CREATIVE TEAM INTERVIEWS

LIGHTING DESIGNER

BRUNO POET

Bruno has a prolific career in lighting design, and his credits include theatre, dance and opera performances.  His lighting designs have been seen at London’s National Theatre, Sydney’s Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and at London’s Royal Opera house (for both the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet) to name just a few international venues. 

Many of the creative team for Tina had worked together before, so I was new to the team.  The cast and creative team are fantastic and it’s been a great experience working on the show. 

Designing the show happens in stages, including making a CAD (Computer Aided Design) plan, doing a lot of thinking and daydreaming, listening to the music and reading the script, and looking at Tina’s life and performances.   Later on in the process it becomes all consuming after bubbling away in the background – it’s a longer process than people might expect. 

During rehearsals for the original London production, we were in the rehearsal room for much of the time, and had a room next door in which we could could explore with lighting ideas.  We knew there would be limited time once we got into the theatre for the technical rehearsals so we used visualisers for the bigger scenes. Some of the ideas that we played with in those early rehearsals made it into the final show!

There is a big team that works on lighting alongside the designer. For Tina I have a programmer who is like a right hand man and the Associate Lighting Designer helps take notes, complete admin, create plans and drawings etc. This associate might then continue on the show, making checks on it to ensure that everything’s as it should be, and then perhaps helping take the show elsewhere.  Tina is currently being performed in London, New York, Hamburg and Utrecht and there are sometimes tweaks and changes that happen (for example when we took the show to New York after the original show opened in London).  We also have production electricians, maintenance, the operation of the lighting desk, follow spot operators, then there’s the smoke machines, etc.  You only have to look at the back of a theatre programme to see how many people are involved in a show like Tina – there are over 200! 

“I use light and colour to make pictures on stage”

I really enjoy talking to the director, and the design team, and then harnessing the technology to make the pictures.  Big musicals are very complex to design for: there are big dance numbers, then lots of scenes with various locations. There’s a lot of action and story to communicate to the audience: that can feel very overwhelming until you break them down into smaller scenes or mini-plays. Designing is a mixture of experience, conversations and gut reactions.

Tina is a memory play so the set has to be versatile and fluid: I had a long chat with Phyllida (Lloyd, the director) and with Mark Thompson (set and costume designer) and seeing the model of the set was important. It’s a very clean and elegant set  and then we can include little elements to suggest where we are, time of day etc.  

“We ask what the audience should be looking at, 

and what the characters are thinking and feeling”

In Tina we have Tina as the performer, then mini-plays of dialogue and then we have songs. Some of those songs are in pure concert mode, but others are part of moving the story along, or expressing how characters are feeling.   Tina barely leaves the stage, most of her costume changes are on stage.

Tina is a memory play: there are flashbacks, and fragments of memories. 

We have the freedom to be theatrical.”

The lighting in Tina doesn’t seek to accurately recreate the exact lighting that Tina and Ike performed under in the 1970s and 1980s.  Being faithful to the original wouldn’t meet the expectations of audiences in the 21st century, either. Technology has moved on significantly. We did have some rules though:  the early career moments don’t have lights visibly moving, and the colour palettes are those which could be achieved through parcans and gels, as they would have done at the time.  We’re using a modern rig, but the techniques develop throughout the show as we progress in time.  Compare our opening scene in Nutbush, to the final concert.

There are 7 lighting bars above the stage, all of which can move (fly). We have to cater for the domestic scenes AND the concert scenes using the same lighting rig!  We can change the angles on the lights too.  We not only need to look at what lights look like on surfaces (floors, walls, furniture) but also what they look like in the air – particularly in the concert section.  We made the decision that the lighting rig would not be visible to the audience until the final concert section: it’s very common for the lights to be visible in concerts – it’s part of the experience.

It’s absolutely vital that lighting, sound and projection work sympathetically with each other.  When we’re working with choreography, the dance and the lighting often take exactly the same cues from the beats of the music. We have to consider everything that’s going on, on stage and ensure that we’re not detracting attention from what needs to be seen elsewhere on stage. Of course, projection is also another light source.  Communication between all of these designers and members of the creative team is clear, so that we can achieve the right thing. 

We have four follow spots on the show and they can pick out a lot of detail.  All of us are using different methods to make pictures on the stage: projection, costume, dance, light, etc.   The follow spots are pretty much the only front light in the show – the rest comes from the side or the back.   The follow spots concentrate on the storytelling, so we’d have a spotlight on Tina, and then whoever is interacting with her.  A lot of the time the focus of these follow spots is very soft – you wouldn’t necessarily guess that there was a follow spot there. However, our eyes will always focus on the brightest thing on stage and so the follow spots allow us to ensure that the audience can do that.   The follow spots can also be used sensitively with variety of skin tones. LED lights allow us to build different colour palettes for each performer.

Harsher follow spotlights (harder edged) are used in the concert section -they’re very busy in this scene!   Follow spots are really helpful because where lighting can create mood, location and atmosphere, follow spots allow us to pick out the detail on the performer.

My advice for aspiring lighting designers : Taking something simple like a candle or an angle poise lamp, we can watch how light changes.  For example, turn the lamp on when it is still light outside, and then as dusk starts to fall, how does that lighting make you feel? What changes?  What is it about sunrise and sunset that moves us? What’s the difference between a room lit by an open fire and candles, rather than by the light emitted by the television?  How different does our classroom feel at 3pm on a summer’s day, compared to one in the middle of winter?  All of these shifts occur everyday, and we are often barely conscious of them. However noticing these shifts can be a powerful tool in understanding and creative lighting design. This is what helps us connect stories and emotions for an audience.