Theater, Dance, Comedy and Performance in Chicago
Hubbard Street Dancers Shota Miyoshi, Abdiel Figueroa Reyes and Cyrie Topete in “Aguas Que Van, Quieren Volver by Rena Butler.” Lighting design by Julie E. Ballard/Photo: Michelle Reid stage lights led
For centuries, lighting designers have been integral to bringing stories to life on stage, playing a noble role as an artist who avoids the spotlight to illuminate others. You know good lighting design when you notice it least, as succinctly timed cues stealthily guide eyes toward the most important elements of a show. Hidden from view, their task is to tell the story unfolding before them, but the lighting designer is equally deserving of the spotlight.
The history of stage lighting dates to ancient times. Greek and Roman dramas held outdoors used awnings of red, yellow and blue stretched above the stage to bathe the players in tinted rays of sunlight. In the fifteenth century, candelabras were hung to create the first indoor lighting apparatuses. In the mid-sixteenth century, torches were placed behind flasks filled with amber- and blue-colored water, the two most popular colors in stage lighting today. The first spotlight was invented in 1816 by heating limestone to incandescence and using reflectors to direct the beam—the phrase “in the limelight” came to mean “the center of attention.” In 1879, Thomas Edison’s incandescent lamp ushered in electric lighting design.
Those rudimentary fixtures have been replaced by cutting-edge technology. Limestone spotlights evolved into “profile” fixtures, the workhorse of the designer’s arsenal, looking like a sci-fi laser canon. Sunlight is imitated by broad “flood” lights. “Fresnels” (pronounced freh-nel—the “s” is silent) are “super candles” that send light through a lens of concentric rings to create a soft beam that is bright at the center and dim at the edges. “Parabolic aluminized reflectors” (referred to as “PAR cans” as they look like oversized tin cans) add depth and color to bodies onstage. Once these fixtures are in place, they are “patched” via cables to a computerized lighting board, where begins the tedious process of programming lighting cues.
Julie E Ballard/Photo: Todd Rosenberg
Recent advancements in technology have computerized the industry. “It’s ever-changing,’ says founder of OverlapLighting, Julie E. Ballard. “What was state-of-the-art ten years ago is no longer, so we’re constantly learning what the technology is. We’ve mostly moved from static fixtures to moving lights, and LEDs (light-emitting diodes) have become a major source, and even those have changed exponentially in the last five years.”
Chris Maravich/Photo courtesy Lyric Opera of Chicago
“The job has become easier and harder in certain ways,” says Chris Maravich, lighting director for the Lyric Opera and lighting supervisor for the Joffrey Ballet. “When I started in the early 1990s, a typical light plot for an opera would have between six-hundred to a thousand individual lights that had to be focused for each show—that took about twelve hours. Now, technology is outpacing everything else. While on tour with Joffrey in Los Angeles, I focused about sixteen conventional lights, but it had thirty moving lights. Though it only took me thirty minutes to focus the conventional lights, it took me five hours to program the moving light positions. It’s easier in the physical work sense, but it’s harder in that there is more computer time.”
While modern lighting designers are keeping pace with technological innovation, the basics of artistry remain the same. Different art forms—theater, dance and opera—all require specialized skills, and few can claim to be a jack-of-all-trades.
Few know the demands of lighting for theater better than Goodman Theatre’s lighting supervisor Gina Patterson. “Theater is storytelling through words, and the goal is to serve the play and help advance the storytelling. The audience can’t hear people if they can’t see them—it’s a real thing! For theater, visibility of faces is higher on the priority list, and that means lots of front lights.”
Margaret Nelson/Photo: Todd Rosenberg
Veteran designer Margaret Nelson pinpoints the objective for lighting dance. “In dance, you’re lighting the whole body. They communicate from the tops of their heads to past their feet, and you need to light the shape of the body with side lighting. In ballet, if somebody is doing lots of interesting diagonals, you want to be able to see underneath their arms and around their tutu. In contemporary dance, you can take more liberty with color and intensity as long as you reveal the form of the dancer.”
Lyric Opera “Il Trovatore,” 2018-19 Season. Lighting Design by Chris Maravich/Photo courtesy Lyric Opera of Chicago
For opera, it’s all about size. “Opera and theater are basically the same thing, but we use bigger lights,” says Maravich. “Opera stages are much bigger than theater stages, even a Broadway house. In a theater, the lights are maybe twenty-five to thirty feet away, but in opera they are thirty-five to forty feet away, and lights need to be bigger to illuminate the stage.”
Lighting design by Margaret Nelson
With the fast-evolving technology comes a sense of nostalgia. Ballard recalls the thrill of running a two-scene dimmer board, now obsolete, where designers would manually construct each scene and transition at the precise moment. Nelson misses the subtlety that is lost in the use of LED fixtures, which don’t dim as smoothly as traditional lamps and lack the nuance to recreate as effectively the slow ascension of a sunrise. Patterson says that designers working at Goodman are sentimental for the old tech. “When they find out we have an inventory of PAR64 lamps, which are no longer made, they all want to use PAR64s. They know that once we run out, that will be it.”
The next innovation in stage lighting is large, detailed projections mapped to interact with the performers and scenery. Maravich recalls having to “invent new ways to make the technology work” in Lyric Opera’s “Proximity” (2023), which featured a cast carrying iPhones whose camera feeds were projected onto seven-foot-tall LED polls. “Coming up with new solutions is what’s exciting right now,” says Maravich. “Most people can put a light on stage to illuminate a person through a window, that’s easy; but having a new solution to ‘I want twelve iPhones onstage and project their camera images,’ that’s something different, and we have to figure out how to solve that problem.”
In the end, it’s about setting a mood. “We as designers have thought about each cue, each look and each moment,” says Ballard. “We must be able to justify every cue at every point. I have spent time preparing to help the audience feel a certain way, or to direct their eyes to a certain place. We’re choosing our ‘paint colors’ to mean something.”
led waterproof strip lights The next time you attend a live performance, and the performers motion to the back of the house, clap extra hard for the noble lighting designer, who works in darkness so that others may shine, and who plays an integral role in bringing others’ stories to life.