some group also use 126 Mauve but this means another set of lights per
bar.
Adding a set of white lights can also be useful, to brighten the stage,
but it will wash out the colour.
Foots lights? Ideally a Eurythmy Lighting rig should contain foots
lights. I hate and find the old fashioned compartment batten not an option
as it produces traffic light effects when the artist are near the front of
the stage and also produces shadows on the background. It can also cut the
eurythmists off visually at the ankles and look terrible.
But low level light can add so much!
It is very important and there are other ways of creating it in a far
more attractive way. I use a cluster of usually 500w fresnels set out front
on the apron stage or in the front wings cross lighting the stage and any
shadows going into the wings and not on the background. These lights do not
have to be run full power and add a lot to the colour palette and add visual
lift. Try even putting low level lights in more of the wings the
effect can be stunning. If you are in an improvised situation there
are various multi lamp and colour disco lights DMX controlled that can
provide many colours from one lamp housing. Caution some have fans in them
so maybe of limited use. Fans = noise ! 1 might be quiet but a rig of just a
few and the fan noise adds up! You have been warned.
Don't forget the side lighting. More important than top light. The
original Goetheanum only had side light ! It came from behind 9 of
the 12 pillars on stage at about a 45 degree angle.
228 Brushed silk can be used to soften the beams in one direction.
Don’t forget to use a 152 Pale Gold filter in the reciters, and
musicians lights.
Eurythmists and eurythmy lighters
across the world maybe interested in the following article that appeared
in the Eurythmy Goetheanum and English December 01 newsletters.
Eurythmy Lighting from 1969- to the Next Millennium.
A little bit of technical Know-how does you good. John Watson
Eurythmy and its lighting have been my passion
for over 25 years. As a teenager I helped with the lighting at the Merlin
Theatre, Sheffield, for a performance by the London Eurythmy Group. The enormous
cast-iron 6-foot-long lighting-control required four operators who had to be
contortionists in using their arms, 
elbows
and legs trying to reach as many large handles that controlled the dimmers in
order – hopefully – to create smooth lighting-changes for a performance.
Fast changes were impossible; it was all a very hit-and-miss affair. Some of you
may remember the similar lighting-control on the balcony at Steiner House,
London.
My professional lighting career in the ’seventies allowed me the
opportunity to witness the development from the huge and cumbersome
control-desks, to desks that became progressively smaller. Small motor-driven
faders on the desk controlling the dimmers situated in the basement room, were
driven with wheels and cogs. Memory-banks of these old machines were punched
paper recorders, like the paper used with a pianola or a fair-organ. These were
the great machines of the ’sixties, lasting even into the ’seventies.
I can remember on a tour of Germany we came across card-operated memory
lighting-controls, where the fast changes were determined by the speed of the
machine swallowing and reading the card! Photo right: Motor
driven faders on the control desk in the Goetheanum Theatre, Basel Switzerland.
1975 Later replaced.
Electronics enabled the control desks to become ‘finger tip’-controlled,
giving the lighting-operator more and greater control of the increasing number
of lights being used. But the lighting-operator’s problems were not yet over.
Both smaller and larger eurythmy-groups on tour usually used the lighting
available in the venue at the time. Imagine arriving to play a piano where every
time all the keys were in a different place! This was what it was like to be on
tour, never the same control-desk twice! Eurythmy lighting-operators had to look
at the control desk with one eye, look at the stage with the other eye, and
read the very bad photo-copied music with another eye, whilst making sure they
kept up! I found the only way to try and stay with it, was at least to learn
the music by heart. This made life less stressful, too, and hopefully more
artistic.
With electronics, small control desks (18-24 dimmers) would all be manual.
This meant all the levels of the lighting would still be written down by hand.
Then, along came the great development of the memory-board. By pressing a
button, the lighting ‘state’ of the desk was recorded into its memory. In
1971 as a junior electrician, I operated one of the first ‘computer memory’
lighting-desks in this country at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. The cost of
this 240-dimmer desk was £40,000 then. Today a similar desk would be nearer
£2,000.
Great! Now that we have memories, we don’t have to write down all those
changes of lighting levels! Yet all is not well, because although these
lighting-controls are designed with enough memories for the average opera,
drama, rock-concert, even the most complicated Shakespeare play would not use
nearly as many memories as the average eurythmy performance requires! With these
first electronic memory-desks, there would never be enough memories. This is
still the case in some theatres, and in addition there would often be no manual
option for the desk, no individual faders, and all lighting-changes had to be
brought on by typing in the dimmer number time after time. They could be even
slower and more tedious to operate than the older manual desk!
