McCandless as a Revolutionary Force in Lighting Design

How did McCandless change the future of lighting design with his innovations
both technical, like the ellipsoidal reflector, and artistic, like the McCandless method?
McCandless was designing at a time when lighting design was just starting to become a
creative force and he, through his work at Yale and as a designer, pushed that artistic
ability and laid groundwork for future designers. Adolphe Appia, one of the first
designers to use lighting as a creative tool rather than simply illuminating actors and
scenery, is recognized as the father of lighting design, especially through his
productions of Wagners operas. However, McCandless method of lighting design
changed the way designers think about light and how a technician approach a rig. Along
with his technical innovations that helped lead lighting technology to the things it has
achieved today, McCandless is just as important as Appia for the modern designer. This
paper will start with a brief overview of the period just before McCandless when Appia
and others started to change the purpose of lighting design. It will quickly lead right into
McCandless later life, after he chose theatrical lighting consultation over architecture.
The two major parts of McCandless life that apply to this paper are his experience as
an educator at the Yale School of Drama, as well as his career as a lighting consultant.
These two parts of his life allowed him to innovate within the budding field of lighting
design as an artistic endeavor through his work in the field, and his standing at Yale
gave him the resources to publish many of the first papers and books laying out a
method and approach to lighting design. His most well-known piece of writing, A Method
of Lighting the Stage (1932), has undergone several revisions but many of the core
concepts are still used in education today and, because of that lasting impact, will be

drawn upon heavily in the paper. Through quotes pulled from McCandless works, other
writings discussing his innovations, and examination of how his technologies and ideas
built upon the foundations of designers such as Appia, a clear picture can be crafted
detailing just how much McCandless affected the world of lighting design, even sixty
years after he stopped pushing the boundaries of lightings role in theatre.
Theatre was frowned upon by Appias father, a devout Calvinist. However,
determined to pursue his passion, Adolphe Appia studied music in order to gain access
to the world of theatre. This connection from music to theatre explains why Appia was
so drawn to Wagners Operas. Appia admired the operas but thought that the staging
was muddled and bland; he wanted to transform the staging into an art form. By
creating a unity between the actor, staging, and lighting, he hoped to create a more
connected and beautiful world for the opera to exist in. Although many of his
productions were not universally praised, his sketches remain to this day and have
provided insight into the methods he used to create this coherent whole through the
unity of the pieces of the opera. This unity included lighting; Appia was the first to
distinguish between diffused light (light used only for visibility, usually for scenery) and
concentrated light (light that is sued to model the form of an actor); he believed that light
could itself be structural, and demonstrated that through his sketches and his use of
light to model the actors as well as showing the three dimensional space of his scenic
design. Another reason Apia was so influential was that he was one of the first to fully
embrace the new technology of electrical lighting. This allowed him more control over
variables such as light intensity and color manipulation. These additional variables
allowed him to further explore the idea of unity across the parts of the performance that

he was striving for. He was able to more easily highlight areas of action, the
concentrated light, through the use of higher intensity and brighter colors. Appia was
also able to show the interpretive value of mobile and colorful lighting as a visual
counterpart of the music (Britannica). Through the use of specific novel lighting angles
and the varying purposes of light, Appia showed lighting design as a part of the design
process, implementing motivated light.
Adolphe Appia is recognized by many as the first designer to bring lighting into
the modern age. His rejection of the norms in scenic and lighting design at the time lead
to the world of lighting design expanding far beyond anything it had achieved before.
His ideas of unity inspired the future of lighting design. However, this did only inspired
the future of lighting design; the man responsible for actually creating that future and
fathering modern lighting design was Stanley McCandless. McCandless studied
architecture, receiving a masters in the subject. However, he worked for less than a
decade as an architect before becoming a lighting consultant in the late 1920s.
McCandless is not known for his career as a lighting consultant, but it is nonetheless an
important part of what made him such an iconic figure in the history of lighting design.
Due to his experience in the field as a consultant, he was able to interact with many
different spaces, and with a large variety of people. It also allowed him a chance to work
with his innovations. The most notable of these is the use of the newly developed
ellipsoidal reflector. While working as a consultant, McCandlesss background in
architecture helped him to understand how light would disperse in a room, and as such
he did a lot of work designing house light grids. One such project McCandless did for
the Center Theatre in Radio City required him to design a specific lighting instrument.

