MAJOR NEW SHOW (new era)
Jane Cox has given us the documentation of her Tony winning lighting for the play Appropriate (2024). This is the new era where the "paperwork" is all digital and visual. The scenic designers have generously allowed us to put photos of the set here online in order to show the photographic Focus Charts (conventionals and movers). And they included the scenic design drawings! They are: Kimie Nishikawa,Andrew Moerdyk and Santiago Orjuela Laverde. Thank you.
We have the original A Chorus Line lighting by Tharon Musser and Hair lighting by Jules Fisher.
From ETC we are featuring their Headset audio of Ken Billington at the Tech Table recording his voice lighting the City Center's Encore's production of the musical Me and My Girl. Initially thought of as a training exercise for board operators, it is a wonderful glimpse of what we all do as Lighting Designers.
In Equipment under COLOR there are many new items:
video: Bill Brigham of the Brigham Gelatin Company explaining how they used to make their color media...gel colors
We took Spectrometer readings of 44 of the old colors found in the plots here from 1941 to 1958. More nanometer readings than current
technology can use but saved for posterity.
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Modern theatrical lighting is a unique art form, whose history until now has been exceedingly difficult to study due to limited access to original lighting documents. The Lighting Archive website is developing a collection of actual plots, focus charts, cue sheets and other documents from real shows. We will place an emphasis on historical productions and designers who have made important contributions to our field.
These documents make evident the aesthetic development of the art form. The styles of the theatrical visual are affected not only by the personalities of the lighting designers but very importantly by the interplay between what equipment was being manufactured and how the designers were inspired to use it. Another major force affecting the aesthetics and the equipment is the extreme time and reliability pressures that operate in the economics of the theatre world. How has the development of the next big thing: computer consoles, color changers, scrollers, LEDs, moving lights, changed and enriched the visual possibilities? By a close examination of these documents, students and scholars can now witness the development of Lighting Design as it has made a greater and greater contribution to the theatrical experience.
To aid in understanding these we have created an Interactive segment of the website. Using Ken Billington's Sweeney Todd Broadway as the example, follow the map pins in this segment to trace information about each unit as it appears in every document for this production. Lighting Design is sufficiently complicated: no one document contains all the information about a given lighting unit and how it is used in a given production. The pre-production paper work includes plot, section, hookup and shop order. The results of the work in the theatre are documented in the magic sheet, focus charts and cue sheets. See Eric Cornwell's Explanation of the Documents in the Support Materials section of this site.
CREDIT
The website was created and curated by Beverly Emmons, with the help of Web Content Specialist: Vivien Leone, and Web Development: Asher Robinson, Mac Smith, and Simon Cleveland. Our generous donors are listed on the About Page