No ohmigod

It’s like going back to school after the summer off.

After having spent two months with just two shows in the venue, both of which required nothing more than making sure there was still power, along comes a simple little contemporary dance which serves as a good warm-up to get back into working on shows – rather than just being present with a show.

[Shop talk]

White marley floor with black German masking is pretty much the entire set. Dancers are in ’street clothes’ for the most part, though the duet in the middle sees some tunic-inspired outfits.

Lighting is a side bar of 5K fresnals and another bar with 5K’s on backlight duty. There’s a bunch of PAR64 (CP62 lenses) and 2K fresnals doing a stage wash, including 46 PAR64 all wedged onto one fly bar (with CP61 inside)

Sound is mostly playback – our in-house Midas/MediaMatrix/EAW rig in a ’standard’ format. Max 12’s onstage which are pointing towards the audience for one piece but otherwise act as standard stage monitors from the corners. That same first piece also has four PCC-160 and 2 AKG 398s picking up some of the ambient noise (mostly the powered flying, but we do what we can)

The playback source though is the first proper outing for our SCS system. We’ve had SCS Professional loaded and running for a few months but not really had the opportunity to try in in anger until now.

Of course, it’s currently a very simple show – just a single cue list of individual tracks with manual triggers and a CD player running in the background as a ‘just in case’ measure.

It’s all mostly worked first time though I have found a couple of little niggles:

The enter button on the number pad has a slight delay before firing – which normally wouldn’t be a problem but is handy to know

And occasionally, it’s taken a double-tap on the enter key to trigger a track – presumably as the computer has ’stolen focus’ from SCS. I’ll post again if I can find a way to get this to happen consistently.

My next plan for this is to link it up to our Sony CDP-D12 players for remote RS232 control.

I say players, I’ll likely only use one at once. Reading through the documentation, I do notice that as soon as the serial cable gets plugged in, both the front panel and the remote are deactivated. While I can see how this could be useful in an installation, losing the ability to manually control the player does strike me as potentially problematical in a live playback scenario.

But that’s further down the line. SCS works very well and was quick to set-up. I’m looking forward to trying it further.

[/shop talk]

The show itself was … well respectable. There was no moments of ohmigod, just some solid dancing from the cast. As can be the case quite often with contemporary pieces, the dancers and the music (or the lack of, sometimes) didn’t often seem to mesh.

Still, it was a useful ramp back up to ‘theatre speed’ as we go into the certain to be busy autumn season.

Sadly, I think I’m going to be spending more time at the rush hour than I have been

Green Theatre Initiative

The Mayor of London (most likely without the help of the present incumberent) have released the Green Theatre Initiative; a plan to get the 100+ theatres of London to reduce carbon emissions 60% by 2025.

Details are best gotten from the Theatre Trusts webpage on the matter

Count me as supporting this one

Hadron

Click this link before continuing:

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

been there?

What I want to know is:

What happens if a ‘yep’ appears?

White is all right, right?

It’s one of those things being venue staff for several years. As companies return, you start to see the trends and the ’signature parts’. Our current show is from a choreographer who is a regular to us but is the first new show we’ve seen for a couple of years.

Based again on a work from a different medium (a novel this time around), there’s been more room for this choreographers slant.

A little tech talk before I continue – and for once, it may be worth even the non-tech heads scanning through.

[Shop talk]

I’ll start with the set this time around – it informs the decisions for the other departments.

The overall brief is for monochrome black and white with colour used for particular emphasis. The opening set is an all white floor and walls (flats mocked to look like white brick in a studio). Heavy swing doors to each side and upstage right and openings in the far downstage corners and upstage centre.

The upstage opening isn’t too obvious from the audience – a large white wall framed with truss-like metal sits on a revolve centre-stage.

Overhead hangs truss – 3 lengths across the stage linked each end to form a box.

The wall is only 10 foot or so so most of the backstage area is visible to the second circle. This kind of ties into the idea

The set is dressed with several floor standing lights similar to the kind to be found in a photographers studio, and a small sized grand piano in the upstage left corner.

A pair of red theatre seats are used at one point (red as it is similar to our audience seating …) and both a chandelar and a skullhead mirrorball fly in as do two versions of a billboard – one pristine and one a little (read a LOT) battered. Think the modern version of a picture in the attic …

The reverse of the centre wall is rust coloured – part of that deliberate use of colour and is obviously frame like in nature – a lot of items are used on this wall to show the protagonists descent during the show.

All the costumes are black or white throughout the piece.

Lighting is a fair few VL moving heads on the truss and a load of tungsten sources – mostly Par64 and Source 4 profiles. Lighting is again mostly shades of white both from the tungsten and the discharge sources. Recessed strip lighting in the set does occasionally flash in bright colours and a ‘TV appearance’ allows for the moving heads to show some colour. A strobe at each downstage corner gets used for photo flashs and there are several foggers and hazers around and above the set.

Soundwise, this is a set-up that we’ve seen before, although there are a few new features.

A pair of MSL2 at each level on the pros with another pair for the centre cluster. Front fill is a row of d&b E0 under the set floor with a pair of UPM’s attached to support columns in the stalls for the seats on the edges. A row of UPM serve delay duties for stalls and first circle, hanging from the circle fronts. A pair of UPA’s are slung from trapeze’s just in front of the followspot position for second circle delays.

Subs-wise, there’s a 650P to each side of the stalls and a USW to each side of the second circle.

Dancer foldback is 2 pairs of UPM’s – one set in the truss over the stage.

The band consists of two keys, drums, percussion, electric guitar and electric bass and they have their own den USR – enclosed on all sides by black serge and overhead with black flats.

They do come onstage during the show – for a single conga during one of the parties and as a guitar/bass/piano combo for another party scene – but are mainly in the den.

Foldback for them is a mix of IEM and Axiom and no real surprises in the mic selection.

The show is mixed from a PM5D and also uses effects playback from S6000 samplers triggered from computer

[/shop talk]

The overall design concept is very strong and supports the piece very well. I’m personally less keel on the audio side of things – the composition doesn’t seem to be quite right, though that may be my personal tastes. I would have liked to hear more dynamic range though and the balance between keys, perc and guitars didn’t seem quite to gel smoothly – and that’s a musical rather than an audio thing, I think.

It also seemed as if the whole show was a little bit too much in exploring the boundaries of what could be portrayed onstage rather than the story. There’s only so many times you can watch simulated sex before it all becomes a little humdrum. That’s not to denigrate the dancers, by the way.

The worst thing for me was that I had no sympathy for the protagonist. His descent into depravity was a little too easy and too quick for any empathy to build up.

There does seem to be that thing that an all white set ends up making the piece less about the content and more about the style – I’m sure that I’ve seen examples that isn’t true for but not any time recently …