A NEW CHALLENGE: BECOMING A TRULY CULTURED PERSON - BY JOSY JONES
I’m a multi-faceted artist, so my many skills are often useful in a process. I am a believer that learning different hats allows you to communicate effectively with your team. If you’ve acted, you’ll be an empathetic director. If you’ve been a theatre technician, it will impact how you see your role as a producer. Having evolved from actor to multifaceted creator, I have more appreciation for my team members’ roles.
The Seat of the Pants process is a unique one; there are not many theatre companies that embed the design team in the rehearsal process. Traditionally, the lighting designer comes to the design run or a few rehearsals to get the gist of the physical score. However, technicians are (mostly) absent from the flow of how things are created. The Seat of the Pants rehearsal process is different. It allows for an opportunity for the designers to (quite literally) move with the ensemble.
Although I enjoy creating in a similar, non-traditional way, I do not include my design team intimately in the rehearsal process either. Designers do not show up to rehearsals to play and move through the space with us. It’s a different process to get to listen to the inner thoughts of actors about their characters, and then be invited to provide proposals for characters’ inner worlds, or consider what Lady Gaga song a character may have as a ringtone (spoiler, I picked “Government Hooker”).
I’ve developed a new appreciation for positions I rarely think about, like the costume designer. I am rarely curious about their work outside of how it impacts the color of the lights I choose. The Seat of the Pants process encouraged me to look for things in the script that spoke to me, outside of my own department. This yielded the opportunity to really think about a detail that would have otherwise been “unimportant” to me as a lighting designer: a direction on page 62 of the script that described a character as wearing “a blue Walmart vest with a nametag and a smiley face button.” I noted that a smiley face button says nothing and everything. Depending on the smiley face they pick, it can tell you a lot about the person. In a traditional process, this would have solely been the purview of the costume designer. In this process, I got to be curious about the full texture of the script.
From the inner motivations of the characters and their adornments, to the macro lens of my role, The Book Club Play continues to challenge me and my curiosity. Though I am not new to theatre, nor activating non-traditional theatre spaces with ensemble processes, I am new to lighting design. I learn something new with every theater company that trusts me to accompany their work.This is not unique to me. However, unlike seasoned designers, I have a limited lived memory or technique. Alongside that reality, The Book Club Play is happening in a non-traditional space with ceilings that are relatively low and will be performed in the round. I love all of these choices; the space and the configuration are the best ways to tell the story. I also love the opportunity it gives me to challenge myself as a designer. I am excited and honored. It’s what great designers are built from.
On a personal level, this piece has made me consider my own biases. Being able to wear so many hats, and having experienced so much theatre in my life, I am a bit pretentious. In fact, as much as I’d hate to admit it, the character Ana, who I find offputting and insufferable, shares some of my inner sentiments about what “good” art and culture is. It’s something I know about myself, and have tried to rewire over the last few years. I was confronted by my pretentious monster’s lingering existence during a reading of The Book Club Play’s script. One of the characters, Alex, confronted me (well, Ana) by saying, “A truly cultured person is…curious. You don’t have to always like it…but you should try to experience it…a truly cultured person listens to Bach and Beyoncé.” Which was extremely ironic; I do actually listen to Bach and Beyoncé…but am I being curious? I’m not. I still write off popular cultural phenomena as trivial, kitsch, unpolished, uncultured. It brought me back to an article I read earlier this year called “Avante-Garde and Kitsch” by Clement Greenberg. As Alex spoke to me, I had to ask myself about these ugly assumptions. Why am I not more curious? Perhaps I am not as cultured as I thought.
Needless to say, I hadn’t expected to be so challenged by this piece. On the surface, it is a lighthearted, comical piece about a book club. Underneath, it challenged me as a designer and as a person. Leave it to the theatre to always force me to grow. Time to get curious.