Pamela Annas
The Light Designer
The critics only notice if you fuck up. Hey you! I’m talking to you, sitting there, 5th row center,and you in the left balcony. Pay attention. Have you read a hundred theatre reviews? Did they comment on the light?
They praise the actor, her dazzling sail across the stage, her exquisite cheekbones, the clarity of her gesture, the emotional range of her face. Nothing about the shadings of light sculpturing those cheekbones, the placing of light on face that makes the scene sad or mad or gloriously glad. Would you like the players to act in the dark, stumble, shout out their lines into empty unlit space?
100 separate light cues for each beat, each one painstakingly drawn, static and moving lights positioned, gelled, tracked, cues transferred one by one to the computer program that triggers the timing, tested for days as the actors work through the play beat by beat—heated discussion between director, stage manager, set designer, and me who has studied the play in depth and designed a light script that will pull out meaning at a level almost subliminal.
You don’t even know what you’re looking at. And you don’t know because the reviewers know hardly more than you. English majors. They write about the story, the characters, the narrative arc, maybe the language if it’s Shakespeare. They discuss the director, nod to the playwright, in a musical to the songs and choreography. Let me throw in here that it is both delicious and demanding as hell to design for dance—your light is so clearly a partner in the dance. Everyone can see it.
Back to the theatre reviewers who tell you what you saw while leaving out so much. Set and costumes might get a sentence but no mention of how the set and the costumes are lit, subtly, for maximum emotional impact. The lighting contributed to the atmosphere of the play is the generic bland gag-inducing comment in 90% of the theatre reviews I’ve read, searching in vain for some recognition. Thank god I like my art for itself.
But you–you deserve more. You’re being kept in the dark. You need to know what to look at, how to use your eyes.
Demand an education in light. It’s your right.
SELF PORTRAIT, ALICE NEEL
1980. Oil on canvas. 54 x 40.
I do not pose my sitters…. Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all of their character and social standing—what the world has done to them and their retaliation. Alice Neel
on the arms of a blue and white striped chair.
across the top of her breasts,
from the other a white cloth flows.
White hair piled on top of her head,
pink cheeks, deep lines, arched brows
a horizontal slash
of frame above round glasses.
Body half turned. Eyes looking at you.
a comfortable belly resting
One foot on the ground.
The other, closest to us, is flexed, ready
to spring into the next project –
a portrait of a CP union organizer,
two old Russian brothers holding
their struggle in knotted hands.
leads the eye to her face, to her eyes.
The shadow looks like Mt. Everest.
The three visible legs of the chair are straight,
the exact color of her own whimsical
ready-to-go legs. The linear stripes of the chair
play with Neel’s nude rounded curves.
Her head pushes
into the top of the frame. She is not smiling.
She is looking intently at her subject, which is you
After It Ends
1.
Crows crumble in ink,
a fever takes your name.
This story is about blood.
The estuary is dented with it.
A rickety dock hisses loss,
the curse of an acid blunder.
Hawk charms the predatory wind.
Wonder culls the lonesome days.
A yellow wind burns the canyon.
This burgundy doubt. This tangled mesh.
2.
I wake up meshed
In sticky doubt,
tear free
scramble up canyon walls
until wind washes my face.
Winter days, one after another.
No wonder the wind is a predator.
I will become Hawk
Gliding above blunder
and curse, above loss,
until I swoop and dock
and blood the estuary
blood the story
erase your name,
my fever,
in ink and dead crows.
Gaia Cruises through a Blinking Yellow Light
in her brand-new crimson pearl Honda EX,
mucks along in the morning commute,
broods about retiring,
quitting, moving on
where there’ll be no more of this shit:
bureaucracies budding like e-coli,
A.I. swallowing the real.
She needs jalapeño peppers and stiletto heels,
salsa and swing, not this funeral march,
this job toward which she is currently squirming
like a tapeworm through traffic and tunnels,
white noise and muted black jacket, discreet scarf.
There are too damned many people. 5,000 species
gone extinct, while each incremental high-tech system
spawns a translator and two highly paid VPs.
She needs jalapeño peppers and stiletto heels.
She needs to kick ass. The radio announces a sharp increase
in earthquakes, as America blasts her hills open,
stuffing its trash in the wounds—cell phones, plastic,
used breath. The latest technology has it covered,
say the talking heads. But.
Have you noticed there’s a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on?
Damn. There are too many fools.
She needs jalapeño peppers and stiletto heels.
Pamela Annas
Pamela Annas grew up on military bases around the world, living for two years in a village in Turkey and graduating from high school in Yokohama, Japan. She is Professor Emerita of English at University of Massachusetts/Boston, where she offered courses in working-class literature, modern and contemporary poetry, science fiction, and personal narrative writing, is a member of the editorial collective and poetry editor at Radical Teacher and has published books and articles on poetry and pedagogy, and poems in anthologies and journals, including most recently Atlanta Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review, Innisfree, Adanna, Thimble, Nixes Mate Review, and Bond St. Review. Her chapbook Mud Season was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2011. Several of her poems are currently the choreopoem script for a modern dance performance, Origami Night, performed in Portland, OR December 2023 and in Boston, July, August 2024, and upcoming in Chicago, August 2025