#87 Clifton Taylor

in 1: the podcast

This week we are sitting down with Lighting Designer Clifton Taylor to discuss he new book, Color & Light: Navigating Color Mixing in the Midst of an LED Revolution. He tells us where the idea for the book came from, the process of writing about a technology that is rapidly evolving and what he hopes readers will get out of it. Clifton and Cory dive into various color topics including using saturation to convey darkness, why certain colors can appear onstage just because of how our eyes work, and using an audience’s preconceived relationship with colors to a designer’s advantage. They also spend a great deal of time talking about the transition from gel based color to LED sources and how that affects the documenting and recreating of shows, how designers communicate with their programmers, and managing a wealth of fixture types and possible colors while time in the theatre remains as limited as always. It’s the wild wild west of color right now with an ever shifting landscape of available options and Clifton is here to make sense of it all. And BONUS…listen for your chance to win an autographed copy of the book!

Clifton Taylor has created designs for theater, dance, and opera companies on Broadway, regionally across the United States, and in 17 countries around the world. His designs have been seen in productions by the Alvin Ailey, Martha Graham, and Paul Taylor dance companies, as well as in numerous works for the American Ballet Theatre and the ballet companies of Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Rio de Janeiro. His international dance credits also include the Mikhailovsky Theatre (St. Petersburg, Russia), the Rambert Dance Company (London), the Ningbo Song and Dance Company (China), the Ballet de Lorraine (Nancy, France), and many others.

Designs by Clifton Taylor for opera and classical music performances have been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, Italy’s Haydn Orchestra, France s Opéra de Lorraine, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Yokohama Noh Theater, and both the Japan Society and the Japan Foundation. He is a sought-after teacher and lecturer on theatrical lighting, especially in the areas of color and light, regularly speaking at NYU and at LDI (Live Design International). He presented lectures on color at New York’s Broadway Lighting Master Class for 17 years and is a former member of the Juilliard School s dance faculty.

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