Elation lights Yale’s Carlotta Festival
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The Carlotta Festival features three fully produced new plays by graduating playwrights performed in rotating repertory. The plays presented in this year’s festival, which ran 5-12 May at the Iseman Theatre, included littleboy/littleman by Rudi Goblen (directed by Jacob Basri); Furlough’s Paradise by a.k. payne (directed by Leyla Levi); and Color Boy by Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez).
The Carlotta Festival demonstrates to students the significant artistic, technical, and managerial challenges of producing new plays in repertory, in circumstances similar to those in professional theatre, and is an invaluable learning experience.
When third-year MFA candidates David DeCarolis and Yichen Zhou had the opportunity to design lighting for the plays, DeCarolis decided to contact Elation Professional to enquire about fixture choice.
Elation product application specialist Nick Saiki steered the designer towards two of the company’s newest moving heads, the Fuze MAX Spot and the recent NAB Product-of-the-Year award-winner, the Fuze MAX Profile. Main Light supplied six Fuze MAX Profile and five Fuze MAX Spot luminaires to the school for the production.
DeCarolis says he used the fixtures to accentuate or heighten the more theatrical or psychological moments of the plays, for example using more saturates or primary colors, and accessed their full feature sets for textures, effects, specials, colour and animation. “They were an integral part of my designs and I used them in many of the moments of the plays that I am most proud of,” he stated. “We appreciated these fixtures so much and they really helped out with this production.”
Both designers say they relied on the Fuze MAX Profile’s four-blade framing system to control the beam shape. Looking back, Zhou admits that she would have liked all of the lights to be framing units. “With Furlough’s Paradise’s smaller set it would have been nice to have had more framing fixtures,” she said, a dilemma she got around by using a gobo in the Fuze MAX Spots as a type of shutter.
