>>PREVIEW
2005 BETTY MITCHELL AWARDS
August 29
Stage West
Calgary’s professional theatre community will be toasting the best of the 2004-05 season at the upcoming eighth annual Betty Mitchell Awards. Here, Fast Forward begins a series of profiles of some of the nominees.
"We like to live in the dark," says Brian Pincott. "Most lighting designers shun the light, they like to sit in the dark, they’re not the ones onstage and most of them, but not all of them, prefer it that way."
This month, however, Pincott may once again be compelled to go from behind the spotlight to in front of it. He’s up for another Betty Mitchell Award for his lighting design for the Alberta Theatre Projects and Old Trout Puppet Workshop co-production of Pinocchio. Currently ATP’s production manager, Pincott has spent 18 years lighting stages across Canada after being roped into theatre at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University.
"I was 23 and had never been near a stage before and I got asked to help out and I was hooked. Within three weeks, I switched out of science and into the arts," he says. "There was no real drama program, there was, like, three acting courses and I wasn’t at all interested in acting. So just by default I started doing lighting and, lo and behold, it was fun and I seemed to have a knack for it."
While computerized lighting sequences and cues may not appeal to many spotlight-hungry drama students, Pincott’s decision to pursue theatre’s shadowy technical side has paid off, with six previous Betty nominations and three wins. His passion for theatre is obvious as he discusses the Trouts and the freedom their collective gave him in his design. He experimented with a primarily side-lit stage for the production, complemented by a dozen front lights he called "the shooting gallery."
"If you’re a set designer or a costume designer, you do a sketch or a model and it’ll look like that, but bigger," he says. "But with lighting design, you can’t do that. It’s all in the designer’s head until you go through the expense and time of putting all the lights up, focusing them all, and then you turn them on."
That always means a certain degree of risk. "When you sit there with a director and… you’ve put 300 lights in the air, and you’re turning (them) on for the first time, if it doesn’t work, you’re screwed," he says. "You can’t go back and do wholesale changes. You can do minor tweaks, but if you’ve really dropped it, you’re screwed."
In the course of his career, Pincott has seen lighting technology change from manual operation to computer-programmed sequences. Having worked manual lights himself in his early years, Pincott sees the evolution as a trade-off between greater technical control and a more accurate execution of the lighting design onstage.
"From a lighting designer’s point of view, (computerization) is a good thing, because you program the computer, you get it, it’s there, it’s exactly what you programmed and it’s not going to change," he says. "But from an operator’s point of view, when it was a manual board (they) used to be able to feel and adjust for the pace (of the performance) and add their artistic flair, their input into how the whole thing flowed. There isn’t that opportunity anymore."
As creative as lighting can be, Pincott says he’s careful not to let it detract from the action onstage. "That’s always the balance, making sure that your beautiful lighting picture isn’t the story, that the story the actors are telling is what it’s all about and your work supports that as opposed to overshadows it – no pun intended."
Recently, Pincott stepped out of the shadows to run as a candidate in the municipal and provincial elections. "I’m learning not to be scared of the spotlight in that area," he says of his political ambitions. "But when it comes to theatre, I’m still, ‘Not me, not me.’"
Tickets to the Betty Mitchell Awards are available from the Stage West box office, 243-6642. For more info, go to www.bettymitchellawards.com. |
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