Lighting and sound wizard Chris
Neal was the last guest for 2015 in the series In Conversation with the Canberra
Critics Circle and what a stimulus for lively discussion his work turned out to
be.
A local lad, Canberra born, he
was the sort of kid who starts out running sound and lighting for school
assemblies, moving on to volunteer work for various Canberra theatre groups and
companies. That volunteer technical theatre work turned into the firm Eclipse
Lighting and Sound, the technical and design wizards behind such shows as Jeff
Wayne’s War of The Worlds in 2012 and the more recent Jesus Christ Superstar.
Neal proved to be a quiet but impassioned
talker who soon had the entire Circle discussing light and sound. He showed
that it is possible to ‘build a job’ by finding out where the ‘gaps and holes’
are in local theatre and filling them.
He reminded us that unless, as is
the case on big shows like Jesus Christ Superstar the technical and design
preplanning has taken months or even years, it is lighting and sound that often
has less rehearsal than any other departments. Yet the expectation of course is
that they won’t sound under rehearsed on opening night.
He talked about newer lighting
equipment and moving (‘intelligent’) lighting and the change wrought by new
technology on the look and use of stage colours. It’s a revolution akin to that
brought about when in the late C19 gas was replaced by electricity. (Fewer
theatres went up in flames but many people missed the old ambience.)
There was a lively discussion too
about mikes versus voice projection. Again, it’s about a technical revolution
but there was a thread of nostalgia from some of the Circle for the old players
who could fill a theatre with unassisted voice.
Not from Neal. There could have
been a whole other session about lighting the ‘straight play’ but Neal’s joy
has become making the big shows work, the ones that these days are full of
spectacular technology of a kind that the audience has come to expect.
There’s clearly a whole thread to
be followed, too, on the use of light in art and in galleries and projections
on buildings in events like Canberra’s Enlighten and Sydney’s Vivid but that’s
for another time.
Meantime Chris Neal’s
enthusiastic outlook on what my old Leeds University lighting teacher Trevor
Faulkner used to call ‘technology in the service of art’ served as a needful
stimulus to the Circle’s thinking on such issues.
Alanna Maclean
