Details on the Israel Folk Festival dance gig[s], 2002 Pseudo-table-of-contents: 1: First attempt, set up and then sprinkled into oblivion 2: Second attempt, mostly successful === part 1 === Subject: festival, what festival Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 01:59:30 +0000 (GMT) From: hobbit@avian.org (*Hobbit*) So last year around this time you might recall me babbling about doing a big lighting gig in Kresge at MIT, for the yearly Israeli Folkdance Festival. I sent a feeler about it this year, and it turned out they definitely wanted help again, so I started noodling up how to do a light plot. I figured it would be cool to do a real design this time, and try to gear it toward dance lighting, i.e. as much sidelight as possible, and do a much better job than our seat-of-the-pants guesswork last year. Another goal was to actually map all the circuits at the wall-mounted pipes and up in the catwalks this time, to make it easier for MIT's own electricians to figure out what was possible or not, as well as us and other people wanting to do lighting in the place. It would actually make a nice web page for anyone thinking to design in that space. Joelll and some other folks working the Bobs gig apparently had a hell of a time finding available circuits to use. Despite the size of the place and what *appears* to be a shitload of nice wall-mounted connections at each hang point, there really aren't that many circuits that run to the in-house dimmer rack. In fact, the vast majority of connections run back to these big multi-connector panels backstage that don't go anywhere unless some group brings *in* extra gear and hooks it up, and there's no patch block between that and the in-house system. And the in-house system is an odd hodgepodge of stage pin and twist-lock. This seems totally dumb and nobody's quite sure why it was done this way, but better knowledge of what *is* usable from the in-house system is useful regardless, so I started a channel chart and mailed periodic updates to the new building manager. He's pretty clearly a longtime theater guy, who I took an immediate liking to, and we chatted lighting boards and electrics and union problems and smalltime .edu politics and such for a while. Anyway, as things progressed we added information as found, and now know exactly how many circuits *are* available at each position. I spent the requisite week and a half or so trying to figure angles and how to get sidelight from the rather wacked positions that Kresge offers. There are a couple of side-stage pipes but they're far enough upstage that they're only really useful *for* upstage lighting, and anything aimed farther downstage blinds the audience. The right way to do it would be adding booms at the outer downstage corners, and maybe some taller trees at the upstage corners for more high backlight, but they would look butt-ugly against all the unbroken curvy sweeps of wood and there aren't any circuits there anyways. So it was a bit of a headache designing decent side-lighting. Turns out that the right combinations of shooting from side-stage, house ladders, and the big middle-of-house rail at the house cloud can achieve a fairly even wash from fairly far out to the side -- not 90 degrees, but definitely not Mccandless 45 deg either. Eventually, I had a Plan in hand, and a fresh order of gel from BN all pre-cut to fit into what I was going to use. One surprising thing I learned this time is that apparently this Festival is the biggest, or at least highest-impact, event that Kresge gets all year. Everything else apparently uses less space, is happy with what passes for their default light plot, doesn't need much in the way of sound, or whatever. It's apparently fairly unusual for someone to waltz in with a real light plot and want to move instruments around and swap barrels and things. The event also takes over *all* the rooms downstairs, to corral 200+ dancers in while they wait for their slot, and then feed *all* of them up onto the stage for the finale. And all this for a 2 hour show. So I showed up Thursday morning bright and early to start hang, and the two union guys [one of which was just a trainee and relatively useless] eventually shuffled in and then it turned out that the Genie lift we needed wasn't in the building anywhere, but probably over at the student center. Also, the booth and hatches into the catwalks were locked, and the electricians aren't given keys to those. We couldn't do squat until someone *else* with the right keys was located and told to head over. This wasn't helping for a hang that I *knew* in advance was going to be slower than last year in the first place. Technically, only the union guys are allowed to touch any gear, and the CAC that lays down all the rules has apparently been trying to tighten down the political screws even harder on issues like this. So I basically had to guide focus from the ground, and the union guy, while nice enough and understood fairly well how to move stuff around, took *no* initiative for tweaking aim unless I told him exactly what to do. Which is silly, because he could actually see dark patches and how to blend things to correct for them better from up there than I could from the deck. But without a continuous flow of explicit guidance from me, "aim up, and a little more upstage, no, UPstage... okay, up a bit more..." he would just sit there doing *nothing*. So focus in general was sort of painful and slow. But after 3pm at shift change, John, the really cool guy we had last year, showed up, and he's much better at anticipating what someone is going to need. But even with his help, at the end of the first day it was still not done, and we booked in to continue the next day as well. Brighter and earlier this time, too. These guys roll into work at *7am*. Ick. The next day we filled in the rest of the washes from the MOH rail, and I brought it all up, and it looked *hideous*. But after going around for some touch-up, and possibly the fact that I and the union guy were a little more used to each others' operative styles, the second day finally brought it togther and it was starting to look pretty good. We filled in a couple of specials, I compensated some levels to get the wash even, and we called it done. I then spent most of the afternoon sitting up in the booth at the ETC Express 96 they have, happily banging in groups and subs and silly cues for when dancers run down the aisles and up onto the stage. After spending so much time playing with the off-line simulator for that board, it's a lot less scary now. By late Friday afternoon things were quite together and looking *way* better than last year, I had my neatened-up magic sheet in hand, and I figured the rest could wait until rehearsal Sunday morning. I went home and wrote up some initial notes for this very rant, which I figured I'd finish writing up later after the actual event. However, the next piece of text I wrote about this year's Festival was this: SUCK or, the real story of what happened in Kresge After receiving the call from Dave Beckman early this afternoon, I stopped by Kresge to try and find out the real story. I happened to run into one of the guys from the sprinkler company who had just finished installing a new sprinkler head and recharging the system, and shortly after talking to him I spotted Dave Kemp, the Kresge building manager, across the lawn and ran over to chat briefly with him. So all this is fairly firsthand from the folks directly involved. Basically, there was NO actual fire. A sprinkler head simply let go and caused a lot of flooding. However, the head was located in one of the worst possible places -- the *control booth* at the back of the main auditorium, where I had in fact spent the bulk of yesterday afternoon! Most of the water appears to have gone straight down, as opposed to all over the equipment in there, and was pouring out of the light fixtures in the front lobby and running downward into the basement. The Little Theater downstairs was apparently under about 3 inches of water by the time the valve was shut off, probably destroying its stage. The Cambridge building inspector has closed Kresge down completely until at least Monday, so there's no chance of it being cleaned up well enough to have Festival tomorrow anyway. Techie details: Apparently there's some kind of ventilation fan above the stairway up into the control booth that had either been turned off, or failed, or something like that, and without the extra cooling the room slowly got warmer and warmer overnight. Finally, the sprinkler head in that area let go, either due to it really having reached 135 degrees in there or that the fusible link was old and failed on its own. There isn't any particularly high-power equipment in that room, so it is sort of strange that the temperature would get that high. Dave Kemp was actually in there running some other show last night and noted that it was a bit warm, but not excessively so. Fortunately, the sprinkler was sort of on the other end of the booth from all the really expensive gear and most of the water went down and out to the floor below, so hopefully the damage is minimal. Little Theater might be a different story... So, festival is officially canceled this year, unless they manage to reschedule *very* soon. Kresge is doubtful, since it will take them a while to assess the damage and get things dried and straightened out, and they're otherwise booked solid for months. There aren't that many 1000+ seat venues available in the area -- maybe outlying high schools or something. For the sake of solidarity if nothing else, we went to the pre-festival dance party tonight, where I handed out copies of the above to help clarify things, especially for people who had heard the rumors of an electrical fire. A little later I realized that the HVAC in Kresge was probably still in "winter mode", and the weather had shot up to 60 degrees or so today, which always seems to throw temperature regulation in larger buildings for a loop. That might have had something to do with why the booth's extra ventilator shut down. Suck, suck, suck. Two days of work shot to shit, and we still need to recover the gel somehow. _H* === part 2 === The "replacement" Israeli fest finally got scheduled about two months later, and the venue they found for it was coincidentally the very same auditorium at Natick High where I've worked sound for NEFFA for the past 3 or 4 years. Fortunately, the rumors had already started flying before NEFFA weekend itself, so while onsite for that I tried to pay a little more attention to what it would be like to do lighting in that space and try to pick Clyde's brain about various issues while we were both there. My being fairly familiar with the room didn't offset the fact that NHS really doesn't have much in the way of decent lighting available to begin with, making the overall prospect fairly grim. Clyde knows more or less how to make their system stand on its head, at least with a little help from the 16 or so extra instruments and booms he always brings in. He also has his deployment and setup down to a fine science which he farms out to the usual helper crew of 3 or 4 with military precision. I would likely have no such advantage, and it was quite clear after another visit to the place that I would have to rent extra gear to have any hope of getting sufficient light onto the stage. The show would again be on a Sunday afternoon, with rehearsals in the morning. This implied that Saturday would be the obvious right time for lighting and sound setup, on a fairly leisurely schedule and allowing plenty of time for fine-tuning. But as I started talking to people, the gloomier that prospect became -- primarily because occupying the space on Saturday meant paying a school custodian $50/hr to come in and sit on his