In this month’s PLSN Interview, we get acquainted with Diana Kesselschmidt. The multi-talented lighting designer with a clever and sharp sense of humor tells about how she gained real-life experience in high school and college, why her professor thought she had gone off the deep-end and her most intimate design to date.
PLSN: So how did you get involved in the industry and how long have you been doing it?
DK: The first set I worked on was at day camp. I was six. In hindsight it was completely inappropriate for children to be wielding saws and paint — nevertheless, they let us. It was Bye Bye Birdie and we were supposed to be the chorus. They didn’t know what else to do with us while the bigger kids were rehearsing, so they put us to work.
I don’t know if anyone knows what a coping saw is anymore. They just let us play with them. It was a horrible idea but no one was injured.
Is that what led you to scenic construction?
From that point on, when a show was happening, I was there, but not on stage. I liked being a part of the cooperative effort. By 14 I was a really competitive carpenter. I had worked on two gigantic two-story sets, with huge turntables and double-swing doors.
What got you interested in lighting and how did you make that transition?
One day, the T.D. at Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, Howard Rhorbach — he’s IATSE Local 1 and my first mentor — came over and said, “The lighting guy doesn’t want to do it anymore.” I said, “What does that mean?” “That means you go up that spiral staircase and figure out how to use the board.” I was meeting with the director the next day and the show was the day after.
You mean you had two days to get up to speed and you had never touched a lighting console before?
Yeah. I went back the next year and spent the entire summer making cable, off the spool, and never went back to carpentry.
You started doing what a lot of people learn in theatrical houses at a very young age.
I got into theatre because the shows at school and summer camps had plenty of volunteer actors, no one to do anything else, and I was qualified. I was a part of the Student Television Arts Company with Ron DeMaio. It is a program wherein high school kids learn film study, theatre study, cooperative creativity, arts, dance, drama, music and writing. That’s where I began learning about visual arts and where I could use all the creative tools I had picked up to produce something.
Was that offered at your school as an extra-curricular activity?
It was offered in school and was sort of a fringe program. It was an extended class.
Did it take place in your school?
Yes. Sometimes we had outside workshops with the program’s alumni. They were producers, directors, designers and writers — some of them were published or had done pretty high profile work — so we had industry mentors through the company.
That sounds like a great experience.
It was wonderful.
How old were you at this point?
Fifteen through 18.
That must have been a very impressionable time.
Yes. When you are doing film workshops at that age on the magic of Hitchcock, it can really direct a person’s life. I was very lucky.
So you were sold on it at that point. Where did it take you from there?
I did try to get away from theatre and keep it as a hobby. I went into archeology because it was so much more interesting at the time, but that didn’t last long. A lot of people talk about the theatre addiction — they can’t get away from it, no matter what they do. That’s what happened to me. I was trying to find something that I could really study in college. It didn’t occur to me at all that you could actually study theatre until I was already a sophomore. I realized there were other people doing something that I’d rather do and I wanted to get in on that.
Where did this occur?
I went to Boston University and it was just an accident that they happened to have a nice theatre program. The first year ended, and I told my parents, “I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to say, but, I’m pretty certain that I want to do this.” They were both supportive.
You’ve had some success early on in your career. When did you graduate?
I graduated from grad school in 2004.
Did you do shows while attending BU?
I spent all my spare time interning and traveling to New York to work, which I thought was the best way to learn.
I think a lot of people started in the industry straight out of high school and worked their way up. Or they studied in college and worked their way up from a different starting point. It seems you got the best of both.
I did try really hard to arrange what they called in school “real life experience,” which is actually an absurd title. It’s hard to go back and forth between school and work because the rules don’t match up.
How many hours would you spend in the theatre at that point?
In Boston, I spent whatever hours were required to help everybody with their shows and the time I took to work on my thesis. It culminated in a PowerPoint cue-to-cue of Sweeney Todd with soundtrack clips that runs by itself, as a Sweeney abridged. I served mini meat pies in fillo dough at intermission. The professors looked at me like I was crazy. Seeing that look was the best moment of my entire school career. I had gone into isolation for three and a half months to work on my thesis, and I looked like an eccentric by the time I crawled out of that hole.
