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Spotfrights


Few roles in a play let you feel as close to divinity as fiddling around with the lighting. And I'm not talking about fiddling with a set of tiny switches backstage while you tell yourself that truly, this is as close as you get to divinity. I'm talking about sitting in the control room, pompously or not, depending on your choice, and getting what is perhaps the most authoratative view in the entire theatre and then deciding who gets to be visible on-stage. Believe me when I say that power trips are equally likely to happen with the director and the elevated elite in the control room.

At least, that's the impression you get of the job at first, until you're tasked with something requiring about three hands and fingers of lengths that would anger any pianist into attacking you. The moment you enter the control room in your (well, my, actually) hazey power trip, you are greeted with a panaroma of knobs and switches that would look suspiciously familiar to anyone who's been to one of those open houses showcasing cockpit interiors.

There's what can only be described as an absolute spread of switches in the control room, and that's for lighting alone. There are fill light switches for nine sections of the stage, individual spotlights for each of those nine sections, then an additional larger spotlight for each of those nine sections again. Then there's additional switches for adjusting the color of the cyclorama (A funky screen that would have appealed greatly to the Beatles. Basically a screen disguised as a wall at the back of the stage that can change color in the most psychedellic manners.), and finally two random switches for side stage spotlights. I think that covers about three quarters of the switches. There's an additional (a very trendy word by this point) quarter somewhere that probably requires the synchronized turning of two keys or something along those lines.

Anyway, it's this mind boggling number of switches that really makes the lighting job very difficult. The nice lady that was kind enough not to leave us floundering (mostly out of concern for the equipment) drew us a reference diagram of sorts for the different numbers of the lights and which portions of the stages they corresponded to. It really did make things a lot simpler so all me and Damien were left with was frustration. Since the diagram wasn't divided into a table with labels like A3 or B4 or anything that would help you visualize positions, and so the switches weren't labelled in that manner, we ended up having to constantly refer to the tiny table scrawled (very kindly) in blue ink under the pseudo-illumination of the small lamp that you're allowed during the operation of the lighting, since the control room is apparently tasked with the role of housing the invisible machinations that run the show from behind.

So we did a rather shoddy job of allowing the hypothetical audience to see the faces of our undoubtedly nervous, and therefore grateful actors. But something rather surprising happened halfway through the last run.

We started improvising a bit. As opposed to referring to the terribly written (by us, I should add) set of lighting cues based on the script, we started improvising. We knew what was going to happen when and where, so we started referring to the diagram (not written by us, I should add again) and turning up whatever lights we thought were necessary. All this in very angry whispers in the dark.

I suppose as you do this again and again the numbers corresponding to the different lights become a vital part of your anatomy, and that would explain the labelling deficiency, and clearly we've yet to achieve that.

But regardless, it was fun, and it really was the sort of thing that's going to keep me from throwing my arms up and yelling at the people in the control room "How hard can it be to get some damned lights on?"