NEW YORK, NY.- Lighting designers live in the dark, shining light on others. Jennifer Tipton, who works in dance and theater, has received more attention than most in her profession. At the top of it for the past 50 years or so, she has earned Tony Awards, Bessie awards, an Obie for lifetime achievement and a MacArthur fellowship, among other accolades and prizes. Still, she’s spent her career being mostly invisible, intentionally without an identifiable style, always in service to the vision of choreographers, playwrights and directors — often famous ones, like Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor and Robert Wilson.
“Which is why I’m a nervous wreck,” she said, smiling calmly, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan in early November. It was her first day in a theater there, designing “Our Days and Night,” a work with no choreographer, no playwright, no director other than Jennifer Tipton.
It is the result of yet another award, the center’s Cage Cunningham fellowship. She is calling the work an installation, although audiences will experience it as a one-hour performance, Thursday to Saturday. The subject is no less than “the story of humans on Earth,” she said.
She could not yet say much more about it. She has written a kind of outline about the relationship of the Earth to the sun, but “the closer I get to doing it, the farther from the text I’m getting,” she said. Choreographer Liz Gerring and playwright, director and actor Ain Gordon will appear, but not dancing or speaking.
“They are the humans,” Tipton said. “Bodies are always better to show light.”
Tipton was able, though, to forecast the work’s tone: not so hopeful. “I feel that it is the end for humans,” she said, citing the most recent United Nations report on climate change. “I don’t think we are going to manage to make the necessary changes.” In other words, our days are numbered. Night is coming.
However dark the vision of “Our Days and Night,” that vision is wholly Tipton’s. “It’s open to me to decide where the lights are going to be and what they’re going to reveal or not reveal,” she said. “I’m in control.”
A little more control is what she’s after. “I’m 85,” Tipton said, “and people don’t ask me to do things as much anymore.” This new approach, running her own show, “might mean I could do lighting without being asked.”
If Tipton is getting fewer calls these days, the scarcity may be only relative, down from her hectic heyday, when she frequently juggled multiple high-profile projects at once. On the day we spoke, a dance for which she designed the lighting was hours from debuting at Lincoln Center: Amy Hall Garner’s “Somewhere in the Middle” for the Paul Taylor Dance Company, a troupe she has been working with since the 1960s. Just a few weeks before that, Gerring’s “Harbor” had its premiere at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, with lighting by Tipton.
“I was so nervous working with her,” Gerring said, “because, oh my God, she’s Jennifer Tipton. She came to a lot of rehearsals but she didn’t say much, so I wondered, Does she like it? Occasionally she would say things like ‘I can’t tell what differentiates this section from the last,’ and I would have to figure that out.”
This has long been Tipton’s way. “I always ask the choreographer not to talk to me about the piece before I see it,” she said. “And then I see it and I know what’s there” — what the audience actually sees.
It was after a rehearsal for “Harbor” that Tipton asked Gerring to appear in “Our Days and Night.” Again, she didn’t say much. “Legends are of few words,” Gerring said. “But I was super honored. Jennifer has given her life in service of what she’s lighting. How great to be in service to her.”
The idea for “Our Days and Night” came, Tipton said, from a workshop with choreographer Dana Reitz during which they had an audience watch light change in silence. Tipton loved the concentration that the exercise produced in the audience, and in herself.
Originally, she conceived of the work both as an installation that people could wander through during the day and as a site of evening performances. But that proved impractical “and dangerous, probably, to have people wandering around in the dark,” she said.
To have viewers focus on her light is nearly the opposite of Tipton’s usual aim, encapsulated in one of her favorite sayings: “Ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the audience is not aware of the lighting, but 100% is affected by it.” Normally, her lighting directs the attention of viewers, even controls perception and affects mood and meaning the way music does, but those effects are usually subliminal, she said.
Some of Tipton’s most famous work draws attention to itself — like the mixture of haze and precise highlighting that makes dancers seem to appear out of nowhere in Tharp’s 1986 “In the Upper Room” (which was revived at City Center last month). And a few projects, like “Necessary Weather” with Reitz in 1994, have been more explicit collaborations, presenting Tipton as an equal author. Yet making the lighting the subject and star is another level.
The ambition is consistent with Tipton’s wish, often expressed over the years, that lighting designers be seen as artists, not technicians. She said that while she doesn’t keep up with technical advances as much as many colleagues do, she takes advantage of new tools.
When computer controls came in, for example, she was surprised by how much she liked them.
“You can program cues with a liquid movement you could never have with human beings pushing levers and knobs,” she said. “Before the computer, I can’t remember a cue that lasted more than 30 seconds, but now you can have something happening across the full hour of a program. I thought I would miss the ability to call cues in the way I was taught — vocally, you can speed it up and slow it down — but I was thrilled that it happened the same way every time.”
New equipment can alter color and orientation automatically — so if she wants to change something, “you don’t have to stop the rehearsal and have a guy get the ladder out and change it,” she said. But many of the new high-tech colors aren’t to her liking — “they aren’t full spectrum, like the sun” — and the fact that the manufacturers keep changing them makes it difficult to maintain the consistency of her designs for older works still in repertory.
As for the younger self who created those designs, preserved in documents called plots, “I don’t know that person,” she said. “And so I honor that person. I don’t change the lighting to adjust it to my eye today.”
That eye is one formed through decades of discoveries. “There are always challenges, problems to solve — in the way the scenery is made or the dancers cover each other,” she said. “You learn from those challenges.”
For “Our Days and Night,” the main challenge, she said, is wanting total darkness — no exit signs, no lights on the stairs — which safety rules might not allow. It turns out that the great desire of this master of light is for its absence.
But Tipton, despite her pessimism about the fate of humanity, isn’t giving up on illumination. “My feet aren’t holding out,” she said, “but as long as my eyes do, I want to keep working.” During the pandemic shutdown, she was “content but I wouldn’t say happy.” It was only when she was able to return to theaters — when she was back in the dark, controlling light — that she was happy again. “That’s home to me,” she said.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
