Carol Mullins knows the secrets of St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery. He knows it’s strangely colder in the crypt of Peter Stuyvesant, who built the first chapel on the site, now in the East Village, in 1660. He knows what architectural elements predated the fire that destroyed much of the late 18th-century building in 1978. He knows the location of the hidden hatch leading to the arch beams above the nave.
“It’s a wooden wonderland,” he said recently. “Looks like an overturned boat in there.”
Mullins, 85, knows all this because shortly before that fire, she began designing lighting for the Danspace Project, which has been performing at the church since 1974. In 1982, she became the resident lighting designer, a position she holds still.
At Danspace’s 50th anniversary gala on Tuesday, Mullins will be among the honorees. It’s a recognition of one of the under-sung soldiers necessary to dance in New York, especially the underfunded, boundary-pushing “downtown” genre that Danspace has promoted.
When people ask her why she’s been there so long, she replies that she’s still learning, “and there’s a new set of problems every couple of weeks.”
After all these years, St. Mark’s Church is a palimpsest of memories for Mullins. A first involves choreographer Ismael Houston-Jones, whose play “Relatives” Mullins lit in 1982. For the end of the dance, during which Houston-Jones jumped as the lights went out, he told her to keep the lights on “as long as you like.”
“I thought it looked great,” Mullins recalls. “Well, he’s dying out there, jumping and jumping. Since then, he’s occasionally joked about my sense of timing.”
Mullins is well aware of the sanctuary’s limitations as a performance space. There are no wings and no lighting grid, so the lights have to be hung along the balcony and columns, meaning no direct overhead angles. And because the church is still used as a church, the stages and lighting equipment on the floor must be moved between performances. (And, conversely, the same is true of most religious iconography.)
But more than limitations, Mullins knows the possibilities and advantages. He loves the height – “the cones pointing to God and all that,” he said. And while the white walls make the light bounce, they also serve as a blank canvas.
Another plus is Mullins herself. She sees her work as a service to others. And while she has her moments — she likes color, doesn’t like dullness — she said she “resists the temptation to impose.” He tries to understand what artists want to achieve and how to do it.
Young choreographer Andros Zins-Browne, who worked with Mullins in February, said he was surprised by her “amazingly contemporary sensibility” and how attentive and open she was.
“She was never precious about her ideas, which left a lot of room for me not to be precious about mine,” he said. “He immediately knew how to use the available resources to do what I was looking for. And he also knew how to push back,” making suggestions “that just seemed better.”
Vicky Shick, a choreographer who has worked with Mullins many times since 1996, called her designs “a subtle dazzle as opposed to a big show.”
“He takes pleasure in your work and can look at it and pick up things you might not notice,” Schick said. Even under pressure, Mullins “acts like we have all the time in the world,” Shick added.
Shick spoke of Mullins’ ability, while on tour, to master logistics and build relationships with different crews. “He organized us,” said Schick, “but he’s also in the lobby late at night, laughing and telling stories. I think he had a wild life.”
This life began in Lorton, Virginia. “It was home to three prisons,” Mullins said. “The city’s motto was ‘Not just a place to spend time.’
He left as soon as possible, studied chemistry at George Washington University but did not quite graduate. He took a job with a technical editor who moved to New York from Alabama. But she received a grant to do volunteer work in Bangkok, and there, in 1970, she received disturbing letters from her best friend back in New York.
“He would say things like, ‘I went on a board for five hours in an alley and it was the most important experience of my life,'” Mullins said. “I thought she was in some cult and I had to get her out.”
Instead, Mullins returned to the city and joined that cult, or at least a cult-like artistic collective: the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, directed by Robert Wilson. Mullins began playing at Wilson’s unusual avant-garde shows, which could last many, many hours. (So is her husband, the experimental playwright Jim Neu.)
Choreographer Douglas Dunn, who has worked with Mullins on more than a dozen Danspace shows, recalled seeing her in a Wilson production, reading silently on stage next to dance critic Edwin Denby. “They both had sparkling white hair,” Dunn said. “It was a profound image.”
One day in Spoleto, Italy, Wilson asked Mullins to take over the collective’s lighting design. “I knew nothing about lighting,” he said, “but Bob had an intuitive sense of what people would be good at.” He was right and he helped, not with technique but with vision: “Bob taught me how to see.”
In Europe, the members of Wilson’s troupe were treated like stars. When one of their productions moved to Broadway, Mullins said, the experience was a fiasco, which made her realize Broadway wasn’t for her.
In any case, Wilson’s next production was Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach, Wilson did the lighting and Mullins couldn’t sing. She became a lighting designer for artists close to Wilson, particularly the choreographer Andy de Groat. In 1982, de Groat moved to Europe, leaving Mullins out of a job. Cynthia Hedstrom, the director of Danspace at the time, called to offer her one which she kept. (Since 1998, he has shared the Danspace space with Kathy Kaufmann.)
One of Mullins’ favorite memories from the years that followed is of star experimental choreographer Steve Paxton. At the end of a performance, he was given a bouquet. She picked a rose and tossed it to Mullins, who leaned down from her perch on the balcony to catch it.
“I had this huge feeling of satisfaction,” he said. “No one throws me flowers.” At this year’s gala, at least figuratively, she will get her own bouquet.