He put the ellipsoidal reflector optics developed by General Electrics Frank Benford into
a lighting instrument and used it for lighting the house. This lighting fixture was the
prototype for the ellipsoidal reflector spotlight, a staple in the modern lighting toolkit. In
1937, McCandless worked with E.B. Kirk to design the first ERS; the Century Leko. This
marked a new era for lighting fixtures; the ERS is so widely used because it allows for
the shaping of light using shutters and a focus barrel that can give the light a hard,
sharp focus or a soft fuzzy edge. That variation in focus plays an incredibly important
role when the designer is using gobos because it allows for very crisp images or a soft
patterning of light. Because of McCandlesss innovative use of the ellipsoidal reflector,
the entire face of lighting design changed. He gave birth to an entire style of lighting
fixtures that allowed designers to implement a much more creative and technical vision.
Stanley McCandless worked for many years as a lighting consultant, and while
the work he did in that field did push boundaries and allow modern ideas and abilities to
flourish, his most influential role in the history of lighting was as a professor at the Yale
University School of Drama. McCandless and fellow Harvard alumn, George Pierce
Baker, started as professors at Yale in 1925, and McCandless taught his first session
examining lighting design for the stage in 1926. McCandless taught at Yale until 1964,
and during that time he published three articles on theatrical lighting design that are
extremely well known to this day. He also left numerous other publications and
professorial papers that are stored in the Yale archives. The three publications that
made McCandless famous are Glossary of Stage Lighting (1926), Syllabus of Stage
Lighting (1927), and most famously a Method for Lighting the Stage (1932).

Glossary of Stage Lighting and Syllabus of Stage Lighting were built around his
lectures at Yale.
Glossary details how one should define and discuss light; it contains many of
the terms used in lighting design and how they interact in order to form a unifying aspect
of theatrical design. These teachings were important because McCandless was one of
the first professors to not only teach the artistry used in design but also explain the
historical development of lighting design; the glossary was not simply about giving
students the tools necessary to become a designer but also to understand how the
world of lighting design had expanded and changed in order to prepare them for the
constantly changing face of the industry. Syllabus of Stage Lighting was a 130 page
book detailing both technical abilities and artistic application. The book is split into four
distinct sections; Introduction, Apparatus, Application, and Appendix. During the
Introduction, McCandless discusses the history of the stage, paying particular detail to
the move from outdoor theatre to theatre in a building designed for theatre. He mentions
the designers that have changed the way lighting is designed, such as Wagner and
Appia, and then goes on to classify the four functions of light as he sees them. These
are Visibility, Naturalism, Composition, and Mood. These four functions define the
purpose of lighting design for McCandless and inspired his most well-known book, A
Method for Lighting the Stage. Visibility entails the designer not only ensuring that the
audience can see the action, but also allows the designer to choose what is left
obscured. McCandless believed that the lighting may reflect the purpose of the play; a
realistic play must have concrete times and places whereas abstract situations do not
need to exist with these confines; Naturalism forced the designer to use the lighting to

