Drama 16 Stage Lighting

Date.Time.Location: 2/25/19 9:05 PM Somer Center Chapel at Concordia College

Objective Description: I sat within this massive church for a service on Monday night. The chapel has no windows and all of the lights were switched off. There was no light emanating from the room except for the ten small candle lights that surrounded the altar.

Subjective Description:It was quite the unusual experience to see a chapel without any windows except for the ones in the hallway directly outside of it. The doors leading to these windows were shut before service effectively draining out all of the natural light from the room. Soon after this, the ten candles surrounding the altar were lit and an unusual phenomenon managed to capture my attention. What started off as pitch black was soon illuminated as the ten small orange lights from these candles managed to gradually breathe life back into the room and seemed to envelop everybody and everything in their warm embrace. These small lights filled me with quite a jovial sense of hopefulness not only for the rest of the night that remained but for the day that was to come in a matter of hours. These tiny lights at first appeared small and soon grew to overtake the entire room, the cold of the night looked to dissipate and the hopeful and happy warmth from the candles ushered in a great sense of optimism in everyone around me for the events that were to come.

Date-Time-Location: 2/6/19, 7:00 P.M., Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church

Objective: The sun had set not too long ago, and the entire church was dark. The only obvious sources of light in the room were the four candles that were lit near the altar.

Subjective: During the day, this church aims to make use of the natural light shining through the stained glass windows lining the walls. When darkness falls during the night, these four candles remain lit for a short time to provide a small but powerful source of illumination for the church. The embers from the candles appear to expand far beyond the alter and cast shadows on the surrounding walls and on the pews. These candle lights are small and yet they succeed in filling the room with their enveloping warmth. These four lights seems to offer hope, a sense of longing for the day to return along with a certain assuredness that this longing will soon be satisfied. For now this light burns low, but soon the sun will return to the sky making way for the morning once again. It is darkest before the dawn indeed.

Photo by Massimo Cerrato. Flickr photo page here. Direct link here.

Hot.

A blast of sweltering heat washes over your face, casting your face in flickering shades and tints of amber, creating deeper shadows in the hollows of your cheeks. The soft, glowing halo of just a few small candles, illuminating only that which remains within the close range of the candles themselves, establishes a small, intimate setting; flushing your cheeks with the heat from the flames as they flicker to and fro.