Lights workshop- "With great lighting comes great responsibility"

This past week we had a workshop with Mr Pancho Tuesta, Gonzalo's brother, on lights and lighting in general for us to use this learning, to apply to the school play. We got to learn about the different types of lights, and how to apply them according to what we are trying to do. Also, we learned about the different properties of lights, which we can control in order to create atmospheres and feelings. In retrospective, this workshop helped us to understand more about how lighting is an important design factor for a our play to be successful.

Personally, in the past i though that lights were pretty much useless. I used to think that when preparing the play, we used lights to literally light the scene, and use different colors to make it spooky or pretty. Looking back i was a bit ignorant, because now i've learnt about the greater importance of lights, and the whole lot of knowledge it takes to build a lights plan for a play.
I found the five properties of lights to be quite interesting, although some of them seemed pretty obvious to me. Still, i thought that the temperature property caught my attention the most, because even though i knew about colors and their properties when applied, i never thought that when placing a contrast of colors to paint the scene the temperature was a great influence to support the main action of the scene, and thus the atmosphere.
To be honest, i think it was a bit hard for me to follow some of Pancho's ideas, because it took me a while to understand which light was which, so when he explain using a name to describe the property and use, i got a bit lost.
There is one thing in particular that i came to terms with, which i already knew, and which infuriates me a lot, is the fact that we have the crappiest of lights. Well, not entirely, but they are pretty simple and basic, so it is hard to actually accomplish great effects and atmosphere. I think it became a bit difficult for Pancho when explaining us how to use the lights for our play, because the ideas he had were limited by our disposal of lights. But because we are the most important course in the school, we receive the best!

I believe that this workshop was very important for us, so we could have a better insight on the lighting design of a play, to understand better theatre itself. Although Olenka is the one in charge of this design area for the play, it will come in very handy for us when we are doing Product 3 of the IB, which involves directing a scene.
One of the most useful things we learnt, in my opinion, were the different positions of the lights, which according to the property we wanted to apply changed. In our play, this becomes quite useful, because of the hierarchy of our characters, which we want to maintain. For example, for the gods, which are the highest figures, we can apply frontal lights at 45° in an axis, so that they are completely illuminated and no shadows are casted, in which case we could also use back lights so there is only illumination for them, representing their heavenly power. On the other hand, for demons, specially Ravenna, we could use a skylight from the top, which will consequently cast a shadow in her face, emphasizing her evilness and darkness.
Speaking of which, as i said before, one of the most interesting topics was the temperature property, which i believe is very important for our play since creating the atmospheres is essential to distinguish the themes of love, heroism, good vs evil, etc. In which case, we can use lighter colors to represent good and love but keeping a warm temperature, whereas for evil and such, we could use colder and darker colors. In Kathakali, colors have different meanings and have to be carefully used, thus we can use our knowledge of the tradition and the colors, to apply it to our use of different color lights. For example, red represents violence in Kathakali, ergo, we can apply red lights in the final battle to emphasize the violent atmosphere without breaking the tradition.
I think that one of the most useful skills, and concrete one, we learnt was how to draw a plan of our light set up for a play. We know very well our stage, and we know how many lights, and which types, are in each bar. Thus he showed us how to plan ahead which light to direct where and how, which colors to place, and have everything ready so the play goes smoothly. One thing i found interesting and useful is that he told Olenka to divide the stage into zones of light, and made us learn them, so that in case of trouble she can say something like "zone 3 is not working" and us as producers, can help her to fix it, and the actors to adapt to it.
However, one of the biggest challenges, is that as i mentioned before, we don't have the best of lights, and they cannot be changed once they are set for the beginning of the play. This is hard because then we have to be careful not to imagine using any light in any way we want, because we have a limited supply, and we have to use it wisely, with limit lights comes great responsibility.
But there is one thing i've been wondering about a lot; how are we going to work with such a limited supply of lights? I am aware that it has been done for decades (?), but this time, as we are trying to stay close to the tradition, meaning following the colors and hierarchical stages, then how are we going to manage to keep everything cool and working, with such a limited supply? Could this mean that we will have to break a bit from the tradition? Or should we just keep ourselves closer to it and use less lights in some cases? In many theatre companies, they use even less amounts of lights, but if they need more they can buy more, or even adapt some with the more trained staff they have, But we don't have any of those! So how are we going to balance the use of the lights? We also don't have many color filters to work at our best, so how will we manage to adapt? Should we combine colors? But wouldn't that mean to change the direction of the light? How have we managed in past years?