Lighting Strikes

There's more to lighting than meets the eye says Lighting Designer Hugh Conacher. And it's not as simple as throwing a light onto a stage and walking away. "I don't honestly think anybody who knows what you can do with lighting would do that out of choice," he says. Conacher first got bit by the lighting bug while in a two-year George Brown College theatre course. "While l was doing the acting shtick, l got very interested in the technical side of things - hanging lights, building flats, anything at all that had to do with backstage production," he says. So he worked as a technician wherever he could get a gig, learning as he went along. "If you were to take a class on it, you could learn everything about lighting design from a theoretical point of view in about a month. But you can't learn lighting without lights. If you're willing to be an apprentice and read a lot of books, you don't need anything else except the ability to understand it," he says. During his fifteen years in the business, Conacher has learned from and worked with the very best. He has developed an impressive professional resume since his initial apprenticeship at the Stratford Festival with credits including the Manitoba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, De-Be-Jeh-Mu4ig Theatre Group, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Dance Collective and Contemporary Dancers Inc. and he has worked in North America, Mexico, Great Britain, Europe and India.

Lighting as Art

But what distinguishes a lighting technician from a lighting designer? And when does the technique of lighting qualify as an art? "A sculptor looks at a block of marble and sees a shape in it and, through the use of tools, extracts the shape from the marble and lets the marble take its own form. A lighting designer does exactly the same thing - looks at the shape of what's happening on stage and uses his tools to let that shape take its form," says Conacher.

Conacher's sense of art as a natural part of life stems from a childhood environment of classical literature and music strongly influenced by his academic father and English mother. A European attitude towards theatre had an obvious impact as well. "European culture is very much live performance. Television and movies, up until recently, are quite secondary to going to the theatre. There was nothing considered odd, it's what everybody did. Shakespeare didn't write for the King and Queen - it was for the people drinking beer and flirting with the maid in the top balcony. It's not an elitist thing at all. It's just so completely normal."

Emotion and lighting

The emotional impact of a performance is a huge part of what Conacher considers when lighting a show. Perhaps it's this sensitivity to content which differentiates his work from a technician's. It's certainly pivotal to his success in working with dance. "The technical aspects of lighting design are secondary to the creative ability to see a visual image when you're looking at something in space. If I go look at a rehearsal of a dance piece, there are several things I try to get out of it; the obvious stuff-physically the space they cover on stage to know where the stage has to be lit. What the dance is about - if it's ballet, the story, if it's modern dance, the emotional impact and who's important on the stage."

Conacher says theatre people often don't realize the significance of contrasts in lighting. "People in dance learned a long time ago that shadows are as much a part of light as the light itself. It's an equally weighted thing light and dark. If you don't have any dark, you don't have any light. But if it's all light, you may as well be looking at a badly done photograph, very flat and dull and boring."

There is lots of homework to be done before going into the theatre. It includes reading the script, studying blueprints of the theatre and renderings of the set, and talking to as many people involved with the production as possible. Still, the best inspiration can often happen by accident during rehearsal. Conacher says attending rehearsal is critical. "The director might take an entirely different line of thought or emotion than what you got out of reading the script. It can be very, very different."

Although he admits he was never any good at math - he even failed it in grade nine and had to take it over - trigonometry and calculus are integral to his work, key elements in interpreting blueprints and doing projections. "Most of the time I use my instinct first and do the calculations if I'm unfamiliar with the space that I'm lighting. But because it relates to something I'm interested in, I've developed the ability to do the mathematical calculations required to know technically how to make something work in a particular environment," he says.

Anyone involved with the cultural arts has to recognize the economic realities of that world. Conacher has developed an invaluable finely-tuned sense of barter in response to budget restrictions and the all too common not-enough-money status of arts groups. Sometimes he'll trade service for product or propose a combination of fee and product exchange in instances where money is tight. "In one case, instead of taking a fairly significant pay increase which was warranted, I took a smaller pay increase and some tickets for shows. I really try to negotiate, particularly with people I know. Frankly, I don't argue that much about fees. If it's totally unreasonable, I just won't do the job."

But he never underestimates the value of his contribution to a performance. "I go through every moment of the piece and think of what happens emotionally and physically, and how it's going to relate to what I do which is to make everybody be seen. Because, everybody on a stage is seen through the eyes of the lighting designer. If you don't have a lighting designer, you're not going to be seen. So, it's kind of important that you get it right."

By: Lynette D'Anna  for The Thompson Review, 1995 Edition