Ethan Knox

Although he never appears on the theater stage, Tim Thistleton’s lighting still has the power to change the mood of the show.

“Someone asked me if I wanted to do a lighting design for a single dance piece, part of a larger ensemble concert. I did the lights for this one dance, and it hooked me immediately because it filled that little void that I felt, as far as performance goes,” said Thistleton, a lecturer at Binghamton University. “When you’re doing lighting design, you need to give it that amount of respect—your lights are one of the performers on that stage.”

Thistleton began his career pursuing stage acting with a bachelor’s degree in musical theatre from the State University of New York at Fredonia. After working in the technical shop, he fell in love with the construction aspect of the stage and began to pursue lighting design, instead. He went on to graduate with a degree in technical production and has since added a master’s degree in lighting design from West Virginia University.

This fall semester, Thistleton will be teaching an introduction to lighting technology class for the first time on the Binghamton campus. This class will also be one of the first specialized introductory courses in theatre career fields offered by the university.

A Stormville, N.Y. native, Thistleton said that when he saw the job posting at Binghamton University, he recognized it as an opportunity to return home and to strengthen his skill and the program.

“Binghamton’s department is in a state of growth,” Thistleton said. “That is specifically very attractive to me, to be able to come here and affect change and help a department that is starting to get higher enrollment, and needs updating from a technology standpoint.”

Thistleton, along with his ability in lighting design, is also a master electrician. He has developed these two skill sets during his career by working with several theater companies around the country. His first stop after his undergraduate training was the Tennessee Williams Theatre in Key West, Florida, where he learned the procedures and operational techniques of lighting design.

In West Virginia, where he pursued his graduate program, he said he learned how to become a better educator. Then, at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, in Santa Maria, Calif., he trained students vocationally, in a lab and practicum style.

Thistleton said that even with this career experience, Binghamton’s theatre department shines above his other positions for its combination of teaching methods.

“Binghamton offers the best of both worlds,” he said. “Having the lab without the lecture is tough from an educational standpoint, for the same reasons why having just the lecture would be tough. My hope, my goal, is for all the students who are taking my classes to also be in my practica. It’s hard to just be a designer and not know how to be a master electrician and it’s hard to be a master electrician and not know the design concepts. Getting your feet wet in both facets of the lighting world makes you better.”

In his approach to education, Thistleton continually builds on his experience to teach in the classroom, where he tries to impart both knowledge and practical expertise.

In the next year, he hopes to achieve this goal by having students gain hands-on experience in major productions. Along with his classes, he will be teaching technical practicums for the fall show of “The Wolves,” a play about a young girls’ soccer team, and the spring musical “Sweet Charity,” about a dancer-for-hire and her romantic escapades.

In creating a world around these characters, Thistleton hopes that both his students and the audience will understand what first drew him to light design in the first place.
“It’s such an interesting storytelling device and it scratches both sides of my brain. I’m using very straightforward and binary technology. At the end of the day, this is just electricity and color is just a dyed piece of plastic,” Thistleton said. “But I’m using it to affect mood and atmosphere and emotion and all of these things. And sometimes it’s subtle and people don’t know why it’s affecting them the way that it does. And sometimes it can be in your face. And that’s cool too.”