Drama 16 Stage Lighting

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THEME: Unreal

I took unreal to mean something that wasn’t necessarily fake, but just seems utterly impossible – magical, if you will. This really captures it for me. Fire is something notoriously unmanageable and unpredictable, and this person is bending it to her will. Not only that, but she’s doing the cool ‘breathing fire’ thing, something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. It’s a skill of street fairs and carnivals of old, something done to draw in the audience to witness the undoable and the unknown. She’s bathed in a deep red hue created solely by the fire, and it’s reflected in her skin and visible in between her tattoos, showing what the fire is doing, even to her and her skin rather than what she is doing. The focus is on the fire, and it really draws you in.

22 April, 2012
Harlem, NY
Around  9:30 pm

En route to Penn Station on a double decker Megabus, I sit in the front of the second story with a full view of the entire road in front of us. We’re driving south through Harlem on a rainy night. With the height of the bus, my view is just below that of the street lamps and signals. The streets are shiny with the rain, reflecting the amber of the street lamps visible through the trees with dripping branches.

The streets are dark and shiny with the rain, and the little amber blotches disappear underneath the bus as we whiz through the Harlem streets, black with the night. The dark of the night and streets and rain want to encroach upon us, but we’re moving so fast that we leave it in the dust, speeding steadily towards the next light. We’re never caught in the dark for too long, it’s never too far until the next street lamp, and we’re getting closer and closer to the perpetual brightness of further downtown. Everything is fast and close the way a chase scene in a movie comes across, all breakneck and jerky with spastic movement. But we always catch up to the next patch of reflected street lamp, even if we can’t see it through the trees.

2. http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/badwater-basin-california/

3. Unreal

4. This is a photo from National Geographic of Badwater Basin in Death Valley. It’s a dry sea of salt below sea level. When I first saw this photo, I actually had trouble grasping the idea that this is actually a place. It’s this sea of white salt, spread as far as you can see, surrounded by mountains. And the sky. The sky is so many colors – from a white and a light blue to a vibrant RED. A red sky – that’s something I have yet to see, and it’s just amazing and awesome and so many things. The red clouds are swirling together with purples and oranges and the blues on the outskirts and the sky just goes on forever, just the ground. The combination of the ground and the sky and mountains creates this otherworldly experience – it honestly DOESN’T seem real. It’s like this uninhabited, magic place. It feels like you could walk forever and never reach any other land besides the here and now of this picture. It’s amazing.

2) http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150709184743225&set=a.10150683729263225.392417.503673224&type=1&theater

3) Unreal

4) Lightning is an awesome thing of nature. It occurs during rainstorms, volcanic eruptions, and, at times, dust storms. Lightning takes on many different shapes and has so many different ways of occurring. This photo of lightning striking the Eiffel Tower seems so unreal because of the way the bolts wrap around the monument. The wrapping motion reminds me of the way a mother bear or any motherly creature, for that matter, would wrap themselves around their young to protect them.

Another thing that I find mind blowing about this photo is the fact that this is not the first time lightning has struck the Eiffel Tower. I read that in 1902, lightning struck the Eiffel Tower and damaged the upper section of the monument.

This picture grabbed my attention by the contrast of the bright light emitted from the bolts of lightning in relation to the darker colored sky closer to the bottom of the photo. The brightness at the top of the photo only grabbed my attention when I saw the light shining at the top of the tower.