Lighting Design

I am a lighting designer. I have been designing lights for shows since I started playing as an undergrad with the Student Composer Concerts. My professor Michael Pearce (who, by the way, turns out to be a pretty cool cat...that's my way of saying amazing person and artist, for those of you who don't know) allowed me the freedom to play. He saw a need for me to take over my education and challenge myself with things I knew near to nothing about. He gave me the most valuable tools...an artistic sensibility. I have always had an eye for architecture, organization, design, creativity, but he sensitized me to a whole world in influences and experiences.

I am in Graduate school now at UMASS, and none of that education is going to help me get through the exhausting hours of designing a show "as the professionals do it". I came to UMASS, to study with Penny Remsen to learn how to be a lighting designer and to learn this very thing, but I had know idea how calculated their decisions had to be. They have to be calculated from A to Z because no time is given for the lighting designer to watch the action of the play in the environment. It is like asking a blind person to live in a completely new home without ever giving them a physical guide through the home...they get a map and some notes, but beyond that they are left to their own devices.

I still want to learn this way of making theatre, but until I learn it the method will be difficult for me to consider a successful way of making art. I can imagine it happens often that shows are amazing and beautiful and artistic through this process, but I can't believe that those are the daily success stories of all designers. Everyone's process is different...I need to find the balance between using only my eye to design a space, and using the tools of the designer to design a space. Onward and upward then into the mechanations of the crazed calcuations...