Twilight.
My favorite time of day. Especially in a city. The colors become richer. The sky gives a dim blue glow as if to foreshadow the darkness yet to come. Giving us a reminder that the sun will return again. If we are just patient. The lights turning on. Houses a glow of warmth, sodium lamps burning yellow, headlights moving with the green and red flashes of the streetlights. Twilight. A liminal space between night and day, day and night. An endless moment that suddenly becomes night. Lost in conversation you discover the sun to be gone. But when did it go?. A slight wind and low chill creep through your jacket.
I lit a play a few years ago where I set myself the challenge of exactly recreating, I think it was, four thirty in the afternoon. The play was ‘naturalistic’ and the director and producer were interested in ‘Naturalistic lighting.’ I feared I might get bored. What I love is the poetry of twilight. So I made the project truly difficult.
Four thirty in the afternoon. This task is more difficult than one might at first imagine. Four thirty. The sun is getting low in the sky but is still bright. The color is not really distorted. A little warmer than 5600 degrees kelvin, but negligable as far as perception goes. One source of light. A single light. One shadow.
Four thirty in the afternoon is not lit by a single light source. A single light, but not a single source. The sunlight bounces off surfaces. A blue wall it becomes slightly cooler, grass makes it a bit green, and so forth. But there is another source of light. The sky. Where the sun is a single directional light, the sky, much bluer, is a highly diffuse and soft source of light. This is all too obvious if you take the time to look, but many people don’t.
So I had to orient myself on stage. Decide where was west, thus where the sun was coming from. Then within the confines of the set, the edge of a house, had to determine the color of the bounce of sunlight off the house. Opposite the house were some trees and vines, and so on and so forth.
That is the prosaic answer. But where is the illumination of a rather poetic text? For that’s what it was. Finding the poetry in that kind of literalism is quite a difficult process. In a sense, it is easy to do this with abstraction. Harder with representational realism. It is subtle. Like working entirely with one color. You can not hide in sweeping poetic pronouncements. You must be clear. Specific. Achieving the poetic truth of twilight at four thirty in the afternoon is quite a feat. There is no rest. You must work constantly and diligently. The same or more as is needed to find the reality in poetic expression.
Over on his process blog, Director Josh Costello discusses the benefits of minimalist storytelling.
I said in the post that the lack of costumes and set decorations — the choice not to choose a period setting — never detracted from the story. What I should have also talked about is the way in which this type of minimalism can actually deepen the audience’s experience by encouraging the use of the imagination.
Yet minimalism for the sake of minimalism is like choosing an arbitrary period because it is ‘cool’ rather than directly adding something to the textual dialogue. Minimalism is a conceptual approach that finds perfection not when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away. Just as a misplaced word can destroy the purity of a poem, so too can a misplaced chair break the delicate balance of a stage.
There is a strange thing our brains have of filling the holes when we are not given the information.
As you know, our eyes adjust to the dark and we can see things we didnt see at first.
Minimalism does that.
Twilight is interesting as there is a time when it is bright enough for the cones to still work yet dark enough for the rods to function. Thus vision is actually most acute then. Magic hour.
That is the best minimalism. Enough signifiers to show us a world, with enough holes for our imaginations to run free.
Interestingly , it has always been my favorite time of day….