Lamp Life

The Lion King is a show about a cyc. Insofar as lighting is concerned it is. I went on Tuesday night to a performance of the Lion King at the Pantages. Don Holder, who heads the lighting program at CalArts had gotten a group of us complimentary tickets, which is something you can do when you win a tony and your show has been touring for nearly a decade. The show is neat. It’s not so different from the movie and the costumes are clever. I’m not breaking any new ground there. It’s entertaining, a hybrid of commercial family entertainment with some high art artists at the wheel so that it is clever. That’s the formula.

What was the most interesting thing to me was the addressing of a question I’ve had stewing in my head for a while. That is: What is a light? Is it its technology? Is it the source, or is it the light it emits? Is a fluorescent, fluorescent without the sources being visible? Or is it the color temperature and spectrum of the light it emits? In one scene the Cyc has this low dusty glow to it, something shadowy (to go with the song Shawdowlands) and I thought to myself at those fluorescents? No one else really noticed, but in that moment it looked like the lighting conditions of Fluorescents. So when we were talking to the lighting supervisor for the show afterwards and saw a long row of dimmable fluorescent tubes I felt pretty good about calling that.

But I wonder, how I could tell? Was it the emotional response to the lighting condition? Was I able to relate to the color temperature and coloring rendering to understand that this light was a fluorescent fixture? Did it have more to do with the way the light hits the cyc, with the 360-degree spill creating a bright band and tapering, and then meeting with the bounce off the bounce drop behind it? Was it because the light interacted with the items around it the way fluorescents do or because the light was that particular type or both?

I want to think that Don’s choice of using the fluorescent was because he could not accomplish that look without it. It wasn’t about putting the right color in an MR-16 strip light, which would have taken up as much or less room (considering the ballasts being remote). It was about the color, and the way the light looked and the temperature and all of that, because that’s what makes the choice.

So I wonder if it is possible to recreate that appearance in a believable way without the actual light. Or, because this use was not a visible source, does it matter what someone believes is fluorescent as opposed to what it is? Can you put a fluorescent on stage without the untrained eye knowing it’s fluorescent? And can you create what the untrained sees as fluorescent without a fluorescent fixture, just as the cultural assumption of what that color and tone would be. Can I use Gel to make a room appear fluorescent?

As a side note, there were a number of Arc sources in the moving lights, and you could always tell when the movers were on, as opposed to conventions, with the color of the light. This bothered me. I found it jarring to see the juxtaposition, and to see what was suddenly a greenish blue light after I had white balanced to the tungsten. It is all a part of that idea of source’s relationship to the phenomenology of the light.