Jennifer Tipton went to college as an physics major, “wanting to be the first person on the moon.” Both her parents were scientists. “My father was a zoologist and my mother was a physicist.” Instead, she fell in love with dance, something she’d been pursuing since she was 15 and switched her major at Cornell to English.
In fact, her mother told her that the college application letter she wrote, “My mother said that the letter than I wrote on my application sounded like Cornell was a dance school.”
So how did she get to be a renowned stage lighting designer, one of four being honored at a celebratory dinner tonight with the Alley Theatre Award for Lifetime Achievement?
After graduation, she moved to New York City to be a dancer. “I joined a dance company called the Merry Go Rounders which danced for children.” Three years into that, she became a rehearsal mistress which entailed watching all the performances so that she could critique the dancers.
“I looked at the bigger picture and that was light and I fell in love with it. And I’ve been in love with it ever since.”
Now she’s here in Houston again — she previously worked with DaCamera, Houston Ballet and Houston Grand Opera — as part of the Little Comedies premiere team that also includes fellow honorees: playwright and director Richard Nelson, costume designer Susan Hilferty and sound designer Scott Lehrer.
Despite her accomplishments, lighting design has been a career path that doesn’t pay exceptionally well in New York City with all the talented people theaters can draw upon there, she said. Regional theaters pay better, she said.
Another reason for the lower pay scale, she said: “We are considered technicians and not artists in the way that set and costume designers are. And in passing, I’m a terrible technician,” she said laughing.
As a result, she stated teaching and just left her post doing that at Yale School of Drama, where she’s been teaching for about 40 years. Each year, she dealt with one or two graduate students each year, all of whom were very serious about the profession. One of her students, she said, Carolina Ortiz Herrera, has done the lighting for American Mariachi, now on the Hubbard stage at the Alley.
Asked what attracted her so much about lighting, she said, “”It is capable of taking you to places far away and very fluidly. You can lose yourself in a performance the way you can lose yourself in a painting say or in a piece of music. Good lighting should follow the rules of composition in music. If you establish a theme I feel you should use it or make a specific choice not to use it in the same way that you do in music.”
Teaching allowed her to look more closely at what she herself was doing with lighting. “When I started teaching I heard myself saying something to the class and then I said ‘ Well, if I truly believe that, I should change the way I do things.’ And have changed it to the better.”
One example: “In getting light close to walls and the scenery or some physical object to be able to allow the actor to get close to the wall and still be lit. I learned that from showing it to my class.”
She said she’s worked with Nelson several times and usually it’s five or so scenes in one play. Her usual lighting approach with him is to have a brightly lit space with lighting approached in 10 foot squares.
“[Little Comedies] is very different. It’s five plays that are being done together. . I did a plot with the same idea of having the 10 foot squares lit from four directions, not knowing if would really work for the plays, And what I’ve found is that works beautifully. “
That said, the last play is very different, “and we planned it to be lit very specifically in its own way,”
She keeps working, “because I love it. I”As I’ve gotten older with more experience and more ability, I look at the stage and the composition, and it’s just extremely pleasing to me.
“Here I am, 86 and still going strong.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