‘Go with the flow’
Creating the lighting colour-mood is only half the job. One of the most
important aspects – if not the most important in eurythmy-lighting – is how
to get cross-fade time from one lighting colour-state to the next. This
is really what eurythmy-lighting is all about. Rehearsing this with the eurythmy
is the only way to get it right. Playing into this equation of the colour-change, will be the response-rate of the lights themselves. It takes time
for the light to reach the stage; brighter colours will react quicker and can be
harsh if not handled in the right way. The deep blues lit with the more powerful
stage-lights will respond sluggishly. ‘Live’ manual operation of the
cross-fades is the most satisfactory way of making sure that the colour-change
‘fits together with the movement’.
The first memory
desks put the ‘fade times’ in for each light cue; this
again was a slow and restricting type of control desk. Watch out, there are
still lots of these control-desks around!
Manufacturers are still selling desks with old
technology. So what is around today? Thanks to the rock/pop industry
loads of cash is around to develop new stage-light technology, lighting-controls
and new types of colours, rock lighting is not that far removed from the demands
of eurythmy-lighting. Go on, watch these shows, they may have flashing lights
but somewhere in all that, are stunningly beautiful colour-moments which could
be useful for eurythmy.
With lighting-desks today, you can ‘record the lighting-changes to memory’
which can speed up the lighting-rehearsal period. Especially those desks with a
large number of sub-masters, where the now recorded lighting-picture can
be brought back manually on to stage ‘by hand’ by the lighting-operator
using a sub-master.
There are also desks where the sub-masters ‘load the next cue’
each time the ‘Go’- button is pressed, giving the eurythmy lighting operator
instant lighting changes at his finger tips. The ‘rate’ or time of
the cross- fade being controlled by a slider. Mendelssohn’s Overture Fingal’s
Cave, for instance, requires 41 changes in 15 minutes, the last 5 being in
the last few seconds of the piece. An impossible piece to light on an older
desk, this now becomes not only possible, but artistically creative by using the
sub-masters.
Eurythmy Lighting II (continued)
We’ve now progressed as far as the memory control-desks, and now for a
little bit of technical input. Now, all you technophobes, don’t throw the Newssheet
down! –READ ON.
Digital Control desks
Now what on earth are Digital DMX control desks? Many readers will have come
across lighting-desks that are not very portable. They have masses of fragile
multicore control-cables linking the light-desk to the dimmers. These are the
old analogue wire-per-fader (channel) desks. The digital DMX desks have a
telephone-type cable. To put it very simply, just a few wires carry electronic
groups or frames of signals many times a second, via a decoder to the dimmer.
Down this small cable information can be sent to control up to 512 or more
dimmers.
This has allowed lighting-controls to become extremely portable. It gives the
possibility for eurythmy stage-groups to tour their own desks, and to plug it
into the host-theatre dimming-system providing it is also running on DMX. At
last the same control desk every night!
I have been the designer of most of the current new installations in this
country, and where possible similar desks with the DMX systems have been
installed. Steiner House, the desks at Bottom Village and Michael Hall School,
and St. Christopher’s School, Bristol, all have similar ETC desks. These desks
have the extra
facility of being able to record the show on to a standard floppy disc. So, if
you do return with the same show, or if your show is part of a larger festival
with drama in between, and providing all the lights are still connected to the
same dimmers and not moved – just reloading the floppy disc will bring back
the show-lighting ready for the eurythmy-lighter to run the show again.
The future. What does the future hold? For new developments of the
stage-lights, look at the shows we can now see on TV and in live-shows musicals,
dance, circus, rock, and opera. Some lighting will be unsuitable for eurythmy,
but there may be those moments where you think: That is the lighting I could
use. Perhaps it looked like ethereally-woven colours of light, ranging from
pastels, to dark saturated-yet-crisp light.
It is also possible from the control-desks remotely to change the colour in
the stage-light, look more closely at what can be done. Woven colour-‘curtains’
of light, weaving with the movement? All is possible now. OK, this type of
lighting instrument is very expensive, and some are noisy, but we still need to
know what’s out there. As with all the new electronic things, its getting
cheaper every year. It takes about a year or less for this equipment developed
for the rock-industry to be modified and made to run silently in order to be
useful for the theatre, and perhaps for eurythmy as well.
The eurythmy-lighting-rig usually has 5-6 basic colours. To do this requires
an enormous amount of lighting-units. Often I see lighting-rigs lacking in blue
illumination power, and far too many lights in yellow. Very often going to a
blue mood means that the stage always gets darker. But why should we be so
restricted? Imagine a piano where you were limited in using only the keys below
middle C – this is the problem many lighting-rigs present.
