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Theater & Dance

American Dance Institute’s ‘Necessary Weather’ gives lighting equal billing

By Rebecca Ritzel,March 15, 2012

Dana Reitz and Sara Rudner in Necessary Weather. (Julieta Cervantes/PHOTO:…)

First, to clear up any misunderstandings, Jennifer Tipton will not be performing this weekend at American Dance Institute in Rockville. That is, she won’t be performing onstage. Yet Tipton, a renowned septuagenarian lighting designer, gets top billing in “Necessary Weather,” a collaborative dance piece that’s credited to Dana Reitz, Jennifer Tipton and Sara Rudner.

If you must know, Reitz choreographed the piece (and also dances), Tipton designed the lighting and Rudner is a dancer who was involved in the creative process. But Reitz wishes none of that mattered.

“Everyone has been confused about this since 1992,” she said, sighing after being asked about the credits for about the 100th time since “Necessary Weather” premiered nearly 20 years ago. “But I wanted Jennifer up there, just like I was. I wanted to share ownership of the piece, without spelling out who did what ...

“People aren’t used to that.”

Reitz calls “Necessary Weather” a “radical collaboration.” All because the lighting designer, the choreographer and the performers were in the theater, creating a work of art, at the same time. And they worked on the piece together, for months.

“This is the first — and probably only — piece that I have ever created this way,” Tipton said. “And it was great.”

She spoke recently from Paris, where she was reproducing the original lighting for Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering” for the Paris Opera Ballet. She was already thinking about flying home to New York to work in her usual, hyper-efficient fashion. Tuesday, she saw a rehearsal for choreographer Paul Taylor’s newest work, “House of Joy,” for the first time. Saturday, the piece premiered at Lincoln Center. Tipton designed the lighting over a 48-hour period.

“Two days,” she said. “That’s all I usually get. For ‘Necessary Weather,’ we had two years.”

The history of this piece, with its next chapter unfolding in Rockville, is part of lighting design history. In August 1992, Reitz raised enough money to rent out Chelsea’s Kitchen theater for the month. Every morning, she and Tipton would lead workshops for designers and choreographers, and every afternoon, Rudner would join them to work on “Necessary Weather.”

“We organized it so we could experiment with how light affects movement, and how movement affects light, and explore all those questions that we had after working together before,” Reitz said. “It’s extremely rare to have that much time in the theater with light. It’s extremely expensive. It’s a luxury, but it’s really a necessity, to understand what’s going on. There was continuous dialogue and a continuous shifting of roles.”

At the end of that month, the women put on a demo performance for friends, presenters and potential funders. But they said it was still a work-in-progress.

“We wanted to let it finish itself,” Tipton said.

They continued to work on “Necessary Weather” on and off for two years, usually during Reitz and Tipton’s downtime when they were leading lighting workshops in the United States, London and Hong Kong.

“Lighting can reveal the meaning in dance,” Tipton said. Working on “Necessary Weather” “deepened our knowledge of what we were doing, and the piece reflects that.”

By the time “Necessary Weather” returned to the Kitchen in 1994, it was already something of a legend. That year, Reitz, Tipton and Rudner toured the work to Jacob’s Pillow and five European dance festivals. Then it lay dormant for 15 years, until Vermont’s Flynn Center for the Performing Arts applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for special funding to reconstruct the piece. Reitz and Rudner were game, even though both are now in their 60s.

“There was a long hiatus, and it’s rather surprising that it’s come back, and that we’ve been performing it so much recently,” Tipton said.

To her, “so much” and “recently” are that 2009 Vermont performance and the New York revivals in 2010 and 2011. You have to remember that Tipton, 74, has been working professionally as a lighting designer since 1963, when she was stage-managing Paul Taylor Dance Company’s first American tour and stumbled into replacing Tom Skelton, her late mentor, on the light boards. She’s been collaborating with Taylor ever since. When she can, she looks to help young choreographers, as demonstrated by a 2003 project with Washington’s Dana Tai Soon Burgess.