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.