Spotfrights


Few roles in a play let you feel as close to divinity as fiddling around with the lighting. And I'm not talking about fiddling with a set of tiny switches backstage while you tell yourself that truly, this is as close as you get to divinity. I'm talking about sitting in the control room, pompously or not, depending on your choice, and getting what is perhaps the most authoratative view in the entire theatre and then deciding who gets to be visible on-stage. Believe me when I say that power trips are equally likely to happen with the director and the elevated elite in the control room.

At least, that's the impression you get of the job at first, until you're tasked with something requiring about three hands and fingers of lengths that would anger any pianist into attacking you. The moment you enter the control room in your (well, my, actually) hazey power trip, you are greeted with a panaroma of knobs and switches that would look suspiciously familiar to anyone who's been to one of those open houses showcasing cockpit interiors.

There's what can only be described as an absolute spread of switches in the control room, and that's for lighting alone. There are fill light switches for nine sections of the stage, individual spotlights for each of those nine sections, then an additional larger spotlight for each of those nine sections again. Then there's additional switches for adjusting the color of the cyclorama (A funky screen that would have appealed greatly to the Beatles. Basically a screen disguised as a wall at the back of the stage that can change color in the most psychedellic manners.), and finally two random switches for side stage spotlights. I think that covers about three quarters of the switches. There's an additional (a very trendy word by this point) quarter somewhere that probably requires the synchronized turning of two keys or something along those lines.

Anyway, it's this mind boggling number of switches that really makes the lighting job very difficult. The nice lady that was kind enough not to leave us floundering (mostly out of concern for the equipment) drew us a reference diagram of sorts for the different numbers of the lights and which portions of the stages they corresponded to. It really did make things a lot simpler so all me and Damien were left with was frustration. Since the diagram wasn't divided into a table with labels like A3 or B4 or anything that would help you visualize positions, and so the switches weren't labelled in that manner, we ended up having to constantly refer to the tiny table scrawled (very kindly) in blue ink under the pseudo-illumination of the small lamp that you're allowed during the operation of the lighting, since the control room is apparently tasked with the role of housing the invisible machinations that run the show from behind.

So we did a rather shoddy job of allowing the hypothetical audience to see the faces of our undoubtedly nervous, and therefore grateful actors. But something rather surprising happened halfway through the last run.

We started improvising a bit. As opposed to referring to the terribly written (by us, I should add) set of lighting cues based on the script, we started improvising. We knew what was going to happen when and where, so we started referring to the diagram (not written by us, I should add again) and turning up whatever lights we thought were necessary. All this in very angry whispers in the dark.

I suppose as you do this again and again the numbers corresponding to the different lights become a vital part of your anatomy, and that would explain the labelling deficiency, and clearly we've yet to achieve that.

But regardless, it was fun, and it really was the sort of thing that's going to keep me from throwing my arms up and yelling at the people in the control room "How hard can it be to get some damned lights on?"

Footnotes while on the Run

Hello there.

A bit of brief writing before I return to bed from whence I crawled.

I was just in the process of rushing an application for the purposes of entering the mystical NRP, or Nanyang Research Programme, if you're pedantic about that sort of thing or if you're giving a speech and you have to let the nice ladies and gentlemen know precisely what they're attending the speech for.

The whole process of signing up for the project was a bit finicky, but I suppose that's all part of the process of being incredibly complicated. Well, not really. I can't really complain, though a terrible misintepretation about the concepts of am and pm led to my submission of the form being about ten hours late, which somehow seems more erroneous than one day when you write it down.

There hasn't really been much time for writing over the last two days, and the barrage of tests will finally descend into rancid waters while waving their neatly typed tentacles in the air and making all manner of screeching noises, then it'll probably take about a week or so for them to reemerge the very badly damaged (though still freshly shiny) reactor of a long-sunken nuclear submarine that was previously unaccounted for.

Quite honestly I'll be quite glad once this whole test period is over.

I mean, life's about doing the other work, isn't it?

Of Knee Jerks and Explosives


It was not a few weeks ago that I sat rather dismayed in the school canteen, and was bracing myself for the increasingly threatening AP Chemistry class looming on the horizon, its view denied to me by the school (compound). After a while I gave up trying to stare through opaque concrete and look like whatever organs in my body were responsible for generating hope had been extracted by way of liposuction, I attempted to proceed up the stairs when I was stopped by the principal in this particular course of action.

