cushion of customs

I’m going to skip pass the Apple conference we hosted (no iPhones there so you aren’t missing anything) and pass the the Canadian troupe with the red velvet curtains, mainly as I didn’t work on them and couldn’t give much more info.

Another smallist show graced our boards last week as we gear up for a couple of large incoming shows, one a four choreographer collaboration and one another festival (details on both of those will follow, probably maybe)

This show also has dancers from around the world and is set, appropriately enough, in an airport departure lounge and was with us briefly after Poland before turning around and visiting Paris straight after.

Not a huge issue til we, and more importantly they, found that the journey from Poland had been a little rough on the kit

[shop talk]

I’m starting with sound again, mainly to get it out the way. Entirely our system this week, only the playback source was brought in – a Macbook running QLab. A couple of PCC160s downstage and a Beyer MCE90 midstage in the wings each side were used for a little light lifting of some spoken words. A single T12 was added to our normal Max12 sidefill to act as a source speaker for the main set item, a mockup of an airport departure board.

Lighting wise, the show is a mainly conventionals rig with overhead washes. A single VL1000 is used for some solo spots, one of which has to traverse with a dancer.

Control is from a Strand 300, at least it is normally. While I was fishing two loose screws from the circuit innards and hunting for a 2A slow-blow fuse replacement, the company lighting tech got his first taste of ETC Eos. And no sooner had I got power back to the 300 then the companies nearly brand new DMX shutter on the projector stopped accepting DMX.

[/shop talk]

I’m dropping out of shop talk here, but it’ll still contain some technical content. The airport departure board set piece was flown and was the major item, other than 13 black wooden chairs scattered around the black box staging.

Rather than being an active piece, the words of the board were cast onto the screen from a projector flown on the number 1 lighting bar.  The words on the board change throughout the piece and are often a trigger for the next section – the dance equivalent of the Hollywood device of receiving advice from public display boards.

This requires careful lining up so that characters look like they are part of the screen rather than being projected onto it.

Which is a problem if the projector doesn’t work.

Randomly the projector would not accept any kind of VGA signal input during the set-up though the next day was (mostly) fine. And while the companies lighting board ran through an afternoon’s worth of soak test (for power, not water absorption), we found that the VGA to ethernet adaptors being used to send the video from the laptop at the sound control position wouldn’t output to VGA at the same til – which was a little dull when most of the second circle couldn’t see the airport board and were reliant on our screens permantly rigged for surtitle use.

The only way we managed to get signal to those screens was to use the VGA output of the projector – this ended up as about a 60 metre run to the VGA splitter used to feed the 2nd circle screens. all of which was fine until one of the VGA:ethernet adaptors glitched during the first show.

The projector will hold the last image for three minutes when it loses a signal before shutting down – so the first we knew of any problems was the loss of all images. Luckily a quick reset managed to bring it all back without pausing the show.

So of the technical kit the company brought in with them, it all suffered a failure at some point within 24 hours of being  through Polish customs … it may be a big co-incidence … may be …

Anyone know how powerful an X-ray has to be before it starts to fry electronic equipment?

The show is fairly short (yay!) and each of the dancers brings their own skills, whether it be kathok or classical dance. I’m sure they’d appreciate cushioned seats one day … and I presume that they don’t look at real airport lunges the same way any more …