Theatre Design & Technology - Oct 1970 - 15

ographer's intent at all. I think with these
new elements of design, you have to be
very careful to use them only when you are
su re they are appropriate.
There is a group of so-called avantgarde dancers. These people are concerned
wi~h the spaces that they are in. It is my
contention that traditional ballet companies
and the more established modern dance
companies are concerned with stage spaces.
These new dancers are more concerned with
spaces, whether on a stage or in a gym or
a lawn or a forest or anything else. They do
not do a piece and then take it on tour and
try to make it look always the same. Everywhere they perform it, the piece must fit
the surroundings. These people, you might
think, would have open minds and open directions in respect to lighting design. This
is not necessarily true. The designer may
end up designing with a completely traditional concept, appropriate to the pieces.
Or the designer may do the whole performance including lighting as part of the
dance. Solos, for exampl e, can be done in
the dark because the light does not happen
to be there at that moment.
These are new elements that are available, and a designer has to be open to
them. However, I feel that it is better that
any ideas of this sort come from the choreographer. Any strong statements or use of
strange equipment or unusual flashing lights
I feel should come from the dance, and not
from the lighting designer.

LIGHTING MODERN DANCE
Beverly Emmons
Jules Fisher Associates,
Formerly lighting designer and stage
manager for Merce Cunningham

[or those of you who may not have seen
Merce Cunningham's work, he has developed in his company over the past ten
or fifteen years some of the ideas that
have been talked about here. He is strongly
interested in chance and what happens in
chance situations. It was certainly a very
helpful incentive to his development of these
ideas that chance was a logical solution to
very real production problems he was faced
with as a pe-rformer and artist. When you
consider that most of his major pieces were
performed for the fi rst time in strange places,
and that he carries no lighting equipment
(he used to travel in a Volkswagen bus), it
is not surprising that he came to the conclusion that it was more interesting to present a piece which was whole, rather than
one that should have been seen in New
York, with a lot more equipment. He preferred to say" Here we are," and present
something whole.

There really are no innovations in lighting
design. We go back to the good old standbys of good taste and wise choice. It is
si mply that we try to stay open to all ideas,
so that au r choi ces can be th e best possible.

In his recent book he has a note or two
on flexibility. As I read these notes, I realized that one of the basic ideas of flexibility, is to take the circumstance for what
it is and present what we did not as something that only represented, or hinted or
was part of a whole, but that in that place
and that time was the whole. Allowing each
element in the spectacle to be separate, we
could rehearse more freely under touring
circumstances without the need of a final
dress rehearsal. When curtain time came, we

The Dance Panel at Henry Street Playhouse.

IPhoto by Robert Teitelbaum.)

THEATER DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

OCTOBER,1970

all began together, dancers, the sound, the
machine if it was available, camera flat
Iights on the qancers wrists if they were
available. If they were not, the action still
went on. It was a kind of situation in which
people could work freely at first. Cunningham's response to difficult theatres and touring circumstances was to carry no scenery.
As an example, he choreographed dances
that did not need crossovers in case he did
not have one. If a dancer had to get to the
other side of the stage, he would walk
there. That is one way to solve a problem
that might worry a choreographer who has to
perform his pieces in places where you
can't tell what you are getting into until you
walk in the door.
Another idea he developed, was that
light for his pieces should be like normal
daylight. It should not be dramatic in following the dance. He felt that the light should
be independent of the dance. It should
change, not remain still, but change in the
same way that a building seems to change
with time because the sun has moved.
A piece in which he did this is called
Winter Branch, and it makes clear how he
used theatre spaces. He soon began to
eliminate the cyc and the drapes, using just
empty theatre space, back walls, pipes, or
whatever happened to be around. This
piece was conceived as the opposite of his
usual idea that light should be like day. He
had decided that the light in it should be
Iike night. He asked Robert Rauschenberg,
the painter (who was a lighting designer at
the time), to evolve a concept that would
be basically dark.
In our kind of night we have mechanical
light sources, car lights, parking lot lights,

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