Why turn down the lights?
What follows is a rant. If you’re not in the mood, skip this post.
You’re standing in the wings. You’re a speaker about to speak to an audience of 1,000 souls at a conference with all the bells and whistles that technology and a good staging company can provide: IMAG screens, lavalier mike, towering sound, theatrical lighting, you name it. You’ve even got stage makeup on.
You’re a little intimidated, and more than a little excited. You want to do your best. You take a deep breath, the stage assistant nods at you and gives you a little push, and you step out on stage.
You can’t see a thing.
You can’t see a thing because thousands of watts of stage lighting are pointed directly at you, while the audience is cast into utter darkness.
So what happens? You squint, making you look gigantically suspicious on those gigantic IMAG HD screens. Every pore of your face looks suspicious. That mole under your right eye looks suspicious. Then you raise your chin to try to minimize the lighting, making you look like a punk – on those gigantic screens. A suspicious punk.
And you start talking, because the show must go on, feeling completely disconnected from that audience of 1,000, that audience you were hoping to reach with your message, your passion, your life’s work.
It all goes horribly wrong.
And it doesn’t have to be that way. Why are the stage lights so bright and the audience lights so dim? It started back when people invented auditoriums – before they invented adequate lighting. Result? Large, dark spaces.
To see the actors (or speakers) on the stage, first candlelight, then gaslight, was directed at them. To heighten the drama, the tech people back then made the lights as bright – and, because they weren’t very bright – the room as dark, as possible.
Actors learned not to squint – and as the lights got brighter and brighter, that got more and more painful. But they learned, and so they suffered a little for their art? It was important to be seen, right?
Along came PowerPoint, first projected onto the front of the auditorium by bright lighting from the back. As a result, the room had to be as dark as possible to see the slides.
More squinting. More pain. More disconnection. And worse, a beam of light to work around. Do you walk through it? Do you stay on one side? What do you do?
Fast forward to 2014. We have fantastic back lighting. We no longer need to project from the back of the house. We have IMAG. We have HD. We have it all.
And yet we still plunge the audience into darkness so that the speaker can be seen.
It’s not necessary. You can have bright stage lights, AND bring the house lights up just a little so that:
1) The speaker doesn’t have to squint, because the contrast isn’t so extreme;
2) The speaker can see the audience so that it is possible to connect; and,
3) The audience has a more thrilling experience.
But wait, you say. Thanks to your rant, I get #s 1 and 2. But what about #3? Surely it’s more exciting to the audience to be in the darkness with the stage lights providing extreme contrast?
No, it isn’t. Imagine my satisfaction when I ran across a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (who knew?) that suggests that you feel emotions more strongly when things are lit, not when they’re dark.
So putting the audience in the dark dampens the experience for them. Makes sense, you make things dark when you’re getting ready to go to sleep, right?
So why do we put our audiences into sleep mode?
It’s just habit, plain and simple. It’s not necessary. And it is dumb.
We need to put the lights on. Better for the speaker. Better for the connection with the audience. And better for the audience.
End of rant. Have a nice day.
This needed saying! I remember when I started to speak on bigger stages how hard it was to connect with the audience when you couldn’t see them. You rely so much on that feedback and to throw your words into a black void and wait for some sound to return was weird and unsettling. Also fascinating to learn about the psychology of what we feel in light or dark. A thought struck me but I’m not sure that’s an appropriate topic for this forum!
Thanks, Andy — it’s all about the connection, and the lighting makes that much more difficult.
Great rant Nick
I think its because the lighting technicians and others see public speaking as a performance rather than seeing as all about connection. So they set up as a theatrical event. Speakers need to connect with their audience, they need to create a sense of belonging or joint enterprise.
So Fiat Lux – let there be light.
Thanks, John — indeed, the staging people want to put some sizzle in, and I heartily concur in making speeches entertaining as well as informative — BUT speakers also need to be able to see their audiences.
Nick, I’ve asked that house lights be brought up at many of my gigs and, get this, the producer (typically from the hired event company) refuses. Then there is a but of a standoff between me and the producer and I will then bring the event planner (the person representing the company creating the event). Frequently the planner will also refuse to bring up house lights because she is siding with the producer who is the “expert” in such matters.
So I have a little trick I frequently use. I hit the stage do an opening bit and then call for houselights to be turned up a bit so I can see the audience. I can imaging the swearing going on in the production booth, but no producer is going to defy the speaker when the audience hears the request.
David
Thanks, David , for the jujitsu method of getting the lights put on!
I gave a speech at a small, hundred person conference the other day; as I walked to the stage I noticed that two thirds of the audience was deeply engaged with their phones and laptops. A deflating feeling….I was going to have to interrupt them. (I suppose they might have been gearing up to tweet my many trenchant insights. )
While I agree the dark disconnects speakers from their audience, it might also make some audiences more focused.
Why, Andrew — I’m surprised to find you so traditional in your thinking! And what are you saying — phones and computers are backlit now, so you can work them in the dark…..
Hallelujah for this! From now on I am insisting that there be light for all ! Sometimes we just go with the way things are until someone writes a blog like yours.
Thanks Nick.
Thanks, Betty — I know you’ll be able to bring those stage folks in line!