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

Tipton is very much a collaborative artist, whose primary responsibility, she has said, "is to reveal what's there." She has done this with both classical and contemporary dance. Her lighting for Peter Wright's production of Giselle, being performed this season in London by Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, makes the first act look rustic and the atmosphere laden with doom. Rather than a greenish tinge for the skin of the Wilis in the second act, Tipton uses a yellowish light that makes them look as waxen as any mannequin at Madame Tussaud's.

It is in her work with contemporary choreographers, however, that Tipton has succeeded in making light a full partner in the dance, never more so than in the 1993 production of Necessary Weather, a collaboration with Sara Rudner and Dana Reitz, in which the lighting looks as if it is emanating from the bodies of the dancers.

In Fuller's day that effect was achieved with one dancer and a multiplicity of electricians. In Tipton's it is done with all the changes and cues computerized for very few electricians. "Light for the stage," Tipton has said, "has four distinct properties - intensity, color, angle, and movement."

Like Rosenthal, and, for that matter, Fuller, who worked long hours in theaters to achieve her effects, Tipton plans carefully. She has said, "I decide what kind of light to put where, what color to make it, and what lights should be used together on dimmers. Working mostly from drawings, I have to visualize what the stage and set will be in real space." But the real preparation comes with experience. Reviewing a long career, she says, "The more I look, the more I see and feel - what happens in a space; how to feel muscle, form, energy, background, and the dancers."

In Tipton, who wanted at one time to be an astrophysicist, art and technology meet once again in the field of lighting design: "The rigor of lighting design fits in with my scientific background." Once Rosenthal announced proudly that she could work anywhere out of a briefcase specially designed for blueprints, plans, architect's drawings, and the like. But she had to buy an extra plane ticket to accommodate them.

Today, Lloyd Sobel, who is resident lighting designer for Eugene and Atlanta Ballets, and who lights ballet productions in Estonia and opera in Aspen, can also work anywhere and in a small space, using a laptop computer equipped with a modem. He is part of a generation of lighting designers who are willing to study the past and build on it as they look toward the future. With the materials at hand, lights of all kinds, and film projections, Sobel has collaborated with Eugene Ballet artistic director Toni Pimble to create an Alice in Wonderland that convincingly has Alice falling down the rabbit hole into the surrealistic wonderland created on the printed page by Lewis Carroll, effects that could not have been achieved without lights.

Through his affiliation with Atlanta Ballet, Sobel is deeply involved in what is called the Atlanta Ballet-Georgia Tech Dance Project. The program was set up in connection with the 1996 Olympiad so that engineers and artists can collaborate on state-of-the-art stagecraft technology. Georgia Tech's textile department is also involved, creating special fabrics for dancers that will have both texture and memory, with the goal, as Sobel puts it, of "morphing" costume changes with computerized projections.