Silence is golden

Typically it goes from one extreme to the other.

After the demand for noise with last weeks flamenco, this weeks continental visitors required no noise at all.

The choreography demands that the dancers take cues from the breathing of the other performers – which can be surprisingly hard to make out over air conditioning, rack fans and a thousand people watching your every precise move.

Kinda a shame then that the rackmounted control equipment for our powered flying system has a number of fans that very definitely don’t run on silent bearings …

[shop talk]

We’ll start with sound as I’m already touching on the issue.

Once again we’ve swopped out our EAW JF260 with d&b E12. They sound better, are much much lighter and have lots going for them, apart from the hire cost, of course. The rest of the system is our usual in-house set-up other than the desk which is a DM2000, another regular kit visitor.

Monitors this week are being done by a pair of flown Q-10’s from upstage and a pair of our Max 12’s downstage.

Staging is black box and black marley with a large number of wooden chairs used by the dancers during the piece.

There’s a fair bit of lighting about the place – bar height is less than 6m, short for our stage and there’re a fair amount of lights on floor stands and short standing scaff poles.

This company showing two pieces on our stage this time and the second piece has even less lighting – flourescent fixtures predominant, including tubes that live and switch on at a 19m flown height – illuminating the mostly bare stage that is required for the second piece.

All the chairs are replaced by a baby grand and a few small flats with the rear facing towards the audience.

[/shop talk]

Both pieces use a lot of repetition and can be challenging to watch if you don’t have a high boredom threshold – the critics were split fairly evenly and we managed to get walk-outs – and let’s be honest, people walking out of a show is a bad thing. Despite sayings to the contrary, I do suspect that bad publicity is worse than no publicity in this case