Drama 16 Stage Lighting

1.

2. The internet: http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/477/overrides/lyngen-alps-aurora-1-24_47737_600x450.jpg

3. Cold.

4. Over the icy mountains, streaks of violet, teal and green race down from the deep blue sky. These shimmering, cool colors give a sensation of shivers and the need to be warm. The chilly water reflects the colors of  the beautiful, frosty rainbow above. As the frozen mountain tops stand below, the frigid colors of the aurora borealis put on a fantastic spectacle of illumination. This wonderful show of lights is nature’s finest curtain call.

2.  Aurora Borealis, Lapland, Finland.  By Martti Rikkonen

3.  Cold

4.Seeing the northern lights is in the top ten on my bucket list. Such impossibly brilliant color against the deep blue of a winter sky creates such a stunning juxtaposition of color that even photographs of it make my heart ache. This image of the northern lights and full moon above finland on a snowy night is a perfect cold photograph. The moon and stars in a midnight near purple sky cast a frigid  tint across the trees and snow. While such  bright pinks and mints of the aurora might seem an unexpected choice for cold the hue of the pink lives  toward the blue side of the color wheel and  its the green is so heavily tinted white as to lose all of its warmth. These colors, though bright, still feel distant and otherworldly. They are not comforting so much as alien and terrifying in their severity.

2. found in promotional photos for the Hotel Kakslauttanen’s accommodations, <http://www.kakslauttanen.fi/en/accommodation/>.

3. Theme: Cold

4. The Northern Lights is one of those bucket-list dreams few people get to realize in their lives.  With most of the best viewing locations North of the arctic circle (or South of the antarctic circle ), properly seeing the lights in their full glory is rather difficult.  With individual glass igloos available to spend the night, The Hotel Kakslauttanen in Finland offers a unique chance to view these beautiful displays of light and color , protecting you fromt he elements in your own bubble of life and warmth as the cold of the night settles in outside.

Despite any and all scientific explanations of what makes up these lights given to me, a breakdown of ions and particles can never covey what the aurora is.  My parents, who saw the aurora borealis in Alaska a few years ago, tell me no photo they have ever seen—no matter how splendid or vibrant, can convey the pure magic of the skys almost literally igniting above you and around you.  The cold of the far North is a cold of merciless elements and life unfit for normal human existence.  Writers like Jack London remind us of the near primal existence that IS the North.  To experience these lights, however, is an experience that would justify the pain of the cold, justify the treck into the far reaches of the globe, to live these lights before you.

Outside the igloos, the air has dropped below zero, the wind sweeps through the trees, a thin barrier of glass separating the elements from your sleeping bag as you watch the night unfold above.  This would be a night I’m sure nobody could forget.

2. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~sdk/fick2003/october.html

Iowa State University Dept of Physics & Astronomy

3. THEME: Vibrant, Colorful, Saturated

4. I’ve always been fascinated aurora borealises, I think it’s crazy that such a beautiful phenomenon can just exist in the natural world! The neon greens, blues, purples and pinks look as though they would be better suited to a street in downtown Tokyo than in the flat lands of Iowa! I’ve never been witness to so beautiful an event, but truthfully I would probably withstand a trip to Iowa- or another equally wretched state- in order to see one! Seeing these colors in nature, I start to think about why neon colors are so popular for different things; these colors at first remind me of early teenagers, then the eighties, then a big Eastern/ Oriental city- like Tokyo or Hong Kong. Yet, long before dyes or neon lights and glow sticks were even conceived of, the earth’s magnetic fields have been trapping gases and whatnot to produce this stunning and vibrant display.