Pacific Northwest Ballet's Rico Chiarelli lights the way

photographed by Benjamin Benschneider

"Dancers live in light as fish live in water. The stage space in which they move is their aquarium, their portion of the sea." — Jean Rosenthal, "The Magic of Light"

In the velvet darkness of a stage, a dancer can be caught in light as if in a net, captured in a glow that seems to emanate from all directions. Dust specks float in a bright spotlight, creating their own tiny dance; shadows echo and amplify the dancers' endless limbs. The air around them seems alive, illuminating and electrifying the movement as it ebbs and flows.

At Pacific Northwest Ballet, the man crafting that magic from hundreds of individual lighting instruments is Randall G. (Rico) Chiarelli, resident lighting designer and technical director. He's been with the company since its mom-and-pop days in the 1970s, and explains his love for lighting design simply. "I like the human body," he says, "and the opportunity to describe it in space."

Chiarelli, a Seattle native, works his sorcery quietly; scornful of lighting that calls attention to itself. If you watch him in rehearsal, making final adjustments before a ballet's premiere, you might be mystified as he calls out changes to lighting levels that aren't visible to an observer's eye. ("Keep it," he'll say, sitting in an empty McCaw Hall after making a single instrument, or a row of them, infinitesimally dimmer or brighter. He can see the difference; many of us can't — but it matters.)

Angela Sterling, a former PNB dancer who's now an international dance photographer, illustrates why in describing Chiarelli's 2003 lighting design for "Swan Lake." When we first see the swans — rows of women in white-feathered tutus — the lighting has tones of blue and cyan. "He was able to convey the sense of something out of this world, something almost fantasy-like."

But, in a nuance only the most observant viewers could see, the lighting slowly changes on Odette, the swan queen, as she begins to fall in love with a prince. The blue tones fade, ever so slightly, to "more human" tones of pink and amber. At the close of the ballet, as she turns back into a swan, the blue tones return.

The effect was so subtle, Sterling recalls, that she wasn't sure if Chiarelli was even conscious of it. "I think Rico is such a master that he doesn't realize his magic that he applies," she says, describing him as "one of the finest lighting designers in the world."

Asked about "Swan Lake," Chiarelli nods and offers an anecdote. "My wife was telling me something she read about Balanchine. Someone asked him how he constructed something so brilliant as 'Serenade,' and his answer was, 'I had nothing to do with it. Tchaikovsky told me what to do.' "

Chiarelli smiles. "The same thing happens to me. Tchaikovsky tells me what to do, a lot, in situations like that."

AT HOME (where he says the lighting is "awful"), Chiarelli has two computers: one an up-to-date Mac, the other a 1980 Compaq he paid $4,000 for back when almost nobody had a computer at home. "I bought it like a car, on installments," Chiarelli remembers. He still turns it on, once in a while, appreciating the craftsmanship. "It's like a lot of things then and now — in a way, it was worth the $4,000. So well made, so sturdy. It's funny to see the two of them running side-by-side."

It's a fitting image for an art form and a profession that has changed dramatically over recent decades. When Chiarelli began lighting stage shows as a young man, lighting design was drafted by hand, using tracing paper and templates on a stage plot, much as an architect would draw a plan for a house. Now it's plotted with computers, but Chiarelli says he still occasionally gets out the tracing paper and a pencil to work out a lighting problem. He's changed with the times, but still appreciates the old ways.

Chiarelli grew up in North Seattle as one of four children in an art-loving Italian-American family. "If I had an influence or inspiration, it would be my dad," he says. James J. Chiarelli was a prominent Seattle architect who, with theater architect B. Marcus Priteca, designed the Seattle Center Opera House (now redesigned as McCaw Hall) for the World's Fair in 1962; his son remembers going on site surveys and watching as the project took shape.

"That's what kind of gave me the bug," Chiarelli remembers. "I got to watch him work with the other designers and the craftspeople, and there were a lot of good lessons."

