Temple of What?

I’ve already mentioned our next upcoming piece.

Celebrating the centenary of the Ballet Russes, we have four choreographers coming to together, each working on their own piece with their choice of fellow artists (lighting designers, composers, video creators and so on) which will all be put together for an evening of performance all next week, followed by an international tour.

The main brief for this was to follow Diaghilev’s comment to Cocteau: “Surprise Me!”

All very laudable.

But we knew that it was just going to be a busy couple of weeks for us here.

It’s never going to be a great start when a theatre built as a receiving house moves to produce a work. There just isn’t the creation space for performers or designers, there’s no storage space for any set/costumes/whatever and so our events department, who have the unenviable job of overseeing the booking for our rehearsal studios, have been playing a very delicate balancing act of trying to keep four separate companies with consistant space to devise the new pieces, while still keeping other bookings coming in and working around whichever incoming company is on the main stage.

This includes the offsite rehearsals of course.

Then there was the fun issue of moving a wooden floor into one of the studios.

I say fun … I may not mean fun.

The floor arrived on the same day that myself and a few of our regular techs were scheduled to load two complete wooden floors back into our storage space in the depths of Kent. The rehearsal floor was supposed to arrive first thing in the morning and be loaded into the lift to go to the third floor studio – to be finished inside an hour so I could take those floor loaders and coerce them into loading our floors – all this while Apple set up an event on the main stage.

My first clue something was awry was walking in to find a large wooden block by the lift. Not really knowing about the rehearsal floor at this point, I didn’t think too much of it and walked straight past.

Walking onstage to be asked “can we borrow you for a moment?” always arouses suspicion. That’s about the line I use when I require a couple of victims to lift our sound desk. And when the initial inquiry is followed with “just how guys have you got in today?” just confirms that something nasty is about to occur.

Trying to ignore the vague sense of impending doom I get when Mr Ben or Mr Best Man ask me if I’m available (never free!), I’m walked back to the large floor piece I ignored earlier.

“This needs to go up to the studio on the third floor!” I’m told.

“This piece of 10 foor by 6 foot by 1 foot decking made with heavy wood and with an overhanging platform top on two sides?”

“Yes” I’m told.

“This piece of 10 foot by 6 foot by 1 foot decking made from heavy wood and with an overhanging platform lip on two sides that’s by our 8 foot long lift?”

“Yes.” I’m told “How many guys have you in today?”

The quick amongst you will have noticed the slight descrepency – that two foot different between platform length and lift length.

That two foot equals three stories of stairs that double back on themselves or about 20 minutes of five guys lifting heavy wood to and fro.

And that was the first piece.

“Tell you what” I’m told after we got the first section up (of four) “let’s wait until lunchtime so the company can rehearse”

“tell you what,” I reply “as the truck we are meant to be loading now is here, why don’t we finish this now?”

“Can’t you load that later?”

“Nope, later we have to unload that truck a number of miles away.”

“Oh”

The joys of people assuming that a lift will take a load without checking first.

Oh, and we are going to come back to this particular dance piece – it’s one of the four …

So having manhandled one floor up stairs, and swearing that Gallowglass can have the fun of moving down to another studio, back up to the first and then down to the stage over the next couple of weeks, we retrieve the truck driver and start loading the two wooden floors that we were expecting to move this day.

Wood was often supplied in 8′ x 4′ sizes and you hear a lot about trucks, trains and transit being built around this size. Well, the internal measurement of a standard 18 tonne truck is around 7′10″. So rather than the two sets of floors (each across two wheeled pallets of similar sizes) being a straight load, it involves the heavier floor (read more expensive) being loaded on it’s pallets offset with the lighter floor (read the one we care less about) having to go on a sheet at a time and stack on edge in the available space.

Our offsite store is a single cage in a warehouse in an industrial estate in Marden, Kent – a village that I’m sure only exists as it has an industrial estate in it. Certainly it gets two trains an hour – one in each direction.

