Beyond lighting the stage and the actors in a theatrical production, lighting design also deals with the atmosphere and ambience of the play. It also involves some danger as crew members have to traverse the grid, located 22 feet above the stage.
Zach Weeks seemed to be shouting to himself in the Forum Theater in the Radio Television Building.
“Hold there. … Lock it,” he called out.
With the house lights off in the theater, his crew is almost invisible. They’re also about 22 feet above him in the grid.
Weeks is the lighting designer for the Division of Theater’s second mainstage production, The Penelopiad, and he and his staff of about a dozen had to focus more than 200 lights for the show. These lights are housed in the grid, which is directly above the audience.
Lighting design is more than just illuminating the actors and the set, Jeremiah Stuart, a third-year graduate student studying lighting, said.
“It’s about the atmosphere and the ambience (of a show,)” Stuart said. “You have to light the air. Whenever you start thinking about it in those terms, there’s a lot more to it. … Our job is to shift the light and sculpt what the action is.”
To highlight the action of The Penelopiad in the desired and planned way, the team spent nearly 24 hours focusing the lights during the past weekend’s “lighting priority.”
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“We take about two minutes per light, and when we have over 200 lights, it slowly adds up over time,” Weeks, a third-year graduate student studying lighting, said.
The amount of time spent focusing the lights highlights how much time and effort goes into lighting design as a whole.
“(People think lighting designers) just hang lights and there’s not a whole lot of thought that goes into it," Weeks said. "When in fact, we spend hundreds of hours thinking about where to put just one light some times. I‘ve been working on (The Penelopiad’s lighting) plot since May."
Each lighting crew has a programmer who works on a board that can remotely position lights, however most of the lighting instruments must be manually arranged. This is where the lighting grid comes into play.
Located about 22 feet above the stage, the lighting grid is a chessboard of square frames covered by metal grates, which shift, clink and rattle as the crew walks overhead where the audience will soon sit. The lights hang below these grates, which have numbered columns and lettered rows. New students are typically timid about walking on the grid, so Stuart said he jumps on the grid to show its sturdiness.
To focus a light, the grate must be removed and a worker essentially stretches down to position the light accordingly.
“You have to be really careful up there but I get a little bit of a rush doing it, kinda hanging out of the grid,” Katarina Radujkovic, a second-year graduate student studying lighting, said. “What we have to do is just lay on our stomachs and hang out down there.”
In trying to focus a larger unit that might not be easily reachable, Radujkovic said she’s had to get creative.
“I’ve actually had someone hold my ankles and gone in,” she said.
The unstable surface, low ceilings, a sea of pipes and an I-beam that only leaves one-to-two feet of clearance make the grid an “inherently dangerous environment,” Jeff Russell, the director of the Science and Health in Artistic Performance program, said.
Because the SHAPe Clinic most commonly sees patients with concussions, Russell said this year saw a mandate that people wear hard hats while in the working space, especially if people are in the grid.
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“We’d rather prevent an injury than treat it,” he said.
Being that the grid is entirely metal and the lights use a high voltage, Russell said there is also a risk for electrocution.
One of the biggest things that can help prevent injury is communication, Stuart said. Thus, the crew often shouts “safety calls” to make others aware of what someone is doing.
Previously, the grid was not structured to allow for the metal grates to be down at all times nor did it have more than one entry and exit point — a ladder backstage. But about eight years ago, Lowell Jacobs, master electrician and master audio, said in an email the school updated its safety procedure and welded the grid into its current square structure and installed a door on the first floor of the Radio-Television Building.
“I feel that we are being proactive about creating our own policy, as opposed to waiting for policy to be mandated,” Jacobs said in an email.
The Division of Theater partnered with the SHAPe Clinic to run training drills for removal of an individual from the grid in an emergency situation.
“If I hadn’t had that training time, I don’t know how I would react (in an emergency situation,)” Emily Griswold, a first-year graduate student studying athletic training and the lead athletic trainer for theater in SHAPe, said. “My very first time up there, it was scary. You can see through the floor … It’s intimidating but once I was up there, I became more comfortable.”
Despite the potential dangers, Weeks said the craft is irreplaceable.
“Light, to me, is I guess sort of life,” he said. “Without light there is no life, so you have to keep enough light to keep the action and it lively on stage as well as in real life.”