To balance the power of illumination between all the colours, I usually try
and build a lighting-rig up with four times as many lights in blue as in yellow,
three times as many in red than yellow, and twice as many in green than yellow.
Depending on the size of theatre and the number of dimmers available, purple and
white may be added. This can be done by using lights of more powerful wattage or
by using ever more lights, or (usually) both. The result is that now the
colour-mood can dissolve from, say, a yellow mood to a blue mood, yet the stage
can become lighter.
This goes some way to opening up the light palate so the blues start to hold
their own (are better balanced) against the lighter colours. But just imagine if
nearly all the lights could change to several shades of blue, similar to a
painting-exercise you see in the Steiner schools, with darker blues around the
outside getting lighter towards the centre. This is just an example – it could
be wonderful for certain pieces or moments in eurythmy.
OK lets forget the dreams..... What about all the many small performances
done in a smaller venue, room, or pub – my wife Mary and her colleague Andrea,
had a hilarious time performing in a pub for the local poetry society. First
move the beer-bellies away a bit to give more room! Source of power – one
plug-socket. Not much hope of any real coloured lights to help enhance the
eurythmy. An old idea but now put into production, is the new development of a
single flood-unit that has three built in lamps and near primary (dichroic
heat-resistant) colours. From this one unit 58,000 colours can be made; just a
few of these £300 lanterns could be very useful. Watch this space if I think
its going to be an asset for small venues.
Control-desks are also getting even smaller and cheaper and simpler to
operate, so keep your eyes open. Check the total number of memories it can
store, and whether these can easily be brought back on to stage manually. Are
they quick to set up? Remember the sales rep. will most likely not have seen
eurythmy, and also may have only a limited knowledge of the desks he is
demonstrating. Ask to see a desk that is installed in a working theatre. Then,
ask the technicians to try to build four colour-groups, record them to memory,
and manually cross-fade at least 20-30 changes quickly, then edit the changes.
As you can see, a little technical know-how can be very beneficial for
eurythmists. Which brings me to the subject of training.
What technical training do the eurythmists get?
Answer: none! Over the years I have met a great number of eurthymists, and it
seems that in the four years training most have not had any training in
eurythmy-lighting. Most have held costumes up for hours and hours on stage, a
few have been sitting alongside a eurythmist, who in turn, is talking on
headphones or shouting up to an operator somewhere at the back of a theatre. And
this frequently carried out in a mad rush before a performance on the same
night.
And what about the deeper aspects of the colours: Is there an indication for
major and minor? Should one make the costumes look pretty in light, or should
the light portray the spiritual elements of the piece? How realistic should the
lighting be for a fairy-tale?
A modern stage can be quite a shocking, hostile environment for a
eurythmist. All those bright lights, all those theatre-crews needing to know
what you want. Health and safety…, stages can be dangerous to work on
especially during the set-up.
Eurythmists need training! They at least need to know the basics about
the different types of lights, what is best to use and where. Which colours to
use? There are literally hundreds of blues to choose from: Which one should I
use? Will the chosen blue work well with the other colours?
Even if the eurythmists don’t rig the lights they need to know what to
tell the venue’s technicians. How long is it going to take to put
up the lighting and then programme or light the show?
I have even met performance-organisers who have hired a venue because the
auditorium seats were nice, but forgot to take a look at the overall job of
setting up the stage! The outcome was the set-up time lasted too long, costing
more money than a similar stage in the area.
If you are faced with an empty hall or space, how are you going to transform
that space and light it, what background cyc/curtain should you have, and how do
you put it up in four hours?
It can be done. A short lighting-course is going to help a bit –
eurythmists desperately need practical experience, just as teachers do their
teaching practise. If your eurythmy performances are going to look good,
professional, and proceed smoothly, then eurythmy lighting-operators need
training. Eurythmy needs the proper stage-management support-teams.
There’s an old saying that ‘many hands make light work’! What are your
comments? How about a practical course or a conference?
I can be reached by snail-mail: Creative Lighting Design Highfield House, 9
Market Place, Heanor, Derbyshire DE75 7AA ; or fax 01773-68322; or simply send
an email to: john@light-design-ed.demon.co.uk
web site www.light-design-ed.demon.co.uk
John Watson, a member of the Association of Lighting Designers, is
a lecturer/theatre consultant. Over the
last 25 years he has toured world-wide
with the Emerson, London, Ringwood/Botton, and Stuttgart stage-groups, and is
currently working with Eurythmy West Midlands.
