Lighting designer Donald Holder, best known for his Tony Award-winning work in Julie Taymor’s The Lion King on Broadway, has always held a deep fascination for illumination. As a Boy Scout, he found himself in charge of building the campfires and lighting the ceremonial trails with kerosene-fuelled smudge pots. When he discovered stage lighting in junior high school, his nascent interest transformed into a full-blown artistic fixation. After graduating from the Yale School of Drama with a formal degree in lighting design, Holder has spent 30 years working across stage and screen: he won a second Tony Award in 2008 for Bartlett Sher’s South Pacific, has worked extensively in the opera, and interestingly, has also illuminated the set of Amazon Prime favourite, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

In an exclusive interview, Holder gives us a glimpse into how theatrical lighting can impact storytelling, his work with the NMACC’s inaugural show ‘The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation’,  how his own artistic process has evolved over a three-decade long career, and how advances in technology are changing the nature of performing arts. Edited excerpts:

How do you typically approach a project?

A lighting designer reveals the world of the play and provides the lens through which an audience experiences a theatrical event. We are responsible not only for what the audience sees, but how they feel about what they’re seeing. Jennifer Tipton, my teacher at the Yale School of Drama, used to say, 99 per cent of the audience is unaware of the lighting but 100 per cent is affected by it. My process begins with reading the script. I usually try to read it twice: the first time, I will try to experience the piece like an audience member would, without any preconceived notions, and then I will try to read it again, and try to imagine what the play is about on a metaphorical or social or geo-political level, and then think about what the world of the play would look like.

Lighting designers are really interested in the same things an actor might be interested in: what is the scene about? what is the objective of this moment? what is the intention of our collaborators? We have to understand the costume designer’s palette, and how the scenery should look, how we should feel about a given moment in a play. We have to understand the intention on a very intimate level, or else we’re not revealing the world in the way that it is intended. And on a more technical or surface level, lighting is very important in terms of narrative—what’s the weather, what’s the time of day, what’s the season, are we inside, or are we outside? Are we in a sort of realistic or naturalistic environment, or is the world completely abstract?

Could you give me an example of how deeper, metaphorical themes inform the lighting design, and help create the mood of the play?

The Lion King, for example, is this mythical, almost religious journey. One of the early conversations about The Lion King with Julie Taymor was that she wanted to keep the humanity of the story intact, but sort of tell this tale in a completely different way [than the film]. For her, the centre of the piece was this homage, at least from a visual thread, to African culture. We spent a lot of time exploring how the design would develop, and it evolved into a luminous box that was inspired by the incredible endless skies of the African Savannah. There weren’t the traditional boundaries that you experience in a stage picture–what we tried to bring to life was this idea of a continuous skyscape, because it felt like the world of this play really was wrought out of nature, and that’s where the story needed to unfold. The muscle of the visual approach was this luminous box that evoked the skyscapes of the Serengeti, which shifted continually over the course of a day or a season, and it was a place where you could experience the majesty of nature but also moments of magic and celestial wonder.

How did you approach the brief for ‘Civilization to Nation’?

At its core, ‘Civilization to Nation’ takes the audience on a journey through time, exploring the origins and genesis of Indian art and culture, from its early beginnings thousands of years ago to the birth of a new nation in August 1947. One of the first questions I asked myself was, “Where is the light coming from, and why is it there?” In other words, how should the world of this play be revealed? Is the intention to deliver an accurate rendition of locations and performances from the distant past? Or conversely should we capture the spirit and essence of each place, manipulating and re-shaping the light in response to the storytelling and the musical, emotional and choreographic landscape? After meeting with the director Feroz Abbas Khan, it was clear that we should pursue the latter, crafting a transformative and fluid design that relies on cutting-edge theatrical lighting techniques to tell a story which spans many centuries, locations and musical/performative styles. This approach would feel more relevant and immediate for a contemporary audience, creating a highly dynamic atmosphere of magic, mystery and poetry that has been so carefully woven into the overall fabric of this work.

What lighting or tech-based innovations can audiences look out for in ‘Civilization To Nation’?

A good deal of the visual storytelling will rely upon video content streamed into the scenic ‘surround’, much of which is comprised of two-dimensional digital video panels. A large portion of my job will be to emulate and extend the colours, textures and movement from the digital backgrounds onto the performers and into the three-dimensional foreground. To accomplish this task, we’ll be deploying many state-of-the-art LED sourced automated lighting fixtures. Our control systems will be digitally linked to projection control, so that we can perfectly synchronize changes in the light to respond with shifts in the video landscape. We’ll also be introducing bold, singular, operatic brushstrokes of light that celebrate the immense scale and proportion of the physical production. In other words, keep an eye out for scenes that appear to be illuminated via a large singular source—an immense swathe of sun or moonlight, cutting through a stage filled with rain, the dense fog of dawn or smoke from the smoldering remnants of a massive battle. We’re deploying many large and powerful sources of light in multiple locations that will give us the ability to bring these and many other ideas to life.

How have advancements in technology influenced lighting design, and allowed it to evolve?

Until 1975, lighting was manipulated manually, so a lighting change on stage was done by moving sliders or handles with hands, sometimes feet or even your mouths. In 1975, a production of A Chorus Line brought the first computerized lighting control to Broadway, and that was the moment that the industry changed. A single light could change colour or focus or texture or size or shape, all controlled via a computer console. All of a sudden, the work could be much more subtle and fluid and detailed, and it gave the lighting designer an infinite level of flexibility. Then directors and designers and choreographers and theatre makers began to realise you don’t need scenery, necessarily, the light can become the scenery. As lighting can do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of storytelling, plays and musicals can become more cinematic and more complex in the way they’re written. And that’s not new—back in the Italian renaissance when all the light was just candles at the periphery of the stage, and it was difficult to see through the smoke and haze, the performance style was very presentational. As the light changed, the performance style became more naturalistic and real and truthful. There has always been a parallel evolution between lighting technology and the nature of theatre itself.

 Feroz Abbas Khan’s ‘The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation’ will premiere at The Grand Theatre, Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, in Mumbai from April 3 to 23, 2023.