Useful Stage Management Skills in the Real World: Lightwalking

Scarpia’s view from his death position.

Usually I’m the one who puts the 3 year old to bed and the Husband puts both the baby and the eight year old to bed. Last night we decided to switch and I put the baby to bed. I haven’t done this in a while because it doesn’t go well for me. My method of putting her down involves nursing her to sleep and then being stuck underneath a sweaty sleeping baby because a) she is super sensitive and wakes whenever I move, b) I am too short to reach over the crib railing for a smooth baby touchdown to the mattress, and c) she has my nipple firmly clenched in between her teeth.

The Husband, however, has some crazy daddy magic technique that gets her to go down with minimal amount of crying. Except in the cases where I let her nap too late into the afternoon or she falls asleep during her post dinner nursing session. Then all bets are off and the baby gets to hang out and watch 30 Rock with mom and dad. These incidences are very rare. Dad is that good.

Anyhow, last night, after the Husband explained his flip and settle technique of getting the baby into the crib, as well as his very precise 10 minute walk, 10 minute rock routine, he left me with the baby.

So I got to do something I haven’t done since last October. I got to walk aimlessly around in the dark, trying to keep a little tyrant happy as I watch the minutes of my life tick by. Also known as lightwalking. Okay, so I wasn’t really lightwalking. But it sure felt like it.

Lightwalking, for those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, is when, during the technical period of a show, people stand onstage so that the lighting designer and the director can have bodies to look at as they create the lighting looks. Now who these bodies are vary by company. Sometimes they are volunteers who come and do it for cookies, coffee, and dress rehearsal passes. Sometimes it’s an intern or two or three. Sometime it’s a stack of chairs. At my home company, it’s the assistant stage managers.

Now, I love my job. But there is one part of it I don’t love to do. Okay there are two: 1) I hate having to tell the chorus to be quiet, and 2) I really don’t love light walking. It is physically tiring to have to stand still for minutes (or hours) on end (though a lot of stage managers are good at letting the light walkers know when they can relax and sit down for a second). Also, while often I bring a book or something, a lot of times I can’t really do much while light walking because someone is looking at you – or rather what the light is doing around you – so if you move, a voice from the darkness of the theatre will say, “Can you please look up?” Mentally you have to keep yourself engaged because once in a while the stage manager will send you on an errand to find the crew, or make some photo copies, or some such. So you stand there, a human mannequin, and just let the thoughts run through your head. It’s usually some monologue like, “Do I need to update the paperwork for this evening’s rehearsal? I should follow up on that note. Did I move that Post-It in my book? What’s for lunch in the Canteen? I forgot to tell the Husband that there are diapers in the wash. I have to pay the bills. Hmmm … what is this spike mark here and do we still need it?” and so on.

Faust groundcloth. Look at all those spike marks! Yes, we need all of them.

So over the years I have learned to embrace the special part of my job that is lightwalking. I’ve learned to enjoy my book one page at a time. Sometimes I’ll bring a crossword puzzle, or my fellow ASM will bring trivia cards which we can read to each other over the special ASM channel on our headsets. That latter is actually a fun bonding experience. I’ve learned how fun it is to get to be on parts of the set and recreate stage pictures (Tosca jump, anyone?), even to pretend to be a chorus of sixty with just two other ASMs. I’ve come to love the quiet of lighting session – this loud quiet of work being done, punctuated by the tapping of buttons as the electrician programs the light board, the gentle murmur of voices as the artistic staff contemplates the visual details, the quiet conversations of the crew as they wait in the wings for one of us to ask them to move a chair, or a wall, the soft scratchy brush strokes of the painter as they do touch up on the set, with their softly apologetic reminders of where not to step . I’ve learned to delight in looking up close at our sets – marveling at how the peeling painted foam looks like beautiful medieval rocks from the audience. I’ve learned to brace myself when someone calls, “Going dark!”, ready to have the lights all go out and be enveloped in velvety faux night. And I’ve learn to be really Zen about standing in the dark, to savor being onstage and looking out and appreciate how fleeting the work we do is. The gentle knowledge that standing on this green spike mark, this is where I am meant to be now, and this is what I am doing now, and there is nothing more important I can be doing for the show right now than standing right there, looking into that blinding light.

And last night, as I was trying to get the baby to sleep, I had this realization that this was my COVID version of lightwalking. This walking back and forth in the dark, the quiet murmurs of night time, this holding something ephemeral yet full of life in my arms, this protective possessiveness, this opportunity to be in the moment, in a walking mediation, even this living in fear of failure and tears while being slightly bored… this was where I was, and this was where I needed to be at that moment.

I guess I’m not going anywhere at the moment.

Off Headset (or why I started to blog)

What life looks like on headset.

Last summer, when I was pregnant with our third child, I had idyllic visions of starting a blog to document my pregnancy. I had always felt that I hadn’t been as mindful about the gestating process as I wanted to be. With my first pregnancy, I was five months gone before I admitted something was going on. With my second, I was working a pretty challenging schedule (Ring Cycle, anyone?). As a result, I never really took time to savour being pregnant. So last summer, I thought, “I have time off; I am going to start a blog to document things.” But then life, children, summer schedules, and quite honestly, inhibitions got in the way, and before I knew it, it was September and the pregnancy that I wanted to savour and document was … a baby. And I was back at work. And the next show happened. Then the next show didn’t.

And so here we are. But no time like the present, right? And nothing like a pandemic induced stay at home order to give myself time to “create before you consume.”

“Off headset” is what we say at work when we take our headsets off. Like when we go to the bathroom – because you don’t want to be the person who accidentally drops their headset into the toilet, or the person who broadcasts the sound of peeing to everyone else to hear. And at the end of the day, I say, “Off headset” as I am powering off my beltpack, and hanging up my headset – the signal that I’m are no longer available over headset, that rehearsal is over for me,and that I’m switching gears.

Life in opera can be all consuming. The long hours and middling pay means that one really needs to believe and love what one does to make a life of it. The intense rehearsals, monumental achievements, warm colleagues with crazy stories – these things tend to take up all my time and energy when I’m in production. Doubly so when I travel for gigs; when I’m in a new city, work can easily become the whole world, because throwing yourself into an show is the path of least resistance. But there is always a part of me that says, “This isn’t the sum of me! This sitting in rehearsal, solving other people’s problems, swapping horror stories during lighting sessions…. I have a life outside of this.”

So in that vein, I thought I’d create a space for myself to explore/write about things that occupy me when I am off headset – food, books, articles, thoughts, family, things that make me smile, think, and contemplate.