The art of making a dance concert is made out of a lot of different arts, and lighting design is one of the most important, collaborative and creative contributions in the whole process. Because of it’s impact on how someone will see the performance, it’s one of the foundations of an audience’s experience in the theater. Compared to the world of sound and score design that I know best, lighting design is often more intricate, and very often much more collaborative. In score design for dance, a choreographer will often bring to me much of the musical structure they imagine, and in most cases, the sound and score design comes early in the process, with the choreographer building the dance inside it and around it.
“Lighting design is almost always a composition that must be woven around the choreographer’s composition — focusing it, echoing it, and understanding it profoundly”
By the time a lighting designer like David Goodman-Edberg can begin their work, the choreographer will usually be nearly finished with their movement design. That leaves the lighting designer the intricate challenge of sculpting their creation around and in support of the work already created by the choreographer. Lighting design is more like composing an original musical score for a choreographer, but it’s almost always a composition that must be woven around the choreographer’s composition — focusing it, echoing it, and understanding it profoundly.
David Goodman-Edberg is an imaginative and accomplished lighting designer for theater and dance — at his website daviddesignsthings.com you can see several dozen examples of his work. He designed the lighting for two very different works in Thodos Dance Chicago’s New Dances 2017 concert, working with Abby Ellison on her achingly beautiful work Beneath the Clouds, Above the Rest, and with Brennen Renteria on his large scale and wildly enchanting When In Doubt. We asked him to choose two photos from each work, and tell us whatever he wanted about his thoughts, his process and his inspiration. His insights into the art of lighting design offer an incredibly valuable look into this well-lit, but still mysterious world.
(One last note before we turn the stage over to David. In describing Abby Ellison’s work, he mentions my sound design, and I’m certainly grateful for his kind words. But actually, both of these choreographers created their own score designs; in both works, I did little more than help with some timing, and remaster for dance performance the inspired choices that each of them made.)
Here is what David Goodman-Edberg writes about these two works:
Beneath the Clouds, Above the Rest
Choreography by Abby Ellison, Lighting Design by David Goodman-Edberg, Costume Design by Moriah Lee Turner
Photo: Luis Vazquez and Kristen Vasilakos (Photo by Johnny Nevin)
“I view my role as lighting designer for dance in almost architectural terms—I am creating a visual environment to be lived in and engaged with by the artists on stage”
Something I find particularly appealing in lighting design for dance is one often finds oneself doing double duty as scenic designer, carving out space in a theater’s empty void for the dancers to inhabit. And so I view my role as lighting designer for dance in almost architectural terms—I am creating a visual environment to be lived in and engaged with by the artists on stage.
In discussions with Abby Ellison, after viewing a run of her deeply moving duet Beneath the Clouds, Above the Rest we talked about translating the intimacy of the piece, as it traces a relationship between a pair struggling, but intensely striving to connect with each other, to a large proscenium theater space. Abby mentioned that she was worried the subtlety of the piece may not read in the larger space; small gestures that were so meaningful up close in the studio may be lost to distant audience members in a balcony.
After discussing a number of potential strategies for containing the space such as flying pipes in to create a ceiling of sorts in attempting to shrink the difference in scale between two dancers and the enormity of the stage or creating a stark rectangle of light enclosing the piece, shrinking the size of the stage, we settled on a much simpler, subtler, and (hopefully) less overpowering gesture—a floor lamp.
The idea of the floor lamp (borrowed from my apartment, to the chagrin of my roommates) was to explicitly evoke a domestic space, a living room, for example, in which the piece could unfold. The audience is granted an almost voyeuristic view into the lives of the two onstage characters, witness to and included in this private drama. The light cast from the floor lamp was used to help define the rules of the piece and the space it inhabited. Augmented by theatrical lights, a warm room-sized soft pool of light was created onstage, defining the limits of the room. In this first image, we see Luis to the left, confronting his demons within the room, while Kristen looks on in the foreground, waiting patiently from the periphery. Immediately after this moment, Kristen navigates the edges of the space, remaining just outside of the floor lamp’s pool of light, lit differently, watching from outside the “room” while Luis remained trapped within its grasp.