Well, I wasn't really stopped by the principal. Not directly at least, though he did hint that he would appreciate if I wasn't in my class by making an announcement calling for a gathering in the school hall, a gathering that was to be attended by a good amount of everyone.

So about five nerve wracking, nostril assaulting minutes later I found myself seated in the hall next to an entire row (or column, depending on whether you were viewing everything from a bird's eye view, which if you weren't, would mean that that particular group of students would be standing on seated one each other's shoulders) of people with bags of kimchi that were digging away at the side of their Ziploc bags with spoons they managed to sneak out of the compound's cafeteria.

This continued for a good twenty minutes or so, during which we were continuously reminded to contact anyone that wasn't here to make sure that they weren't in danger of being harmed by whatever was in the school compound (or not), not that there was necessarily any danger since that hadn't been announced yet, but it was absolutely vital that anyone missing was to be accounted for, lest they... not be here.

And after what seemed analogous to a nervous, tie-wearing, thick spectacled acountant finally getting down on his knees beside a gorgeous woman that he's known for about twenty minutes and popping the question, the administration finally called upon the superintendant from the nearby police station to give us a bit of an exposition as to why there was no reason to panic.
The reason why there was no reason to panic was that a "war relic" had been discovered in a construction site not far off from the school, and while there wasn't any danger to anyone in the school, our rather convenient distance from the war relic made us a candidate (and winner) for being a base of operations for the getting-rid-of-war-relic procedures.

And it was at that point that a good amount of atmospheric murmuring (rather loud murmuring, as the sound of over a thousand people speaking in hushed voices tends to be) was heard, though the superintendant did say that wasn't anything to be worried about and that the disposal and school hijacking procedures were completely safe to anyone that wasn't the kind of person that wanders into construction sites for no reason.

Dr Hang then concluded with the stirring instruction that we all bugger off for the rest of the day to ensure that we didn't annoy the nice policemen, save for those staying in the hostel, of course, who buggered off across the field to wander about the structural integrity of its foundations.
So that was a rather eventful episode, but what was particularly interesting was the reactions of the school population.

Before the news was broken, there was a ridiculous amount of frantic speculation, and a good number of people looking very grim and staring into the distant clouds, commenting that if the administration was doing its best to account for every single person in the school then there was sure to be a proper reason for such measures, and that reason was probably almost as grim as they were.

There was also an observable population that was rather prophetic, insisting that they had heard from credible sources that could not be named that it was most definitely a bomb that they had discovered nearby.

There was a good number of people annoyed at the twenty minute wait, and there was at least one individual that was annoyed by the nearby scent of kimchi.

The varying degree of responses to the single event of an assembly that not yet justified is interesting, and to a certain degree, amusing.

This amusement is further fed by the crowd's reactions after the reason for the assembly was revealed. Some immediately started looking for nearby exit signs while others evangelized the truth of the "war relic" being explosives. There seemed to be a recurring theme of either "the police aren't telling us the truth of what the relic is" or "the police aren't telling us that we're not actually safe". And to the latter response, you have to ask the question: Why?

Why wouldn't the authorities (a more faceless, authoritarian term for "police" here) reveal that we were in danger, and proceed to evacuate us if we were? While there existed the possiblity that they wanted to keep panicking to a minimum, there wouldn't have been much possiblity of it spontaneously detonating after it was discovered and the authorities were alerted, and there wouldn't have been any chance that they would have started working on sending it on its merry, explodey way till everyone was safely evacuated. The suspicion that the authorities or the government is hiding vital information from the people it is meant to protect/ the country's citizens is a knee jerk reaction that could potentially make someone walk funny if we aren't careful.

But maybe these suspicions are vital to maintaining the integrity of our national system. If we enquire, we open the possiblity of ignorance. But all that considered, surely we could have done that in a manner that didn't involve flailing our arms to make references to Hindu mythology.
And the twitch reaction aside, there was the rather paradoxical reaction of cheering after Dr Hang declared the rest of the day to be absolutely nothing. It was a rather impressive leap from people construction conspiracy theories and fearing for their lives to overall cheerfulness at the prospect of a break for the rest of the day.

That was nowhere near the leap of witnessing my entire cluster gather in a single room and cheering at the aftermath of the bomb actually being disposed off in a completely un-subtle fashion. And as I stood there trying to get a glimpse of the disappointingly, not-very-devastated construction site, I thought to myself, we sure have strange selection of responses to the prospect of adversity.