match the requirements of the play. The idea of composition reminds the designer that
they have control of the pictorial aspect of the stage, and that they must work with the
playwrights intentions, the action on stage, and the other designers visions in order to
create a cohesive unit. Finally, mood dictates that the designer must be mindful of the
atmosphere and feeling created by the visual effects. The most abstract of the functions
of light, mood affects the psychological reactions of the audience. He goes on to
discuss the qualities of light; Intensity, Form, Color, Movement. Intensity controls how
bright a light source is as well as the contrast created by multiple light sources. Form
encompasses anything that changes the beam or field of a light; these include gobos,
shutters, and focus changes that alter the size. Color simply defines the temperature,
hue, and saturation of a light. Finally, and again most abstract, movement not only
denotes a physical movement of a light, but any changes of the previous qualities that
the eye can track. By defining the functions and the qualities of light, the Introduction to
McCandless second publication was one of the most progressive pieces in lighting
design history. This was the first time these functions and qualities were taught and put
down in writing in order to preserve the ideas, and those ideas are still taught and
implemented today. Just as important as the definitions themselves are the methods
that these eight definitive parts of lighting design inspired. The rest of A Syllabus of
Stage Lighting covered lighting instruments, control, technical elements, procedure,
history, psychology, and example fixture schedules and layouts. This second piece of
writing was a turning point in McCandless legacy; he was already a well-respected
professor who taught some of the leading lighting designers of the 20 th century, but with

Syllabus, McCandless became an integral part of defining lighting design and bringing
it into the modern era.
Although Syllabus of Stage Lighting was groundbreaking in its revelations about
lighting design, it was really only groundwork for McCandless third book and most
renowned publication, A Method for Lighting the Stage. In this book, McCandless
explains in detail how the designer should go about planning to light a production. He
also discusses in detail a method which made him famous, now called the McCandless
Method. The McCandless Method covers many variables of lighting design in order for
the designer to fit his design into the functions of light. The first step of this method is
the act of breaking down the acting area into individual areas, allowing the designer to
plan the hang positions and focus for each area individually to achieve visibility. The
second step of the method is planning the angles of the light; McCandless decided that
two lights in front of the actor at 45 on either side and 45 above their head provided
the most natural looking light. This combination of lights is still extremely common due
to its simple, yet natural, and malleable look. McCandless goes on to build upon Appias
ideas of using the light to highlight the form of the performer by including additional
lights in the setup. He realized that the 45-45 setup was wonderful for illuminating faces,
but let the physicality and action of performers fade into the scenery. Because of this, he
included the use of side and back lighting, allowing the performers bodily contours to
create high and low lights depending how they move. McCandlesss Method allows the
designer to use multiple angles for varying effect depending on the action, fulfilling the
functions of light. The third part of the McCandless Method dealt with the color of light.
One of the more straightforward qualities of light, yet it plays so strongly into

understanding and properly implementing the functions of light. Color elicits such a
strong psychological response in humans that using it effectively is instrumental in
achieving an effective lighting design. McCandless believed that deep, saturated colors
should be reserved for highlights and background; he was afraid that using these
intense colors to light performers would distort their features and ruin the audiences
immersion within the world. This ties back to his idea of naturalism; these vivid colors
occur, but usually in a way that we do not directly interact with them. McCandless
believed that soft, lighter colors were more appropriate for lighting performers,
especially their faces. He also introduced a method of using different colors from
different angles. McCandless believed using two contrasting soft tones as front light
from the 45-45 angles would give the most neutral look, while accentuating features and
allowing the designer to manipulate the lights to achieve a wide variation of looks.
Standard colors used would be a warm such as bastard amber or no color pink,
contrasting with a cool color such as pale blue. Finally, McCandless discussed the use
of what he referred to as special effects. These included any light that was not being
used to light the acting areas, background, or blend and fill to create unity. Some
examples of specials he discussed that are still widely used are a single spot
illuminating an actor for an aside or soliloquy, or an instrument with a gobo being used
to emulate a beam of sunlight through a window. Because McCandless classified each
light and its use, these specials are simply design tools that do not fit into one of the
previous classifications and allow the designer to achieve a certain look in order to
influence the functions of lighting. All of these steps and classifications are a part of the

method that McCandless detailed in his book, and all of this information is still taught
and used in universities and professional venues around the world today.
McCandless was not the first lighting designer, nor even the first designer to use
modern methods. However, because he dedicated his life to the teaching, documenting,
and classifying of these modern methods, he is lauded as the father of modern lighting
design. The functions and qualities of light he wrote about were inspired by his
teachings in the classroom, and it is fitting that they continue to be passed down and
taught in classrooms around the world.

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