Lighting Designer and Educator Lap Chi Chu speaks about working on two shows at Lincoln Center simultaneously; Camelot and The Coast Starlight. Both shows rely heavily on the lighting to help audiences understand the context of the scenes. Here the designer talks about his approach using Astera tubes within a lightbox onstage for The Coast Starlight.
“For The Coast Starlight, it is a moving train, and the style of the play is very presentational. It’s basically a lot about all the things unsaid between people, so it’s abstract to begin with. We could do anything we wanted with the lighting, but trying to not do the obvious thing, and to get to the feeling of what a scene wanted to be. For example, we had a scene where they walked into the observation car of the train, where they finally see the sky. Instead of illustrating the sky for us, which we tried, we actually settled on something different, where the floor became very bright and just changed the environment; where it felt like they opened up. We did that by basically having a lightbox onstage. We had a lot of Astera tubes, which were a lifesaver for this show. It’s actually made the show cost-effective. It costs a lot to power that lightbox in a revolve, so with the Astera tubes, they’re all wireless, and they’re all pixel mappable,” the designer says.
“We put the Astera tubes down there, in the floor to light the scene. They did so much of the heavy lifting for The Coast Starlight. It made things architectural at times, and it makes things fantastical, and then it could be theatrical as well. Lincoln Center had never used them before, but after me being there, between Camelot and Coast Starlight, I think they’re loving those Astera tubes,” he adds.
“Originally, it was going to be a lot of LED, powerful LED tape under there, but it was too expensive to get power run under there. The Astera tubes are responsive, they’re wireless, quite stable, and they’re bright, and pixel mappable, which is a lot of what I do.” – Lighting Designer, Lap Chi Chu on the heavy lifting that lighting did for The Coast Starlight at NYC’s Lincoln Center Theatre. May 2023, PLSN
Read the full story about Lap Chi Chu’s design work for these two shows in PLSN‘s May issue article: Camelot and The Coast Starlight; One LD; Two Shows
