The light fantastic - Fuller, Rosenthal & Tipton: beginning with Loie Fuller in the nineteenth century, dance has pioneered the development of twentieth-century stage lighting - Jean Rosenthal; Jennifer Tipton

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Martha Ullman West

Fuller notwithstanding, when Rosenthal entered the field in 1929 women were not accepted as technicians in the burly backstage world. "My only real weapon ... in the battle for acceptance," she wrote, "was knowledge." Rosenthal, like Fuller, knew what she was doing. As early as the 1930s, it was possible to study stage lighting at Yale, which Rosenthal did, under the tutelage of the aptly named Stanley McCandless.

Rosenthal, who was the first resident lighting designer for the Metropolitan Opera House and who also designed the lights for many theater productions, felt that if she left anything to posterity it would be in the field of dance lighting. "Light is quite tactile to me," she wrote. "It has shape and dimension. It has an edge. It has quality and an entity. It is the one miracle of creation without which, to me, the others would be meaningless."

Unlike Fuller, Rosenthal was a collaborative artist, working with the star choreographers of her time. Some of the signature lighting she did for Balanchine and the diagonal shaft of light she created for Graham (lovingly referred to by her as "Martha's Finger of God"), are now in such widespread use by dance companies of every style that they have become standards of the lighting repertoire.

For Rosenthal every dance company had an individual aesthetic, and the lights had to be customized to fit it: "The only common denominators for ballet are the requirements of beauty and ease." For Balanchine she lit patterns in space; for American Ballet Theatre it was decor and narrative form.

From the first she made drastic changes in what had become standard and inflexible lighting for ballet in Europe, where the first ten feet of stage space were lit for visibility and change of color - blue for Swan Lake, pink for Les Biches - against scenery with flat light. Rosenthal lit the whole stage to give ballets mood, depth, and individuality.

Her light changes were keyed to both music and the physical impulse, no matter what kind of dancing she was lighting. Her career began when, a mere slip of a seventeen-year-old, she became a stage manager for Graham. It ended forty years later with her designing the lighting for Graham's Archaic Hours in 1969; weeks after the premiere she died of cancer at age fifty-seven.

For her work in lighting opera, theater, and dance, Rosenthal received many accolades as a woman who was both visionary and practical. She imposed, in her own words, "an organization, to create a set-up that could do all the diverse things the company did, tidily and anywhere. That meant flexibility, presentability and a color scheme which worked in many moods."

Today, it is Jennifer Tipton who travels the world, enhancing dance and theater productions, projecting interior landscapes, and creating exterior ones with the greatly improved lighting equipment available now, as well as with that boon to modem life, the computer. With this advanced technology, Tipton, her contemporaries, and the next generation of lighting designers can explore untold possibilities for lighting the dance.