Interview with Tony Award-winning designer Kevin Adams, UT alumnus

Spring Awakening

Upcoming Event:

Kevin Adams gives public lecture at UT

Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2007

7:00 - 8:30 pm

Geological Sciences Building 2.324

Free admission

Q: When you started out in the Theatre and Dance program at UT, did you ever think you would have a career in lighting design? What was your idea when you graduated compared to what actually happened?

A: I was never interested in being a lighting designer. Ever. It just never crossed my mind. I came to UT to study set design, which I was very dedicated to. And I continued this study at the California Institute of the Arts where I received an MFA. From there I moved into Los Angeles and worked as a set designer in theatre and film. I only ever had one lighting class, which was a required class. It was a very inspiring class taught by David Nancarrow and involved all kinds of technical things that I have long since forgotten. But David was a very inspiring theatre maker and an enthusiastic advocate of taking risks, and that always stuck with me.

Mostly I was nurtured by the set design teachers at UT. John Rothgeb brought me to UT and was extremely encouraging, and visiting designer Michael Sharp was very helpful by introducing me to theatre in New York City. But mostly I studied with Robert Schmidt who arrived at UT during my sophomore year. And a lot of what I practice every day today in my work as a lighting designer came from studying set design with him.

Q: How does freelancing affect how you think about work and how you work? Did it give you more freedom to 'play' or experiment?

A: Working as a freelancer is tricky. When I'm between jobs, I have always tried to keep myself occupied with making my own work. When I lived in Los Angeles and was between film and theatre jobs, I spent my down time making video and photo based work. I actually had quite a bit of success with these pieces I made. My photography was twice exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is included in the permanent collection. And I made a series of videos, including a short about the gay bashing murder in 1991 of Houstonian Paul Broussard. This video, which was exhibited internationally, including the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the NYC Museum of Natural History, is the thing that I am most proud of all the things I have created, including my theatre work.

Making work by myself also keeps me recharged and is a nice change of pace after collaborating for long periods of theatre making. It helps keep me somewhat sane and it takes the edge off of being a freelancer and the ups and downs that go along with that.

Q: You use a lot of fluorescent bulbs in your work, both as lighting designer and visual artist. Is there a particular reason why you choose to work with these kinds of lights? Dan Flavin chose to work almost exclusively with fluorescent bulbs for his installations and other works—does his art have any influence on your work.

A: I became a lighting designer by coming in contact with the large amount of light and space art that belongs to the museums of Los Angeles. I spent years staring at the work of Dan Flavin, Christian Boltanski and artists that use light in their work. And I began lighting my own sets in the late 80's using the strategies and equipment I saw in these artists’ work. So for many years I have been exploring the use of different kinds of residential and industrial lighting sources in my work as a lighting and set designer. I had used incandescent light bulbs for many years and had kind of gotten tired of them. I had used them in every configuration I could think of, and as an object they just looked a little...20th century. A little dated and tired. Recently I have gotten back into working with light bulbs again by using all the new shapes and sizes of compact fluorescent light bulbs that are coming out. They look contemporary and the colors and punch they produce are really unusual looking. And they don't dim which has made me think about cueing in a new way. Most people don't really know what they are because they aren't used often yet. There is a very big “ooooh” factor with them right now. I used 100 blue fluorescent light bulbs in Spring Awakening and they are really quite striking when they fly in.

Q: What are some of the newer movements and shifts in lighting design that you find exciting or interesting? New technologies? Anything that you're currently experimenting with?

A: Lighting, in theatre, residential and industrial use, is moving away from the incandescent bulb of the last century. That inefficient technology is being replaced partly with variations of LED and fluorescent lighting technologies. LED has slowly been making it's way into theatre and special event lighting, and I have enjoyed exploring fluorescent lighting as sculptural objects and as illuminative devices.

Q: Explain a little bit about the lighting concepts for Spring Awakening. It's both a written play and a concert/musical. How did you communicate that using lighting design?

A: Spring Awakening contains two separate narratives: the 19th-century play (the book scenes) and the 21st-century concert (the songs). I imagined that the book scenes, which are the real space of the characters, should look like a kind of contemporary presentation of a small classics play. I wanted the hardness of white work light to contrast with the earnestness of the language and the open youthful performances. I wanted the book scenes to look simple and un-detailed, and to be free of lighting that creates an illusion of place — more like a workspace than the real place where the scenes take place. I also wanted the rules to shift and become more complicated as the show progresses. The show begins simply as the actors enter into the white work light of the preset. A pretty girl in a white slip steps onto a chair, and a silent overture of 100 clear light bulbs pop on to announce the beginning of the show.

The parallel narrative is the contemporary rock/pop songs that express the interior world of the youths. This world is brimming with abstracted environmental details, saturated color, complicated cueing, and muscular lighting. I've been using electric objects (various light bulbs, fluorescent fixtures, neon) in my work for many years, and I was interested in framing the musical part of the show with an environment that contained sculptural light objects. Created through a long collaboration with the set designer, Christine Jones, we surround the actors and audience with elegant sculptures made of colored fluorescent tubes, neon lines and circles, and hanging fluorescent blue light bulbs, as well as light boxes and vertically mounted ceiling fixtures. These electric objects — as well as LED strips that illuminate the walls which are inlaid with miniature deeply saturated audience blinders — are capable of exploding the simple white scene space into a variety of concert spaces that are surrounded by a constellation of brightly colored dots and lines of light that flash and blink like abstracted signs and signals.

The two parallel narratives run separately — one often contrasting the other's rules — until deep into Act II, as the narrative turns to montage and real space overlaps with interior space, and they intertwine and eventually become a single visual narrative.

For more information about Kevin Adams, visit his website.