Drama 16 Stage Lighting

1) 2/24/14, 7 pm-ish

2) Lights in the top floor windows of Enterprise

3) I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but the towers on the residential side of campus all have faces. At the top of each tower, the way the windows are positioned on the uppermost floor and the floor just beneath it make the buildings look like they have two eyes and a mouth. I don’t really know how to describe this. Picture two narrow rectangles for eyes and a wider rectangle (one bigger window beneath the other two) as the mouth.

Every time I’m walking back from the gym and those lights are on, the residential buildings turn into a colony of giants with stoic faces. Normally it’s Enterprise that catches my attention. The geometric features of its face (rectangle mouth with clenched window pane teeth) don’t lend themselves to a smile or a frown. The giant just looks like its face hurts, as if it accidentally injected itself with too much botox and is stuck. Or it’s just sick of bracing against the cold winter wind. If it could speak it would probably say “HNNNNN!”

When the lights are off, the botox-infused, winter hating giant is sleeping, I’d guess. I think these giants are nocturnal, because next to sunlight, it’s hard to tell whether those lights are on or off, and it looks like they’re asleep. Against the black night, the eyes and mouth of the stone guardians stand out because they’re so full of light. That is when they’re awake. I feel camaraderie with these buildings. They’re night owls, like me.

Photo by Derrick Tyson – http://www.flickr.com/photos/derricksphotos/189815067/

Theme: Shadow

Description:  We all seem to shelter secrets. Whether we do it out of embarrassment or pride, secrets exist to hide or repress certain memories. Some secrets can even make us go insane, eating at our insides until nothing is left. There is a secret pain in this picture. The man hides in the shadows, scared to face his secrets but bits of it fall out of the shadow into sight. Shadow has a useful ability of hiding the things that we don’t want seen by others. Shadow however, can be manipulated by light, just as secrets can be manipulated by truth. The man seems to be in pain, afraid of his secrets, maybe his past, coming out. He pulls his face down and into the shadow for a reason. I can feel inner agony, leaking off his face. The light is cast from the ground and casts a shadow created from his nose and hands over most of his face. We can make out his eyes, mouth, hands, and a portion of his nose. Not too much skin is shown, keeping his face and identity a mystery. He is hiding something. But what is it? Well, that’s a secret!