David Finn
Lighting Designer
David Finn's professional career as a lighting designer began at the age of 16, working for the puppeteer Burr Tillstrom with his beloved characters Kukla, Fran & Ollie.
For five years, David assisted lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, beginning in 1988 with Jerome Robbins' Broadway. David assisted her on works by, among others: Mike Nichols, Robert Wilson and Agnes de Mille. He recreated Ms. Tipton's lighting for Jerome Robbins' and Twyla Tharp's ballets for major companies around the world and toured as the lighting director for Ms. Tharp’s company, designing the lighting for Grand Pas, Sextet, The Men's Piece, and Octet.
As resident lighting designer for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project from 1993-2000, David designed works by Merce Cunningham, Hanya Holm, José Limón, Karole Armitage and Tamasaburo Bando. David's first lighting design for ballet was for The Birmingham Royal Ballet in England in 1989 on Sir Peter Wright’s The Nutcracker designed by John Macfarlane, which has also been performed in Tokyo by The Star Dancers Ballet. David has also designed works for acclaimed choreographers Paul Taylor, James Kudelka and Sasha Waltz and for prominent companies such as The Paris Opera Ballet, The San Francisco Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada and The Lyon Opera Ballet.
His career in opera began in1997 with “Otello” at La Monnaie in Brussels and has included works at The Salzburg Festival, The Paris Opera, The Royal Opera, Het Musiektheater, The New York City Opera, The San Francisco Opera and The Vienna Festwochen. David designed the Ring Cycle for The Canadian Opera Company from 2004-2006 with designer/director Michael Levine and directors François Girard, Atom Egoyan and Tim Albery. It was the work he did with François Girard on this project that led to his association with Cirque du Soleil.
Much of David’s current work as a designer is for ground-breaking inter-disciplinary work including the dance-operas Les Larmes du Ciel for the Luzerner Theater (Switzerland), La Guerra d’Amore (Lausanne, San Francisco and Braunschweig), and dance-theatre works Senza Fine and The Day I Go to the Body for The Salzburg Festival. His film work includes the lighting design for stage scenes in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. He directed the documentary film, The Green Monster, which was inducted into the Museum of Television and Radio in New York as one of the ten best documentary films of 1999.
ZED marks the first time David has worked with Cirque du Soleil. “What’s great about Cirque is you’re not just doing circus,” he says. “You’re doing theatre, too, and that’s a lighting designer’s dream. The set is beautiful and powerful. When the artists are in the air I can light them like dancers, but when they’re on the ground, that represents an interesting challenge for me. My goal is a balance between atmosphere and clarity.”