Who developed (or invented) dance lighting?
Most dance lighting techniques originated with the work of Jean Rosenthal (1912-1969). Shortly before her death in 1969 she wrote about dance lighting at the end of the Second World War. Ballet was expected to be pink and pretty. The systems for lighting it were inflexible. Equipment, standard in European opera houses, consisted of first-pipe positions, a boom or tormentor, one left and one right. Supplemental lights were borderlights and strips of light above or on the sides, simply hauled in, one to twenty of them, at four feet to six or seven feet. There were a couple of what we privately called “belly-button crosslights.” (Actually, they hit the crotch.) So the first ten feet of the stage was lit for visibility and available for change of color — blue for Swan Lake, pink for Les Biches. After that there was just scenery light, flat and without depth or mood. My system required fixed booms along the side at every entrance as a basis for flexibility and for lighting the whole stage.