We arrive ahead of the truck to find that the entrance way is blocked by the unloading artic of the touring company who own the building.

Ah.

So we duly have to unload our truck outside, reversing the loading.

In about our only good fortune that day, the artic leaves right after we finish taking the floor off and we can wheel the floor to our store.

It takes a little bit of pack-tetris to get in into the store, currently home to several productions worth of odd items (not bad for a receiving house) but we manage in short order and return to the station in time to see the train leave – apparently mid afternoon the schedule changes – who knew?

Time rolls on.

It’s now the week before we start to shoehorn the four pieces on to the stage. I get a call saying that the cloth has arrived and needs to be unloaded.

“Okay. What cloth?”

It transpires that one of the four has a Scanachrome backdrop. All very lovely but we’ve a totally different production on the main stage, a rehearsal in the studio theatre and an event out front. And the print has been supplied in a state of partial unroll. Oh and it’s five hours early

Sidenote – it is possible to deliver too early. Much as I dislike late deliveries, if I’ve specified a time for delivery then I’d like it to be that time. There are many good reason why something can’t be received earlier – in this case, it was a matter of space and bodies to move the goods – of which we had neither.

Oh and the truck driver was near to reaching his drive time limit.

Sigh.

Still, we managed to get in somewhere (and the creases will fall out once it’s flown, probably)

And the production week has now arrived.

Before I go into the shop talk, it’s important to look at the staging a little more. And it’s about this point that my family may want to engage the parental filters – there will be rude words (and I don’t just mean the crew swearing).

Each night of the performance will see the four pieces all put on – with two intervals. So we’ll start with piece one, interval, piece 2, quick pause, piece 3, interval 2 and final piece. And the pieces seem to be following a black box set-up with minimal set-up (he says) apart from the final piece that is, and there’s no real nice way of saying this, a temple of cock.

No, this isn’t some reference to last year’s peacock show, or to any other avian creature.

[shop talk]

(like what I did there )

Lighting wise is a little bit of guesswork with it being the premiere here. There’s a lot of generics up in the air alongside a few movers and a couple of large projectors (one overhead and one pointing upstage) with booms for side light. Scrollers are in abundance.

The company have chosen to use a Strand 520 from one production desk with a Strand 550 from another. I know the 520 is going on the tour – where the 550 fits into the puzzle I’m staying out off.

Soundwise, it’s a little more complicated than could be expected at first.

Basic system is our normal Midas/Mediamatrix/EAW with Max 12 sidefills. In terms of outputs, the operator has split the signal all over the path so each level of the theatre has it’s own matrix feed and groups feed the stereo subs, delay lines and so on.

There is also a flown pair of EM121 onstage acting as source for playback and additional stage monitoring.

Inputs come from the onstage Catalyst system that controls video playback for one of the pieces, including a MIDI feed that links Qlab and the sound desk; additional audio inputs from Q-lab; from a mixture of AKG mics on the orchestra for a third piece; and from more mics and some processing from an offstage quartet and Steinway 10′ from the last piece. There are also a couple of flown rifle mics and three flown DPA overhead with four of our Sony radio packs also in use for one of the pieces. The radio packs are attached to chairs mostly by cable ties, but I did found that no local hardware shop sells square saddle clips. Cheap handles can work though …

The opening piece has a few mirrored flats with projectors set-up behind them but is otherwise a blackbox. Pieces two have the scanachrome backdrop for one and a black backing for the other. The final piece has three large plastic flats on three sides with german masking behind. That’s going to be a fun interval change.

The hard flats are basically a slightly impressionistic mock painting of naked men at one of those parties that women most definitely aren’t invited to.

[/shop talk]

As far as we can determine at this stage, the first three pieces seem to follow the neoclassical ballet/modern dance mould quite closely. The last piece is really designed around the ’surprise me’ brief and seems to be particularly aimed at ribbing Catholics with pregnant members of clergy, rape scenes, and an electrocution to finish. With the Pope in a starring role and the constant backdrop of naked, intertwined men, the final piece is constructed entirely with the aim of being shocking.