I’d also take two or three weeks off here and there and go to New York and work with anybody that would have me. Once I was there, I’d work up to 16-hour days. I showed up first just to be there — and do anything I possibly could — and then stay until the very end to close up, so everyone knew I’d heard every last piece of information and I’d have answers in the morning.
That’s great advice for people in school and doing internships.
I hope so. I’ve spent a lot of my time guest teaching. I taught students in the theatre departments at Bergen Community College, Fitchburg State College and I’ve been emailing back-and-forth with a few of the kids from BU. I do everything I can to help clarify the difference between rhetoric and useful information that will help them become comfortable with themselves in time to do their job successfully.
Do you think feeling comfortable with oneself is a prerequisite for being a good designer?
I find that with most students that I work with, and with the work I did as a student, the difference between getting things right and wrong is almost purely confidence. Most often, people aren’t asked to do more than they know; and if they are, confidence helps them to know when to ask questions.
Do you mean confidence in their existing abilities?
Yes. The catch-22 is that confidence isn’t something you can make up — you do have to earn it with practice.
You’ve done a lot of work since then — do you prefer to work in New York?
I’ve done a season or two in East Hampton and Cortland Rep and a few other places. I did a couple of seasons of an ice show in Boston. I love to travel for fun. I end up sticking to New York for work because I’m a New Yorker, born and bred.
On the shows you’ve worked on since graduating, what have you found most challenging?
I think challenges and pride go hand-in-hand for me. I love solving challenges and I’m really proud when I do. I think my greatest challenge is Ballet Deviare. Their first show was Lightening the Dark. It was in a theatre that had 34 working 1.2k dimmers, 75-watt bulbs and a ETC Microvision. They had a wonderful choreographer and a good managing director who had experience in just about everything except theatre. My job over the last five years with them has been to help turn their dream into a reality — in the most clichéd sense, but also in he most in-depth sense — because I introduced them to production management and stage management. Why you would want to put money into a light plot, how big the plot could get, how they could make scenery useful without being impossible to design, manufacture and transport and how lighting and scenery can work together with a specific piece. Now, five years later, Ballet Deviare’s Memento Mori is a full blown ballet — 180 circuits, scenery, effects, piece specific lighting designed in detail, custom costumes — ready to perform this summer and tour this fall.
Memento Mori is a perfect example of building magic from nothing. I pushed the company heavily to add a more personal element this time around, as we have developed a fan base that has known us long enough to have an interest in us personally. This show was delayed six months from our usual yearly schedule because so many company members were dealing with death and disease within their families. The pieces in Memento Mori were taken from our rep, or created fresh, to present the full gamut of living, the strength, the weakness and the hope that we have to continually choose in order to keep living.
This may be the first truly personal piece I have ever worked on. Each number is designed with dance, death metal/traditional rock and film editing style in mind. In the plot and use of angles, you can see the dance. In the impact and fast cueing, you can see the metal and rock. In the length of the cue times, the dynamic contrasts and risky use of space, you can see my film study background. The unusual color choices of R50, R370, L088 and this time R32, you can see me, my vision. Only a combination of these three loves in me could warrant such an unusual palette. It helps that I was able to control the unity of the design elements by designing and building the scenery to interact specifically with the lighting.
I’ve found that no matter how hard I try to stick to lighting design — because of all of my training with carpentry, sewing, organization, management — I just can’t shut my mouth when people ask me, “How do we do X, Y and Z?”
That’s a good quality to have.
But it gets me into a lot of trouble. I don’t now how many times I’ve had to do absurd things because someone figured out I happen to know how to do X, Y or Z.
But that’s puts you in a unique position. A lot of designers say their most gratifying moments occur when they pull something off, even though they don’t have much to work with.
Absolutely. One of my proudest productions was Caged Visions, at HB Playwrights. We walked in and the most exciting things in the theatre were their new striplights, which were beautiful, but we still had to spend half the evening attaching the plugs ourselves. They had some benches and sticks and that was the show. But, with a very skilled director, a very talented cast and a crew that loved each other, we came up with something that was absolutely breathtaking.
