UA News

Fitzgerald traces her career back to some cardboard and Christmas tree lights.

Name
Deanna Fitzgerald

Position
Assistant Professor, Lighting Designer, School of Theatre Arts

Number of years at the UA
1 1/2

Favorite part about working at the UA
"The students, definitely. Getting to be there as they find their voices at this time of their lives is really quite beautiful."

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Deanna Fitzgerald doesn't much like being in the spotlight. But she has no problem operating one.

As a lighting designer in the School of Theatre Arts, Fitzgerald is charged with shedding light on a variety of student performances and teaching her 11 lighting majors the ins and outs of illuminating the stage.

Fitzgerald notes that lighting designers can be found doing their work everywhere – not just in the theater, but in film and television, concerts, architecture, theme parks, houses of worship, restaurants and so forth. And although you may never see them, they are the ones that decide what you see and how you see it.

Fitzgerald talked with Lo Que Pasa about her work backstage on UA theatrical performances.  

What were you doing before you came to the UA?
I was in Las Vegas. I did the lighting design for a show called "Stomp Out Loud." They're the guys who bang on the trash cans.

What brought you to the UA?
I had been teaching before – I taught at the University of Utah at one point and I taught at the University of Cincinnati, which is where I got my graduate degree. ... When I was in Vegas I started to miss teaching, so this job opened up and it seemed like a really good fit.

What classes do you teach?
I teach lighting design, advanced lighting design (and) drafting, which is a graphics class. A new class we're working on now is electricity for the entertainment technician.

What shows have you worked on here?
I work on all of them because if I'm not lighting them I'm mentoring the lighting designers on them, so I did the designs for the "Music Man" and for "Rum and Coke." Right now I'm working on the designs for two Shakespearian shows – one's a Shakespeare, one's a Shakespeare-esque show – which are called "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Tamer Tamed."

What goes into creating lighting design?  
It's a long process. Here at the School of Theatre Arts we do what we call the 12-week process, which starts with the director coming into the room and saying, "This is kind of what I'm thinking. This is what I want to do." Then there are 12 weeks of meetings and brainstorming and coming up with ideas and demonstrations, and then eventually there's drawings and then hanging the lights, focusing the lights, programming the lights and then doing the show, which is the only part that the audience sees.

How did you start doing this?
When I was in high school I wasn't very challenged by high school and I wanted something else to do. Somebody said, "Why don't you go to the community theater because you seem to have some artistic skills and see what happens?" So I went down to the local community theater and they put me to work. They had me taking these foam core pieces of board and cutting holes in them and putting Christmas tree lights in them, and I had no idea why I was doing that but that's what I did for evenings and weekends, on and on and on. Eventually they said, "Hey, you're a pretty hard worker. Do you want to run a follow spot(light) for a show?" ... It turned out that the show was "Cabaret," which is still my favorite show, and on opening night I was running this follow spot and making sure that Sally Boles was lit as she was singing "Life is a Cabaret," and she belts out those last few words and the lights on stage, and those Christmas tree lights that I spent days and days doing, started chasing and she was singing and the audience went wild and I was hooked. That was at (age) 15 and I've been doing it ever since.

How important are the lights in a show?
It's a big deal. A lighting designer's primary responsibility is to decide how the show is going to be revealed, in terms of the location, the time of day, the emotion that you want to present, the most important goal being to support the arc of the story, the intention of the material. So it's not just about hanging some lights and turning them on.

Is there anything new going on with technology in your field?
Yeah, right now it's actually really exciting. We're bringing in some new LED technology. ... To actually use them (LEDs) to light people or scenery is something that we haven't really come around to making work yet, and now there's actually a group of lights that are doing it pretty well and we're getting some of them. ... The great thing about LEDs is they use 150 watts per fixture, and it replaces units that will use 3,000 watts, so we're going green, which we really love.

Have you done any cool lighting effects you're especially proud of?
I did a show when I was working in Miami, and we wanted to do a full moon eclipse on stage over the entire course of the show, so at the climax of the show the moon was eclipsed and then it faded off. ... The moon was (a circle of light on a backdrop and was) 10 feet wide, so it was huge, and then to create the eclipse we put a 10-foot diameter cardboard disc on a curtain track and somebody sat with a little handle and made this thing go across the light over the course of an hour and a half. ... We tried all kinds of complicated things but the simplest ended up being the best.

Have you ever been on stage or do you prefer to stay behind the scenes?
When I was in college I was on stage a couple times but only because I was forced. I never wanted to be on stage. I have a bachelor of fine arts in drama so I had to be on stage as part of the curriculum a couple of times. But, no, I don't like being up there.