Lighting Design
At the end of last school year stage 32 went through a lighting upgrade, we increased the number of functional lights we can have hanging. In spirit of a new beginning in the lighting crew (many of the most experienced students had just graduated) we also took down, inventoried, and cleaned all the lights in our possession. This came with a call for a new lighting design for the theater, and I was the one who stepped up to create it. With support from Joe Sanguinetti and what I learned at GIA (Where I took a lighting design class) I created a new design for the U-32 theater.
The goal of this design was that it would function for everything, Variety Shows, Concerts, 8th Grade Plays, Presentations in the Auditorium, but was also customizable for mainstage shows. It isn’t quite there, but lighting designs are living designs and can be updated as needed, so I’ve had, and will have more, chances to improve it.
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I’ve done a lot of work in the theater with the Lights, starting at the very beginning of the year, as this part of my narrative from last quarter suggests. The lights for the tempest were super fun, and I was able to help set them up a little bit. I lit 4 concerts this semester: U-32’s Middle and High School concerts, The Winooski Valley Concert (which I didn’t actually run the board for, but I set it up so that someone else without such an intimate knowledge of the lights could run the show), and One of the New Englands Dress Rehearsal. The dress rehearsal was my favorite to light because it was a series of soloists, so the amount of stage that I had to put light on was much smaller, and in my opinion looked much better than when the whole stage is packed with performers and covered completely in light.
I’ve also been using my lighting skills in rehearsals for The 20,000 Project. I experiment with how the performers react to the light, because when they are doing improvisation they look for external inspiration or stimulus to inform their performance. So the way that I set up the lights changes the way that they move. People seem to like what I create too, after seeing some of the lighting designs I put on stage for rehearsal, Heather has asked me to do lighting for a few specific Dance 32 pieces.