— David Goodman-Edberg
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Photo: Luis Vazquez and Kristen Vasilakos (Photo by Johnny Nevin)
Punctuating the piece, the fleeting moments of connection between the two were highlighted theatrically, taking the two of them out of the more real space of the room as they briefly found each other. We see one such moment in this second image—as Luis is gingerly approaching Kristen in a tight and sharply defined circle of light, isolating the pair from the room together in a moment of almost magical temporary connection. In each of these moments, Johnny Nevin’s terrific sound design seems to be posing a question, finding an almost tense calm, in wondering if the moment will last.
I attempted to match that in the lighting of the moments, seeking a stark, heightened isolation in their brief coupling, dissolving back into the reality of the floor lamp lit room as they broke apart again and the moment was lost. Immediately following this particular image, though, they do not break apart, but rather move together through the end of the piece, carried by increasingly lyrical and tentatively hopeful music that continues to flow through the moment. And so the tight circle of light expands and the same quality of heightened light fills the space, the floor lamp goes out, and the reality of the room is lost to a dreamlike space. The space slowly closes in and dims as the piece ends, leaving them almost but not definitively together.
— David Goodman-Edberg
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When In Doubt
Choreography by Brennen Renteria, Lighting Design by David Goodman-Edberg, Costume Design by Moriah Lee Turner
Photo: Carson VonFeldt (Photo by Johnny Nevin)
In Brennen Renteria’s ebullient piece, When in Doubt, depicted in these third and fourth images, I sought also to find a specific gesture like the table lamp that could tie my design together. The piece was highly theatrical, relishing in and clearly evoking 1920-30s era glamour, right down to the flapper-inspired costumes. After seeing a run, I had a number of ideas for lighting to match the terrific kinetic energy of the piece’s second section, but was unsure how I could visually connect it with the slower and more formal qualities of the first.
In discussing the piece with Brennen, he framed the concept in particularly helpful terms—that the second section blossomed out of the first, that it was a joy and energy found within and bursting out of the structure and formality of the first. I proposed finding a means of heightening the theatrical qualities of the piece as such a frame for both sections, using some period-appropriate consistent lighting gesture to evoke theaters of the time. The venue, the Athenaeum Theatre, built in 1911, provided inspiration and a near perfect setting in its own right—early 20th century era lighting would fit right in.
After discussing a number of different ideas, including some particularly unwieldy ones I came up with such as incorporating dancer-operated follow spots into the piece, we arrived at the idea of footlights, a feature of a number of research images I found. After hunting around town (another story) I ultimately located some period appropriate border lights that would do the trick.
Choosing to place them towards the rear of the stage space, facing out, they suggested an imaged audience past the stage and included the real audience in the action happening onstage, lighting them as well as the dancers on stage. Deliberately lit in almost totally monochromatic sepia, as Brennen proposed at our meeting, matching the warmth of the footlights, I sought to evoke a nostalgia for a time past. A few cooler pools of light punctuated the space at moments, highlighting a star’s entrance, for example, suggesting a follow spot’s arc lamp source set against the warmth of tungsten.
— David Goodman-Edberg
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Photo: (from left) Hailey Meert, Kasha Hilton, Kristi Licera, Richard Peña, Brennen Renteria (Photo by Johnny Nevin)
“Pockets of light irised open and closed, highlighting moments as if caught fleetingly in a follow spot’s sights and drawing attention to the individuality of the dancers as the formality of the first section was shed for an authentic joy”
Rather than lose the established era in the second section (depicted in this final image) and shift to more contemporary style as the piece kicked into high gear, I sought to add color to the established sepia world, as if the audience was transported back in time to see a now mambo infused vision of the period in full color, albeit with a few small liberties taken to match the energy of the piece.
Introducing the section, with the dramatic music shift, the footlights chase, invoking a marquee advertising the proceedings at hand, and adding a bit of flash to the dramatic shift. If the first section served as a formal, faded photograph, the section section was as if one was there in person, witness to the full color of the time. The reversed foot lights served as the key connective strand, telling the audience that we were in the same locale, but now joyfully come to life. Pockets of light irised open and closed, highlighting moments as if caught fleetingly in a follow spot’s sights and drawing attention to the individuality of the dancers as the formality of the first section was shed for an authentic joy. Ultimately, the piece coalesced into a final pose, all the dancers coming together as one downstage center and sharing the moment with the audience. The footlights reached a nearly blinding peak intensity just before the lights snapped to dark, leaving the audience with a feeling of breathless excitement.
— David Goodman-Edberg
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