the floor very dark. Ballet dancers need to see the floor for their jumps and turns. The ballerina couldn’t see the floor and we need to go back and rework the cues to keep the strength of the projected image but provide enough light for the dancer to dance the difficult choreography. Sara Mearns does amazing job dancing in some pretty harsh lighting.
Timing is also an area where Wendall and I work closely together. We both developed our cue list independently, but once in the theatre, merged, changed, discussed, tweaked, all the placements. She came at the piece with the desire to define each of the 15 sections with a clear beginning to the new music. I had placed cues that were more transitional and dissolving from one section into the next. We worked a lot during tech to find which sections of the choreography needed the images to precede or follow the musical transition and how that timing between light and projection could help make it more organic. There was constant conversation about how long each of us were making our cues, where to place them in the music, and how to split up the times to make it more interesting.
Because Wendall and her associate Paul can work so quickly in the theatre to adapt to new ideas and input from the choreographer, it has to be a collaborative effort with light cues being adapted in real time to new imagery and changes in concept or direction. Our tech tables were only an aisle apart, and that allowed for us to evolve the piece together in the short time that is allowed to produce a ballet design.
LD: Any particular challenges in terms of this program?
MS: Time. For the three pieces that opened on the Gala we had one lighting rehearsal, two stage rehearsals, and one notes session split between the three pieces. That meant my design ideas had to be very clear going into tech, and our planning with the plot and stage management as complete as possible so we could use the short time as effectively as possible.
Stay tuned for a chat with Harrington about her projections for Pictures At An Exhibition.