ass and do nothing. So there I was, trying to juggle rental-scheduling and figure out the target setup time to state when putting out the call to techno-fandom for extra help, but getting silence or disappointing answers from those who were supposed to know the details. Basically the promise from the venue included some crufty over-stage striplights and about eight instruments out in the house -- which couldn't even throw any farther than a third upstage without casting shadows from a big ol' dead-hung batten in front. Said batten holds 16 or so more lekos but would be basically unusable, since access to same would require a larger crew to stabilize a really precarious old ladder for someone to go up and focus. It was also unclear if those were already preset for a play, or were going to be preset the *following* week -- I couldn't really get a straight answer out of anyone, and eventually just decided they were out of the picture. I eventually found out that there is almost *no* additional gear hiding in storage anywhere -- no booms/bases, no extra instruments, nuthin'. Just a few short jumpers and twofers stashed up in the catwalks, and some glass roundels for the strip-lights stashed in milk crates in the office [which I only knew about because Clyde uses them]. To shortcut the sad tale of about a week of frantic phone calls and email traffic, the upshot was that we would only have very early Sunday morning to set up, with little or no extra crew, and teaching/rehearsals were to begin at 8am. And *nobody* from techno-fandom was about to get up that early on a Sunday morning, so I was basically hosed. To the festival committee's credit, they did work very hard to pull together this "replacement" festival in the first place, and were up against various mutually hostile smalltime school bureaucracies themselves. I apparently had jumped into the middle of this by trying to reach the English teacher who supposedly knows *anything* at all about the lighting system, and asking to contact the student assistant they were going to hire out to us, and trying to just get an idea of what my options were. Because that's what a lot of lighting design is -- just knowing your options. Between the implication that my questions had caused concern that I was going to come in and change everything, and the fact that the school's PBX seems inextricably linked with that of the Natick town hall, I soon realized that it was all getting more political than I would have liked, and resigned myself to limping through this year as best I could and perhaps teaching those in charge of the auditorium how to suck less next year. This was echoed in said English teacher's obvious frustration as he became fairly candid with me about what that auditorium *could* be, but was not. I still maintain that the festival committee should have been a little more hardball with the school people and a little more communicative in general. These things don't just happen by magic, despite what you think you've seen at Disneyland. And I did want to try to do a decent job for the event, which meant not just laming out and accepting a vague "what's already there is what you get" from the venue management who didn't understand what we needed in the first place. So I arranged to rent some minimal extra gear -- just eight instruments -- in an effort to *not* have the stage look like total dark crap. I made sure to survey all the circuits in the place so I'd know where I could plug things in and avoid the *really* crufty 2-wire stage-pin outlets. It was already way too late for NSI/Colortran to send a manual for the old Patchman control board, but I had figured out most of it by playing and Clyde was kind enough to email me the one missing and quite undocumented detail I needed about the scene memory presets, in addition to a bunch of other info about the whole system. [Incidentally, it speaks CMX only. Now, if I'd just had Boots' board...] With that and the circuiting map and an idea of what positions could hit where on the stage, I was able to prepare a semi-reasonable design, circuiting map, and patch list. I then made a very careful punch-list of tasks for that morning, assembled all my paperwork, and prepared myself for a fairly hellish day. The rain didn't help, either. I arrived at 6am that morning, loaded the rentals out of the truck, and got the custodians to open up the office where supplies are stored and then go find me the tallest ladder they had. The student assigned to us showed up fairly promptly, which was good because he was basically the rest of my crew and seemed quite clueful about stuff in general. [I've forgotten his name and he hasn't made any contact with me since, so..] While he banged my patch-list into the board, I went topside into the catwalks to collect some cables, and just as I had watched Clyde do at NEFFA, lowered the gear I needed in a cloth bag on a long rope and then raised the gels for the eight "pocket" instruments back up. Stupidly enough, there are no spare circuits on the two over-stage battens, which Clyde generally works around by running Edison extenders all the way back up to the catwalks, but instead I decided to bring one circuit each side out of the side-stage floor pockets and just run up next to the downstage legs to the first electric where I'd hang four instruments to fill in upstage. This worked well and was out of the way of incoming dancers, except the lesson learned here was in choice of instruments -- don't try to match a 500W fresnel with a 575W source4 for wash lighting; there's a profound difference in brightness! By skimping a little and swapping cheaper fresnels in for what should have been a pair of 50deg source4s, I wound up with a bit of a mess that was hard to compensate for since the mismatched sets were twofered together. There wasn't time to change anything, either, since we had to get finished with the stage and clear it