Recent Work

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Recent Work: How to build a purposeful aurora borealis

You may never have seen the northern lights in person, but even a still image of them awes. They're so much bigger than we are. Other worldly. Delicately and overwhelmingly beautiful.

In John Cariani's play Almost, Maine, an aurora marks the transition between each vignette. They represent something magical happening both in the lives of the characters and in the world on the whole.

Given the romance attributed to these natural electromagnetic phenomena, you wouldn't want to portray them as random bursts of light. A light show trivializes them. You want to focus on something that ties your light to the preceding story. You want to create something with purposeful movement.

And you remember that it's all theater. There's not one right way to do this (a philosophy that applies to both the theatrical and corporate spheres). Fortunately, Half Moon Theatre in Poughkeepsie seemed more than happy to let me explore this any way I wanted for their production of Cariani's play.

A quick search for aurora landed me at this green aurora, to the right, that took place in Sweden (credit: wandermelon.com). I couldn't stop staring. Its color. Its depth. Its varying brightness. Its ephemerality.

I saw the blur of a dancer in it. That's my past affecting my present.

Anyone who knows me well knows my mentor Zachary was the ballet master and choreographer of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. He used to sit me down to watch dance, ask me what I saw, and then let me know why I was wrong.

But I'm almost bold enough to say Zachary would have agreed with me in this case. Just for argument's sake, take a look at this excerpt from a Romeo and Juliet pas de deux I found on the Internet Archive:



Can you see the connection to the Swedish aurora above? What if you pulled the dancers out of the background, blurred away any detail, keeping only their motion and light, and then saturated them with color? Then what do you see? I saw this:



And it wouldn't have to be dancers either. I saw this in seals storming a school of fish:



And this in the time lapse blossoming of an iris (the source of the top image on this page, taken at the theater at Cunneen Hackett):



The play has come and gone at this point, kind of like a real aurora might. But if you would like to visit or even support Half Moon Theatre, you'll find them here.