As a teenager, Chiarelli worked backstage at the Opera House and tried out his nascent lighting-design skills wherever he could: bodybuilding shows, local dance schools. He worked as a stagehand while attending Seattle University and the University of Washington, studying sculpture and painting. (Laughing, he says he doesn't like to talk about his sculpture, using a word we won't print to describe a lot of it.) He married his first wife, a nurse; started a family (daughter Lia, son Dominic); advanced in his career — "I'd kind of grown up in Seattle showbiz. I'd worked at all the major theaters in town; I'd been head electrician for the opera."

It was backstage where Chiarelli met Thomas R. Skelton, a distinguished lighting designer of numerous Broadway shows and dance works for the likes of Robert Joffrey, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor and Martha Graham. Skelton had been a student of Jean Rosenthal, who, in Chiarelli's words "created ballet lighting design as we know it even today," and he quickly became Chiarelli's mentor.

Along the way, Chiarelli fell in love with ballet, and with the opportunity to light a body moving in space. He learned early, working backstage with shows that came to town just one night — Margot Fonteyn, he remembers, at the old Moore Theatre — on how to make dancers look their best. Experience, acquired gradually, taught him how to choose where the lights would hang, at what angle, and what color they would be, and how to arrange lighting transitions so they fell in the right place: perhaps on a music change, but more often just before it. Rosenthal, in her book "The Magic of Light," wrote that lighting must anticipate the music by the minutest fraction. "If it is that same fraction behind, all that marvelous energy that goes into making the dance appear effortless is destroyed."

While Chiarelli was busy learning his art and working all over town, something unexpected happened. In 1977, Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, a husband-and-wife team whose roots went back to Balanchine and New York City Ballet, arrived in town to take over the fledgling Pacific Northwest Dance Association. Chiarelli saw something different in what they wanted to do, and wondered if he might have a role in the new Pacific Northwest Ballet (renamed in 1978).

"I went up to Kent one night after one of the shows, on the loading dock, and I said, my name's Rico and I want to help you, any way I can. I don't know you, but I'm excited about what you're doing," Chiarelli remembers. A couple weeks later, Stowell called Chiarelli, asking for recommendations for a lighting designer to do an upcoming program. "I said, give me some time, I'll make some phone calls. I hung up the phone, and as soon as I hung up, I thought — this is what I want to do. I called him back and said I'd like to do it. There was something magical about it; or fate had something to do with it."

It was the beginning, as the movies say, of a beautiful friendship — and it's continued to this day, despite a brief (less than two years) stint as technical director for San Francisco Ballet after Stowell and Russell left PNB in 2005, and freelance assignments Chiarelli's taken for companies all over, including American Ballet Theatre, Boston, the Joffrey, Pittsburgh and Dallas. Of his absence, Chiarelli says, "I was ready for a change," but soon found that he missed what he'd left behind — and missed lighting design, which wasn't part of the San Francisco position.

PNB is in his bones, and in his family: Daughter Lia is the company's associate director of marketing, and Chiarelli's second wife, Victoria Pulkkinen, is a former ballerina who teaches at the PNB school. Grinning, Chiarelli admits he took a ballet class in order to meet her. "I was awful," he says, but the ploy worked; they've been married since 1986.

PNB artistic director Peter Boal knew Chiarelli by reputation long before arriving to head the company in 2005 and says he's highly respected in the dance world. Many lighting designs for archival works are controlled by estates and trusts, but Boal says often formalities can be loosened "because they know Rico's behind it. It helps us out tremendously." New choreographers, Boal says, will often initially insist on bringing their own lighting designer, but after looking at Chiarelli's work, they make an exception.

WITH A JOB that encompasses more than just lighting, Chiarelli's day-to-day work at PNB varies. As technical director, he's responsible for everything we see on stage other than dancers and costumes. He divides his time between the McCaw Hall stage, PNB's administrative offices in the Phelps Center next door and the PNB scene shop in Wallingford, a well-worn warehouse filled with sets in progress or in storage (plenty of "Nutcracker" set pieces tucked away), theater detritus, a floating patina of vintage cigarette smoke, and an office door that reads "Dr. Rico, Chief Illuminator."