so Ira could start teaching the finale number. We slammed the red and blue roundels into the right slots in the over-stage strips and flew that mess back out, and moved to dealing with stuff in the house. Meanwhile, Dave and Kenny and Aaron had gotten most of the sound stuff going and handed Ira a mic so he could yell over the continual background chatter that the dancers seemed incapable of silencing amongst themselves. The other tasks were to add and wire in two source4s to the three crufty but still functional 360Q lekos on each side-of-house box boom, which was a total bitch to reach up to because the ladder they scared up was just a bit short; and then go up and refocus the cloud-pocket instruments [colortran lekos with really iffy mounting hardware]. The side box-booms are actually handicap bathroom-stall rails, and aren't really designed to withstand lighting C-clamp stresses -- there are several deep pits punched into them where clamp bolts currently are or have been in the past. I tried to be gentle, which was fairly easy given the extra friction from the side-hang position. A couple of the existing lekos needed a quick-n-dirty bench focus and we had some very minor confusion due to one missed channel in the patch, but eventually the side booms were happy and I went topside again. It turned out that the clouds are structural enough to hold weight, and the boards laid across the struts are a good clue about how things are done up there, so it was possible to get sort of in *front* of the lights for better access. I still had to basically lie down on the cloud and hang my head down into the pocket to see where the light was going, and look at everything upside down while wrestling the big ol' monsters into position. I was very glad of having brought the FRS radios, which allowed the student and I to talk channel numbers over the cacophanous ruckus of Ira's rehearsal. I could only really use two instruments per side to constructively wash the stage -- the two lowermost of each side, since the pockets are slanted. The other two in each were only good for the downstage third, but I used those for straight-on red and blue color-wash since those had less output and were less likely to show shadows of the FOH batten. So overall I had the usual instrument-stingy warm from left, cool from right setup with a small bonus of a couple of colors to add in. Only having colors from the pockets and the midstage second-electric downlights was a bit odd and didn't really count as true back or top light, but that's all I was going to get so I counted myself lucky to even have that much. We finished this stuff up *just* as they were ready to start the full run-through of the groups. I had to briefly revisit the stage to tweak aim on the first-electric stuff and change one misplaced roundel, and then we hastily moved the board up to its mid-house position and I set it up under a kludgey red work-light I had also thought to bring along. I balanced up the washes as best I could and stuffed them into a couple of the memory presets. Clyde's instructions seemed to work, and I was then ready to go. Even in this time-crunched day, I held sacred the ability to do a real rehearsal and at least make cue notes, even if I couldn't write actual cues on this board. I didn't want to be thrashing around during the actual show, like last year, due to not being able to pay attention to the actual dancers at run-through. So this time I was able to see what they were wearing, tweak looks while they were on stage, take notes, and be able to reproduce the best thing for them later. The board has an interesting and very primitive way of doing submasters -- each channel has a three-position toggle switch above it, which assigns that channel to one of three submasters A, B, or C per side, and those in turn have their outputs governed by the X/Y crossfaders. But I found that it was actually much better to think about the whole system backwards, with the crossfaders supplying a level to the three per-side submasters, and they in turn sending a proportion of that level into all of the selected channel output faders, which then all run through the soft-patch to turn into CMX dimmer output. Electronically, that's probably what really goes on inside the thing, possibly with diode matrixes to implement HTP pile-on for whatever output is currently highest. It makes sense from an electrical engineering standpoint if modern computerized boards aren't on your radar yet, but nobody would be likely to design a *new* board that way anymore. For the record, and skip this paragraph if you're already falling asleep, the "Jesus Christ operator" for the memory presets is this: memories 1 and 2 refer to the X and Y channel banks themselves, i.e. they're not memories but they just enable X and Y to work. 3 thru 10 are the actual eight memories, and each memory button is a toggle that just enables its contents onto the channel bus in an HTP fashion. To record a look, one types RECORD [its LED goes on], then either 1 or 2 to refer to whichever bank of channels is giving the current look, and then any of 3 - 10 to record into that memory, at which time the RECORD LED goes off again to indicate completion. This captures each current channel level and whatever sub it is assigned to. The student didn't know any of this either, and was interested to learn it after I had messed around and proven that it worked that way. Most people just leave 1 enabled in X and 2 enabled in Y and run in generic two-scene mode. I didn't really bother with *crossfade* per se since it was to black between acts, but rather used X and Y in opposite conjunction as a single fade-timeable master for output from the six subs I had available. I left one channel bank all set to sub "C" to preset any per-act specials into, and the rest was just various flavors of wash and extra color wherever it could conceivably help. Once I got into