Wonder how well it will go down in Rome later in the tour?

As far as we are concerned, it seems to be shock for the sake of shock without any reason for inclusion. Of couse, we haven’t seen the piece yet so we could be mistaken …

But it’s this final piece that had that lovely floor, it’s this piece that the constructors had to come back in to cut yet more holes out of the flats (the gap between naked men has ceased to be other naked men and is now gaps to see the black serge behind – maybe that’s deliberatly based on the creator of the Ballet Russes – naah …), and as two of the flats have to be stored flown out then brought in during the interval change and turned 90 degree to form the side walls (while LX strike the booms), this is the piece that has a sweepstake on the length of the first night interval change (from 20 to 50 minutes, place your bets here), it’s this piece that has all those onstage mics and the floods and LEDs set into the raised wooden floor (and which lights have been mostly cut AFTER getting them to work), and it’s this piece that cost me a nights sleep.

Not nightmares from the constant cock, mind but an actual night of not sleeping to finish adding lights.

Each piece has been given roughly two days to tech and rehearse before we put it all together – mostly this seems to be fine. However, one of the original ideas for the temple of cock was to outline all the figures with fairy light (remember this whole show has to tour …)

Sadly, this wasn’t cut merely trimmed down so the lighting crew spent the better part of a day working out how to line of the figures with so-called unbreakable fairy lights – so far not broken par se but we like a challenge …

In any case, the end of the first day saw one figure outlined and two more figures needing to be as completed as possible with two remaining strings of lights and one night.

Having already being at work for twelve hours, what I wanted to do was go home to my bed. Instead, myself and several other luckless techs found ourselves spending another eight hours drilling cock.

The flats are made from two layers of hard plastic with internal supports, kinda similar to a cheap conservatory roof. to install these fairy lights, the spacing had to be marked on the front. Then a pilot hole drilled (either carefully pulsing to avoid ripping the fabric stuck on the front – or scoring with a knife first). Then a second hole had to be drilled from the rear to widen the hole (and this had to be drilled into a scrap bit of wood to further avoid ripping the cloth).

Then a third drill had to be used for the rear layer of plastic to fit the fairy light housing in.

Then it had to be inserted, which would normally involve a bit more knife work to make the hole in the fabric wide enough as the speed of the drill was enough to melt it to itself.

Then it had to be glued into place with a hot glue gun. Then the wires had to be taped against the flat so that they can’t catch against anything.

And where the string crosses a brace, then most likely a bulb will have to be black-takked to stop the light spilling through

And where the string crosses an upright support, the string needs to be able to break to allow for touring so the strings have to be arranged that one of the connectors lines up there, or the string cut and re-wired to accept IEC plugs and sockets (which are definitely one of the most annoying connectors to wire up).

And the stage left figure starts a metre of the floor and goes up to around 6 metres so that all needs to done at height.

But it’s not too bad as the stage right figure is only a few metres tall.

And the strings are around 20 metres, with a light less than every 10cm.

That’s a lot of holes to drill.

As it turned out, we didn’t manage to break any of them, in the sense of having broken glass. We did manage to kill two or three individual bulbs though (that’s what the black tak is also for …).

On the whole, you can see why this particular piece is not my favourite. And that’s before the standard devising rigmarole of all the artistic types butting heads and all the technical types getting short-tempered (and callouses)

There was a reason why I’ve been at a receiving house these last few years (at least one).

Still, the cock shop has been stashed for a couple of days while the projector pieces go through their tech. And contrary to popular belief and experience, it hasn’t been too painful so far.

Of course, the mirrored flats only went up today, including the piece that’s flown point down at our increasingly vunerable dance floor. And the issue of time coding the composer for the offstage quartet is yet to be addressed …

I’ll sign off here for now … there will be more …