Interview: Xavier Pierce

XAVIER PIERCE

LIGHTING DESIGNER

Xavier Pierce has designed Pipeline and The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 at the IRT. This season he is designing our first three productions: This Wonderful Life, Tuesdays with Morrie, and the upcoming NO. 6.

HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTERESTED IN THEATRE? I was born in Atlanta and raised in Miami. In elementary school I won a lot of oratory contests. Then a fine arts magnet school opened, which allowed me the opportunity to be in theatre. Then I got into an inner-city touring dance company, and I was with them for eight or nine years. The son of the woman who led the program started getting into lighting and production, and that was intriguing. When I transitioned into high school, it wasn’t a great one, so I began to go on more jobs with the dance company, and I learned more about lighting. But I wasn’t doing well in school, and I was worried they were going to kick me out of the magnet program. I thought if I learned something that no one else could do, they would have to keep me. The lighting person was a senior, and he was graduating, so I set myself up to take over after he was gone.

I did my undergrad at Florida A&M University, a historically black university in Tallahassee. I studied theatre and fine arts. I also took classes at Florida State University, which is just across the railroad tracks from FAMU. I was getting two very different educations in lighting. At FAMU, I was getting a very hands-on experience of lighting, designing a whole bunch of shows with a whole bunch of people. At FSU, I was taught the structural components of lighting. With those two educational modalities, I became a super-lighting kid! In the summer I would be at the Santa Fe Opera; then when I graduated I was with the Utah Shakespeare Festival. When I finished there I was with Arena Stage for a year assisting a whole bunch of designers. From there I decided I wanted to be in New York. But I didn’t have any money and I didn’t know anybody, so I figured the only way I could do it was if I went to grad school. I applied at NYU, and luckily, two of the professors were designers I had assisted at Arena Stage, so NYU offered me an assistantship.

After I finished grad school, my professor Robert Wierzel asked me to assist him when he designed Fela! on Broadway. That was a big deal for me. Bill T. Jones was directing it and choreographing it, and the show was comprised of mostly black people. It was wonderful to be around so many black people at the height of their professions. It gave me a lot of understanding of how the industry works. It gave me a lot of understanding about being around my people in the art making process. And it gave me something to look forward to as I moved into my career.

HOW DOES LIGHTING DESIGN FEED YOUR SOUL? That’s a really good question after having been away from it for nine months. From the beginning, from high school, the thing that has always excited me is that you can communicate without talking. There’s a state in lighting that allows you to leverage all the emotional weight that you have infused into the lighting design to move people in a way that is imperceptible or perceptible. Because I was a dancer, there is a connection to the unspoken word. There is a connection to the metaphysical space. There is a connection to speaking without actually speaking. To this day, my mantra is I want people to feel the light as opposed to see the light.

The thing that is different now, after I have been doing this for a minute—I realize now that I am the best version of myself when I am at the tech table. I’m focused, streamlined, communicative, passionate, no-nonsense, always judging and critiquing the work in process, always striving to be better.

But now, at this point in time, I also realize that lighting is just a part of who I am, and not all of who I am. I think artists really need to understand that. We need to really understand who we are, especially when the work is not there. So in this time of reckoning, in the time of COVID, I have had to really pinpoint who I am, as it relates to work. I’ve had to divest myself from Xavier Pierce, lighting designer, and invest myself in Xavier Pierce—and Xavier Pierce, lighting designer. WHAT’S IT LIKE WORKING AT THE IRT? It seems like the institution is steadily evolving towards a good place. The institution welcomes criticism and welcomes ideas from different backgrounds and different people. That is very powerful. And I don’t know that I would have been emotionally intelligent enough to pick up on that a year or two ago. But now, I think it’s everything. An institution’s ability to question itself, an institution’s ability to stay connected to its artists, and value its artists; creating a space in which they allow criticism, they allow positive feedback, they value the artist so the artist is always doing good work—I think that level of integrity surrounding artists, and making the artists the focal point of the institution, allows the institution to do great work. At the IRT, I feel like I’m part of the process, the whole process of the institution, as opposed to just one show. And now that I’ve done several shows here, it feels like I’m part of the institution. When I was coming up in my career, I thought that you would have one home. I spent my formative years at Arena Stage, and I thought, oh, this is my home. But now that I’ve been in the industry for a while, to have a number of homes, a number of places where I can sit down at the table, a number of places where I can discuss and work things out, is comforting to me. Being in a space that is becoming an artistic home, and building that relationship and partnership—it is of deep, deep, deep value, and something that I really love and cherish.