Rather than limiting her, starting out in dance opened up avenues in theater. "My work for Merce Cunningham vetted me for those who thought of themselves as avant-garde, and so through that I worked with Joe Chaikin, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs."
To this day, Emmons is honored to keep the company she does on the job. "Our profession is a meritocracy: The best get there," she says. "That's why it's a privilege to work on Broadway. Everybody there knows what they're doing. Sometimes it's a struggle just in the nature of making art to come up with the famous hit that everybody's looking for. But everybody there is just a treat to be around."
Lighting designers' success can be determined by their people skills as well as their artistry and technical know-how, according to Emmons. Gentle negotiating and a spirit of cooperation are preferable to dictatorialness—which may be why it took a woman to create the occupation. "The idea of having a lighting designer is sort of a female idea in the sense that the way Jean [Rosenthal] talked about it is: She'd like to make a suggestion," Emmons says. "Basically you're inserting yourself between three bulldogs: a director who wants his way, a scenic designer and the electrician—they're all butting heads. She was greatly respected because she found a way to gently evolve herself into saying: 'I talked to the director, and it occurs to me that we ought to perhaps plan this...' She very gracefully inserted herself and the concept of a separate person in that job. They always talked about her saying 'please' and 'thank you' to the crew; crews loved her because she honored their work."
While women have made a lot of progress in design, the most significant changes in the profession during the course of Emmons' career have been technological. Computerization has vastly expanded lighting possibilities, but also has made the job infinitely more complex. "Nowadays it's very technically complicated to keep track of the software," says Emmons. "It's a huge database management problem, in addition to the aesthetic concerns." For instance, with moving lights—which didn't even exist a few decades ago—"when you hang up one, you have 72 decisions to make before you move on to the next one," she says. "Now, multiple that by 100. It takes far longer and it's exponentially more complicated to keep track of what you had mind and how you're doing it."
When Emmons started out, "it was all hand dimmers, and the old dimmer boards were created for World War I submarines and just recycled," she says. "Everything was done by hand, which meant you couldn't have more than 300 lights because nobody could handle them. Now there are musicals of a thousand focusing units.
"Another thing is, what you wrote in the cues is exactly what will be there that night. It's exactly programmed, so it's perfect," she adds, further explaining: "When you take a light out on a dimmer, the wire inside the bulb slowly goes out, so even if you go zunk!—quick—the light fades out. Now you can have a light go out on a snap. Well, that's a much different punctuation in moments in songs and dance movements and transitions."
What hasn't changed is the lighting designer's objectives, which Emmons instills in those she instructs: "It's always about seeing. What's interesting is to get people [students] looking and seeing and responding to the work of art and responding to the physical space. That's where we intersect—between what the work wants to be and what the space will allow. Lighting design has to exist, to quote Robert Rauschenberg, 'in the gap between art and life.'"
Emmons is currently on the graduate theater faculty of Columbia University. She also teaches Broadway Master Classes sponsored by Primedia and at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. From 1997 to 2002, she was artistic director of the Lincoln Center Institute, which provides educational outreach to New York City schools.
For the previous installment in this series, about composer/playwright Elizabeth Swados, click here.
Photo of Emmons from Lincoln Center. Productions designed by Emmons, from top: The Monkey King [photo by Rob Levine]; Sailor's Song [photo by Carol Rosegg]; Jekyll & Hyde [photo from IESNA.org]. Homepage photo of Emmons by Blanche Mackey.
