Stanley Kaye, professor and head of the graduate Lighting Design program in the School of Theatre + Dance (SOTD), celebrates his passion for technical theatre in a podcast called Light Talk, now being listened to in 72 foreign nations and has had over 20,000 downloads.
Every week Kaye, as well as Steve Woods (Southern Methodist University), and David Jacques (California State University Long Beach) bring original viewpoints and discussions in a hysterical manner to professionals and students about the latest topics and developments in the world of entertainment and architectural lighting design.
The podcast launched in March 2017 and has been successful ever since, but Kaye says it started as just a friendly conversation or “coffee-talk” for lighting.
“The three of us were having a conference call about LED lighting, and they were giving really good information, and they were cracking me up at the same time,” Kaye said. “That’s when I wondered if we could make a little podcast about our subject.”
Kaye worked with UF e-learning to find a platform to create a recorded conference call with Woods and Jacques, which was how the first episode came to be. Immediately two to three days later, the podcast had hundreds of downloads.
“It’s weird,” Kaye said. “We’re backstage guys. We’re not performers, but we are performing now.”
Since March, the podcast has over 34 hours of material with special interviews with designers like Joshua White. The podcast is listened to by professors, students, designers and manufacturers from over 74 countries, including places like Russia and the Farewell Islands.
Kaye, excited to see the popularity of the podcast, remains level-headed about the project.
“We’re doing this to have fun,” he said. “And if it ever stops being fun, we’ll stop doing it.”
Kaye stresses that the agenda of the podcast is driven by the audience and the listeners. The idea of the podcast is to give information about technical theatre in a natural way that one won’t find out of a textbook.
“We are creating a community that already exists but we’re giving that community a place to come together and commiserate, whether it be to praise or to complain or to delve deeper or to push the industry forward,” he said.
Light Talk can be found on iTunes, Google Play or via their website www.lighttalk.org or Facebook group.
