Me focusing lights for our theatre department’s spring production of Hedda Gabler

Author: Jackson Smith | Major: Theatre Production and Design | Semester: Spring 2023

My name is Jackson Smith and for the past four years I have been studying in the theatre department on the production and design track. Soon after entering the theatre department I met our head of design and technology, Shawn Irish, and this past year he served as my mentor not only for my Honors College thesis, but for my design opportunities as well. I went into the theatre department wanting to focus on sound design, but after taking Shawn’s class on lighting design a new passion was sparked, one that would go on to fuel my thesis project. All of this has led to my completion of my thesis, “From The Footlight to the Spotlight: An Examination of Theatrical Lighting Design”, a project in which I took on the question of how one could approach lighting a theatrical production.

I knew early on that I wanted to focus my research on lighting design rather than sound design, as it would give me an opportunity to explore the discipline that I was far less familiar with, but beyond that I was unsure of what my thesis would consist of. I eventually decided to approach the topic from an analytical space, putting a particular emphasis on the history of lighting design as well as the physics of the medium. I would then briefly cover the artistry of light in my paper, and include a creative element that would show the effects that different lighting conditions have on a scene. But, after continuing my research on this path during the fall semester, I began to feel like the art aspect of light was coming off as more of an afterthought, and too much emphasis was being put on the scholarly aspects of the medium. Lighting design is an artform and I realized that I needed to approach it as such.

This realization happened in January and coincided with the moment the lighting design process for Hedda Gabler really started to become realized. Much of my time was being spent on creating an actual lighting design for one of our department’s main stage productions, and being so entrenched in the world of lighting made me want to completely rework my thesis. So, once our show opened and the design was out of my hands, I got to work.

The thesis I originally created was more of an explanation of what lighting design is, but after just having gone through the process of designing a production I had a new question that I felt needed to be at the forefront: how do you design lights for the stage? This question cannot be answered by just following the history of the discipline, and instead requires an understanding of not only how the medium works, but how it can be used to manipulate an audience’s perception of a show. So, I discarded the work I had done in compiling a history of theatrical lighting as it no longer served my project, and I started researching more about the artistry of lighting design.

I was able to find a good amount of material covering a variety of artistry related topics, from how a solid understanding of color theory can help to create more intentional looks on stage, to how different genres of theatre tend to have their own conventions within which designers operate. The paper began to finally take shape, and in the end I came to the conclusion that, when lighting a production, there are rules that designers should know. However, these rules do not have to be followed, as long as a designer is breaking them in deliberate ways that serve the production at hand. This realization echoed my own experience with Hedda Gabler, and so I incorporated an in-depth analysis of my work on the production as a primary part of my written thesis.

Finally, I still wanted my project to have a separate creative element to accompany it, and so I revisited my original idea to stage a scene of a play and light it how it would have throughout theatre’s history. Since I no longer was concerned with exploring the historical aspect of lighting, I changed this component to be focused more on differing lighting conditions and created a composition of three actors and a sparse set to showcase how changing aspects like the angle or color of light affect the look and feel of the world that is being shown on stage. This packet, which I called “Variations of Light: Examining how changes in light impact a scene”, became a resource that I wish I had had when first beginning my design for Hedda Gabler, and this is because I created it with the intention of it being an easy to understand visual explanation of the fundamental concepts that one would use to create a look on stage.

Overall I feel that the work I put into my thesis this semester was time very well spent. As an arts student it can sometimes feel like the work we are doing is somehow lesser than that of a STEM student doing research in the lab or a history student doing field research, but the support of the Honors College in aiding my research has assured me that this work does matter. I believe that the combination of my written thesis and my supplemental “Variations of Light” visual guide can serve as a guide to aspiring lighting designers, and give them a foundation upon which they can start creating their own worlds, telling their own stories. That truly is the power of theatre, and if my work can help even one person better understand how to tell their story then it was more than worth doing.