The world of a theater techie is one of jeans and black T-shirts, of ladders and lighting instruments (hundreds of them, each hanging at a precisely set angle and fitted with a colored gel), of the camaraderie of people who don't get to take a bow but know that the production couldn't go on without them. And though Chiarelli jokes about being demanding (his nickname, Rico, came from the villain in the movie "Little Caesar," "because I can be sort of bossy sometimes"), he clearly has the friendship and respect of his crew, with whom he cracks jokes through his headset.

Chiarelli doesn't design every ballet at PNB; many come with lighting already proscribed, in which case he'll make only small adjustments. But every season brings an opportunity for new collaboration: working with modern-dance legend Twyla Tharp, for example, to light her two ballets "Afternoon Ball" and "Opus 111" for the 2009 season opening, or with designer Roberta Guidi de Bagno on the lighting for last season's newly designed "Coppélia." This season, he'll design the lighting for PNB's debut production of the romantic classic "Giselle," coming in June.

"What you have to do with the choreographer is establish trust," says Chiarelli, who says much of his job is psychology; figuring out what people are really saying to him about how they think a dance should look. For "Afternoon Ball," he listened to Tharp explain the mood of the dance and then drove around Seattle, looking for places that looked like what she was describing, ending up in "deserted parts of Ballard."

He spends much time creating lighting that solves problems. How do you, for example, adjust the lighting for a ballet in which the dancers, as in Balanchine's "Serenade," are wearing long tutus? You don't use lowlights, Chiarelli says, because those will "burn the skirts" and distract attention from the body's center — the light has to come "higher and steeper." For shorter tutus, you can light the legs a little more. "It's all logic," he says.

Chiarelli believes in highlighting dancers' faces and upper bodies — not all designers do, he says — but that brings its own challenges. "There's glowers and soakers," he says: people who have a natural translucency, and people who "no matter what you do," soak up the light without reflecting it back. (Diplomatically, he declined to identify any current PNB members as one or the other.) Makeup can help a soaker, and he's not afraid to step in and suggest modifications to a dancer's makeup. In the past, he notes, ballerinas would use heavy makeup to emphasize eye sockets and shadows under the chin, which made sense under overhead lighting. Today, "thanks to Miss Rosenthal, we have light that comes from the side and the back. It's a much more delicate process."

IN HIS FOURTH decade with PNB, Chiarelli says that "of course" he thinks about retirement, which would give him more time to indulge in non-dance passions: his grandchildren; his two vintage Alfa Romeos, with which he constantly tinkers; music (he plays guitar, and was once part of an all-stagehand Seattle band called Johnny Spleen and the Intestones); computers; books. "He's always learning something new," says daughter Lia. And he'd like to teach, in the same way that he learned his art from mentors.

"I'm 63 years old now, so I'm becoming a little archaic," he says. "A lot of young designers I meet nowadays are more interested in tricks, and I don't like tricks." He admires simplicity: the "miraculous" logic of a Balanchine ballet; the clean, flat wings on the side of the McCaw stage ("that's something I stole from the Joffrey"); an old computer that you had to program yourself so you understood how it worked as well as how to use it.

In rehearsal, he sits behind a makeshift table in the middle of McCaw, speaking to the stage manager on a headset, quietly refining the lighting levels on a PNB standard, Nacho Duato's modern Spanish ballet "Jardi Tancat." On the dancers' bodies, arms and legs flowing like water, lights grow almost imperceptibly brighter and dimmer, reaching the ideal Chiarelli can see in his mind.

"I so want to wait for the music for that," says the stage manager, responding to a light cue that, to her eye, seems to come too early.

"No, what you did is fine," says Chiarelli, without hesitation. And he looks up again, at the leotard-clad fish, swimming in the light.

Moira Macdonald is The Seattle Times movie critic. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest staff photographer.