Piece of Mind

On Friday, May 16^th at 4pm the interview projects performed Piece of Mind for the opening preview to Congresswoman Grace Napolitano’s speech on raising awareness on mental health.  Because it was in the Pacific ballroom there were no stage lights, however, they did bring in two big lights for each side of our little makeshift stage.  At the opening of the performance the first actor that speaks is center stage exactly and I am sitting on a stool about three feet upstage left of her.  The two of us were perfectly at a diagonal line with the light on stage right, so one of my first thoughts when we began was about the lighting.  I noticed that the light was so harsh from this angle that it created this powerful, almost Divine glow shaping the outline of her face.  I have no clue how this read to the audience but I was thinking that it had to have been overly intense for the mood that we were trying to convey.  My second thought was that I needed to write about my attention to this light in my lighting blogs for class.   My third thought was that I should actually be paying more attention to my acting since two hundred people did not come to watch me look at the way light hits an actor.