the swing of it and got the fade-time sliders set right, things were working pretty smoothly. I had a little time between run-through and house-open to chow a little food, rewrite my cue-sheet into something readable, and field a couple of requests from the groups. I also made sure to play with some of the house-batten stuff and find anything else in there that was usefully aimed, such as a special for the live band or a white center-stage spot. I figured there might be a couple of surprises, and I might as well be best prepared to deal with them. And the finale would likely need as much light as I could wring out of the system. I even got to kick back a little and talk to Sasha who wandered by and who I haven't seen since FTP. The student had a soccer game to head off to, so I thanked him profusely for his help and turned him loose. By house-open I was feeling much better about everything, and was really ready to roll. The show itself went reasonably well. Lighting remained pretty basic all round, but I was still able to span a spectrum of looks from quite warm to fairly cool and get a little more color detail out of most of the costume themes. I only did some funky intro stuff for one group that already knows me fairly well and had sort of hinted at slightly fancier entrance cues on their tech sheet, but everyone else was basically lights on, lights off, done. But the morning frenzy was worth it, because they could for the most part look good across the *whole stage*. And that's what I'd been trying for all along. The only tech problem arose just after the show was over. All the groups squeezed onto the stage for the big clusterfuck finale, and I had everything rammed up as high as it would go and some of the FOH-batten stuff cheated in to just give a little more coverage. Then they all started their run-off down the stairs and back up through the aisles, at which time it was time to start slowly bringing the house lights back up ... but they wouldn't come up. Only then did I notice that my "take control" light for the house-lights section of the board wasn't lit and refused to light, and I called down to whoever was backstage to try the set of controls down there, but those were dead too. So I just left the full-bore stage wash up, backscattering enough light into the house to at least see by, and waded down through a strong opposing stream of dancers and then exiting audience to investigate. Nothing obvious was wrong [yet], so I had someone make an announcement over the PA that we were having trouble with the house lights and this was all we had and would people please be careful when exiting. I ran off in search of one of the custodians, who sauntered slowly back toward the auditorium with me in front of him sort of acting like Lassie after little Billy has fallen down the mine shaft. Why couldn't he pick up on the urgency and safety issue, and walk faster?! 'Cuz he's a $10/hr town employee, and it isn't his job to be fast. But then when he arrived backstage he did one thing I was loath to start trying, which was randomly flipping breakers on the dimmer panel, but in the process happened to hit the one that *was* off! We examined its faded hand-scrawled labeling more closely and realized that it not only controlled the convenience outlet on the panel, but also fed the low-voltage control side of the old analog house lighting system. This breaker is also side-mounted on the non-recessed panel, *right* at the height of a typical dancer's butt and next to the entry/exit path, and during finale there had been *many* dancers crowded into that little space at stage right waiting to enter. So obviously, one of them had bumped the breaker off during finale and probably didn't even realize it, because if you'll recall, large groups of dancers tend to be noisy. So then we had to tear down and restore the place, which was not trivial since all of the hang positions had to be revisited, the roundels removed, the side-booms rewired again, cables hauled back upstairs for storage, etc. Dale was kind enough to arrive and help out, which was excellent and possibly served to prove the existence of T-F to some of the committee. Because the student had claimed that they had at least some notion of a default patch written down in the office, I didn't bother trying to put back what they had -- in fact, I completely zeroed the patch *and* all the memories so whoever would next use the board would have to start totally clean before the board would do anything at all. Let whoever comes next *not* be confused by artifacts from old shows, I thought. As we were finishing up, the rest of the festival committee people simply *vanished*. They were no longer in the building and not visible anywhere outside as we loaded the last bits back into my truck -- they just bailed, with no followup, no mention of dinner plans, nothing. This was sort of disconcerting, so Dale and I headed outside and chatted a bit until we realized we were getting soaked, and headed our respective ways into the soggy evening. The committee is considering moving to NHS as their default venue, possibly because it's easier to schedule than Kresge and certainly has much more parking for out-of-towners. The hall is sort of old and crufty in general, but has a certain coziness to it, and much better acoustics. The downside is that real backlight would be difficult to do, and real sidelight really wants some side-stage booms and/or pipe-end instruments, so *proper* lighting would need quite a bit of extra gear and prep. There are plans to upgrade parts of the auditorium, but that's likely mired in townie school-budget politics for the next couple of years at least. I suppose it could just be done the same way again, too. I can only hope I've convinced everyone of the need for more setup time and zero politics, because I'm *not* doing this again next year if the given timeframe is the same. _H* 020613