Now that the madness of the holidays are all behind us, I have a confession to make. I can’t stand the holiday season. It’s not that I’m “anti” anything; I just get really annoyed by many aspects of it all. From the commercialism to the fake sort of “have a wonderful season” (spending everything you make on stuff), to the endless amounts of zero time to get anything accomplished — it makes me crazy. On top of the guilt of having to work endless gigs to make it all affordable and then not being there for the fun stuff because of said gigs. Ugh. Bah Humb-ugh.
Holiday Jeer
First and foremost are the lights. I have designed, put together and spec’d many production packages worth many thousands of dollars and I cannot, for the life of me, understand a string of %$#&-ing Christmas tree lights. Oh sure, I jumped on the LED bandwagon a couple of years ago thinking I’d be saved from the endless “pull and check” lamp crap, but they still suck and still have to be hung. In the cold. Don’t even mention the word “inflatable” to me. The biggest annoyance (and something that is proliferating at a frighteningly fast pace) are those little “projectors” that are dotting everyone’s lawns like the presents the dog leaves in the snow for us to clean up in the spring. You’ve seen them….little Malibu-style stake units that shoot garbled, holiday-esque patterns on the front of your garage and home and are juuust bright enough to be seen, yet dim enough to be annoying. “Hey man, I know you do that projection stuff at your work, but check this little baby out…. I projection-mapped my whole house!” I cringe and smile. “Well…yeah. I guess you did, Bob.”
When the whole “home-use” lighting controller craze hit a few years ago, I thought I was going to be physically ill. Power-Christmas-ballad-driven “light shows” (complete with playback on 87.1 FM) that filled up my neighborhood and wasted all that Internet bandwidth, not to mention most of prime-time cable slots. These things are the reason the emergency rooms overflow this time of year and why my phone rings with questions like, “So I got this controller that says I need a dedicated 30a service….exactly what does that mean?” And, “What’s a sub-master?”
One Bright Spot
The one bright spot in my holiday season is The Nutcracker. What? The very zenith of the holiday season is your bright spot, you say? Yes. The one I’m involved with every year is a huge production by any standard — 120 ballet dancers in two casts, full symphony orchestra, pyro, massive sets, children, toys, mice, magic boxes, the whole enchilada. It’s a giant undertaking, and not a single digital thing — except for maybe the lighting console controlling the 400-plus conventional fixtures, and one projector for a scrim effect.
I’m a projection guy by trade, but for this production, I wear a lot of hats. I fix all the props, I built a set piece or two or three, I set up the barres for rehearsal, I mop the floor before performances (with the requisite amount of secret sticky ingredient), I repair the occasional drop. For someone who lives in a digital world, these are all very analog duties. Now, our sets and drops are ancient and really starting to show their age. I keep having dreams about recreating the patterns on everything in grayscale on white or gray drops and then mapping the entire thing digitally. It could be done with an amazing effect, I think.
One of the greatest things about The Nutcracker is that it’s really easy to re-imagine any aspect of it, from the staging to the sets, to the treatment of the order of music. The Nutcracker is perhaps the most performed piece in the pantheon of ballet. Tchaikovsky’s score to Petipa’s choreography wasn’t even performed in the U.S. until more than 40 years after its inception and premiere, and even then, it took the Balanchine-staged version by the New York City Ballet to really make it popular. In fact, The Nutcracker is so pervasive in modern culture now that you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that can’t recognize the iconic imagery or any one of the instantly recognizable tunes. It’s performed in something like 120 major U.S. cities, and while they all retain the classic century-old flavor, they are all uniquely different. Some have live animals, some are burlesque, some are set in 1950’s Harlem, and who can forget the modern take of Lunaman’s recent “Nutcracka” (a personal fave). Many have “retirement” performances, knowing they’ll re-do the entire thing next year. But I digress….
Every year, I get sucked in to thinking I can remake or re-do the whole thing digitally. Like sugar plums dancing in my head, it starts out with one bright projector and some decent software, and then it grows, not unlike the Christmas tree in the production, to an obscene amount of stacked and blended machines shooting everything from acid induced five-headed rat riots to classic Victorian architecture to 19th century Russian snow forest scenes. There’s a whole scene worth of steampunk circus-inspired madness and another of brilliant underwater neon. And then I think of the budget. And then I think of the classic feel of what is there. And I remember why I love it. I love that the most important light is the battery operated one that makes Clara’s face glow at 1800K at the end of the show. I love to make sure there are tissue boxes for the dancers offstage (whether they know to use them or not). I love to mop the floor. I love it for the craft of doing it. I love it for the way it makes me feel. As the biggest Grinch, I’m aware of, I don’t really hate the holidays. I just wish they were more….analog.
