A Look at the Other Side

Hello everyone! Yes! I’m back writing again! Many of you who follow me on twitter might have noticed that I wasn’t Tweeting nearly as often as I normally due. This mainly do to the fact that the other side of my life got really busy. The other side isn’t referring to my family or personal life. I’m talking about my life in the theatre. For those of you who don’t know I have been heavily involved in theatre since my sophomore year in high school. I now focus on lighting, but I have run sound and even a assistant stage manager. A lot of people ask me why I do it, especially at the business school here at Lehigh. My response is normally “To give my mind a break from Finance”. I say this because it is completely unrelated in that I am an artist instead of a investor. I’m dressed in all black instead of a suit, and I focus on a story instead of the last breaking news.

I had always thought of theatre and finance to be very different from each other, but it wasn’t until I worked on my current production, which is a show called “Boom”, that I realized how similar they were. First let me give you a quick breakdown of all the roles on the lighting side for a production. First there is the Lighting Designer, much like the hedge fund manager, he or she has the vision of what the show should be. The LD comes up with the various fixtures they want to use and transfer that into a lighting plot: which is a drawn representation of each light and its position along with channel and dimmer number. If the LD has a assistant lighting designer (ALD) then they will do the plot and help manage focus points during focus. The next important role is the Master Electrician (ME). The ME is like the head trader: they get the plot and decided what dimmer and which dimmer to use (you don’t want to use a dimmer that is 50 feet away from the light when you can use one 5 feet away!). They are also present during hang, when you hang all the fixtures according to the plot, and focus, when you focus the fixtures. ME is in charge of the Electricians, who are like traders; they are your workforce that gets things done like hanging, focusing, and circuiting.

Once I realized some of the similarities just in the workforce of lighting; they started to flood to me. Both jobs require long hours. I have several +10 hour days in a space in order to get things done. The hours are pretty muched flipped from finance unless you are a trader in the US who trades Asia. I am mainly in the space from 2pm to 12pm when I would be at my desk from 7am to 4pm on a trading day. There is a constant stream of information that is thrown at you that you have to keep straight in your head “What type of power are we using? Does this take DMX or Artnet or Net3? Why are receiving power? Why don’t we have data being sent to the fixtures?”. There is also a good deal of money at stake too. We have to move and hang very expensive fixtures all the time. An example would be for Lehigh’s production of Boom we have four Highend systems DL.3 moving head projectors that retail for about 30k a apiece so you get a little nervous when you have to rope them up 20 feet in the air and hang them on a balcony rail.

The biggest connection fiance has to be when you are a programmer. A programmer is someone who takes what the LD is saying and programs it into a lighting console. This happens during tech so you are constantly changing lights. A programmer is on headset with all the Technical staff so it gets very difficult determining what information is important. You often have conflicting information too. You have the LD asking you to do something while the Stage manager is ordering you to go to the next cue. My experiance during Boom was almost like being on a trading floor. The stage is infront of me, but I was glued to my console, for me it was a ETC Gio.

ETC GIO

The two monitors built into it are touch screen so you can better mix color for LED fixtures or select multiple channels without using the Keypad. I had a flood of commands going in my ear “I need channels 211 thru 215 at 50. Channels 5othru 75 minus 63, 64, 64, 67 all at 40. Pan the stage right Icue beam down to more center stage left. Record this as a cue with a up time of 5 seconds and down time of 10”. I had to execute these in real time or I would hold up the productions. I got commands like this about every two minutes with various smaller commands like “bring channel 1thru 20 at 40 and update the cue” in between. Its a exciting and stressful experience because if you mess up everyone else on the intercom can hear that you messed up because your LD is correcting you. Its almost like day trading in a way.

Looking back to it seems strange that I didn’t realize the connection before because it seems so obvious now. Its the fast paced, quick thinking that both share that has attracted me. I think I never really tried to think about it because I always wanted theatre to be a escape. I still think it is a escape because it takes my mind off a lot of the ridiculousness of finance like the constant need to be informed and the constant deluge of opinions. So when I go from the world of finance from time to time its because I’m trying to convince an audience that they are in the fairy tale world of OZ, The streets of London(Sweeney Tod), or possibly the colonial America (yes that was a Hamilton reference).