A light touch

If only an anesthetized patient lay on a table, the scene might almost be an operating room.

“Bring the old bridge to a hundred,” says a tense, oracular male voice. “He’s too warm -- I don’t know if it’s the makeup or the light.”

A minute later, as alert assistants wearing headsets wait expectantly: “Tell him to bring it in slowly until I say stop.... OK, now kill the back wall.... Cold fluorescence 100. Green fluorescence 100. Kill the cold light.”

In a pitch-black Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Robert Wilson -- the towering Texas native and famously demanding theater director -- is speaking in shorthand at a lighting rehearsal for the Los Angeles Opera’s “Madame Butterfly,” which opens Thursday.

For two more hours, he will adjust the green from 44 to 38, take the blue at the top to 100 and at the bottom to 60, and shine ultra-precise spotlights on “light walkers” -- stand-ins for the singers on a virtually bare stage. Wilson will light just a face, just a fist, just a piece of bamboo. “OK, record,” he says when an effect has been created to his satisfaction, ordering that it be affixed in the overall “plot.”

As clinical as the process appears, lighting for Wilson is not only an artistic statement but a kind of emotional language.

“I just wonder if in order to get more power, more cold power, we shouldn’t have more cold light,” he announces. “Because this is so weak.”

Wilson likens the process to painting with light. He addresses each element of an opera’s many facets -- its movement, words, music, sets -- separately, as a series of parallel processes that rarely meet before opening night. In the end, he hopes every element will properly complement the others.

“This music is often very emotionally highly charged,” he says, during a break, of Puccini’s score. “So the look of the stage is much cooler.” His goal is to “create a kind of tension between what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing.”

Getting the lighting right for the Los Angeles staging will take 45 to 60 hours; in Paris, where this production premiered in 1993, the lighting took almost 100 hours. Before the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s move to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, getting so much time for technical rehearsals would have been impossible.

But even with the time, the atmosphere is tense: The slightest sound is an affront, provoking harsh shushing, and Wilson sighs in exasperation when things take too long. Will the patient die?

Despite Wilson’s considerable reputation -- as perhaps the nation’s leading avant-garde theater director -- and his steady production since the early ‘70s, the only fully staged Wilson piece in Los Angeles was the Tom Waits-scored production of Georg Buchner’s play “Woyzeck” done at UCLA in 2002. In fact, though Wilson, 62, is based in New York and his aesthetic is in some ways deeply American -- shaped as much by the wide-open Texas sky as by Japanese Noh plays and European modernism -- he works almost entirely in Europe. In this country, he’s still best known for 1975’s “Einstein on the Beach” and 1984’s “The Civil Wars,” both collaborations with composer Philip Glass.

Wilson’s cool, at times icy, minimalist staging is not universally loved. A Parisian critic once called his productions “traveling light shows” that treat even the greatest operatic scores as “background music.” Some miss not only the music but an emotional content and find his productions’ characteristically slow pace and ritualistic movements irrelevant -- or damaging -- to the language and story.

Act 2 of “Butterfly,” which Wilson is rehearsing, is full of wrenching emotion, as the title character awaits her American naval officer husband’s return to Japan. But at work, the director can seem more like a technician than an artist. “OK, take the rock to 35 ... 27. And the dark blue at the bottom to 47. OK, record.”

Wilson says he’s working to give the opera a well-rounded quality. “One of my responsibilities is to create a space where what I’m seeing can help me hear better. And a lot of that has to do with light.” The light, he says, is like an actor or character.

Each piece summons its own palette, says Wilson, who recently directed Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in Paris.

“Mozart is switching between something that is real and something that is super-real or supernatural,” he says. For the more earthbound section, “the lighting is very subtle. It’s beiges and grays and very, very pale violets, a very sophisticated palette of color. But then some of the scenes with Papageno” -- the opera’s comic bird-catcher -- “use Yves Klein blues and lemon yellow skies and chartreuse and violet.”

Wilson’s gut tells him whether he’s gotten the mix of music and color right. “I know the nature of light and the mixing of colors. I know if I get something too warm -- like today I had a lot of warm pinkish colors -- I’m constantly mixing in green to kill this sweetness.”

Most directors consider lighting an afterthought, he says.

“So often what we’re seeing in the theater is simply decoration for what we’re hearing. Or it’s redundant, just seconding what we’re hearing.”

Wilson works predominantly in opera and theater. (He has also created displays for artists, as in a current touring show of Isamu Noguchi’s sculptures, and a show of his stage furniture will open Saturday at the Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills.) But his aesthetic, he says, was focused by encounters with two European film artists.

As a young man in the 1960s, he met Luchino Visconti, the director of such luscious films as “Death in Venice” and “The Leopard,” directing an opera in Spoleto, Italy, and working meticulously with light and color. “It was kind of confirmation for me that you could do that in the theater.”

Years later, he had dinner with Marlene Dietrich.

“Someone once said to her, ‘You’re so cold when you perform.’ And she said, ‘But you didn’t listen to my voice.’

“And it’s true -- her movements could be very cold, but her voice was very hot. And that was her power, that was her strength.”

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‘Madame Butterfly’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Thursday, 7:30 p.m. Also Feb. 18, 24, 26, 27, 29, March 4, 5, 11, 12, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday and Feb. 21, March 7, 14, 2 p.m.

Price: $25-$170

Contact: (213) 365-3500