This latest dance show definitely put another notch in my 6-shooter as far as lighting goes. In a rather odd set of circumstances, I got to run my Kresge show after all and finish what I had started, even though it was a different show in the end. Nonetheless the results were educational and satisfying. In our last episode, the Israel Folkdance festival had been canceled by a failed sprinkler head and subsequent water damage and building shutdown. Turned out that the most damage was suffered by the big video projector and some other less-used gear just sort of kicking around on the bench at that end of the booth. The lighting board had its slipcover on and was farther away from the sprinkler, so it got maybe a few drops on the cover and was still fine underneath. Little Theater downstairs of course bore the worst brunt of the whole thing, and people at MIT worked very hard to clean and fix everything and get the building up and running again. So once Kresge reopened, scheduled events pretty much resumed from that point. Still, it was a bit of a surprise to receive a poke about two weeks later that there was another group doing a dance show in the same space and needing someone to do lighting. The South Asian American Students group [SAAS] does a cultural festival once a year, along much the same lines as the Israeli fest but a bit more varied. [The grouping in this case refers mostly to folk of Indian, Bengali, Nepali, Pakistani, etc descent.] I got in touch with one of the producers, who seemed delighted [that's a pun, since they had no lighting yet] that I was willing to see what they needed. As things progressed it became clear that this group's tech needs were even more complex than the Israelis, since they wanted actual *effects* and changes keyed to music here and there, and a full cyc, and maybe even some strobes and other odd stuff. These things had been provided in previous years by Jon Gonda, aka Gonj, who's way more versed in these things than I could hope to be -- but this year he was apparently too hosed with lighting the Dance Troupe gig downstairs in Little Theater to help SAAS out. With the knowledge I had already gained about the dimmers and circuiting and various other quirks of Kresge Main, it made even more sense that I should go ahead and do what I could for SAAS this year. We hooked up with Dave Kemp, the tech supervisor at Kresge, to start scheduling things. Dave is relatively new to Kresge itself but has been in the business for 467 years, and provided mountains of help and sanity-checks. He calmly walks that delicate line between solidly-booked schedules, union issues, everyone who thinks their gig is the only one on campus at the time, the occasional surprise flood, and some serious limitations on what he's able to do imposed by the Campus Activities Complex office. Recently the CAC has been clamping down even harder on who can do what in that space, for example prohibiting anyone but union MIT electricians from wrangling lights and wiring or going up in the catwalks to focus. Which is idiotic, because most of the electricians by their own admission don't really deal with lighting esthetics and need to be told *exactly* what to do during a focus. Anyway, Dave pointed out that the SAAS group really needed a separate tech director as well as a lighting person, but the upshot was that I picked some of the TD roles where I could because there wasn't really anyone else to deal. In general, I would not be able to do as much myself as Gonj did last year because of facility and my own limitations, but I already had a fair notion of what I could do with Kresge's existing gear and some minimal add-ons. I figured I could try getting the job done without taking certain, ah, traditional liberties. Near-future scheduling also promised to be rather warped, because of other events and spring break in the middle of it all when most of the dance groups would be out of town. Rehearsals, rentals, focus, etc would all have to be slotted in wherever they would fit. I sat in on a rehearsal, and scribbled notes on what the choreographers told me they had in mind for their lighting. A few sanity-checks happened right there, such as if you light a cyc sort of gold and then put dancers in red and gold costumes in front of it you will see disembodied floating heads. Most of the groups seemed to be really hot on cyc-color changes, rather than tweaking the theme/direction/mix of the main front lighting, and *nobody* mentioned top or back light. What almost all of them did say was "lots of light" and emphasized the importance of facial expressions to the overall art form. In an effort to figure out what colors would look good on most of the dancers, I borrowed a couple of peoples' arms and went at them with maglite and gel-book, and determined that the standard "bastards in the mist" combination of R02 and R60 would work fine as a base wash and playing with more saturate reds and blues and such would fine-tune it. I tried to ask about the stories and meanings behind the music, and what the overall mood of each piece was, and to relate that to the best way to light it. The director lent me a video from last year, from which I could see the general content of the show and see what Gonj had done for it. This was very useful and scary at the same time, because it was clear that he had set up a *lot* of extra stuff that I probably wasn't going to come close to doing given the time and facilities constraints. But just from the very brief time I had had to play with the plot for the Israeli fest I knew that I was already on the right track and would probably be able to produce something reasonable nonetheless. One thing I try to capture in any light plot, whether it's my own or someone else's, is the thinking behind the design. This is rarely noted down anywhere in the design process, since the usual manifestation anyone else sees is a list of instruments, gels, positions, circuits, and other mysterious numeric incantations that the lighting designer spews forth. But it's the driving *artistic* component behind it all that I am still trying to figure out if I have any decent aptitude for at this point. I was pretty much on my own with this one, and kept thinking of it as rev 2 of the intended design for the Israeli festival. The primary goal was to get as close to dance lighting as possible, i.e. mostly from the sides, to emphasize 3-dimensional body contours and avoid having dancers look flat. Kresge doesn't make this easy. It isn't a fly-house theater. There are no wings or legs, just long curvy sweeps of wood that sort of wrap around the back of the stage, and thus no place to stick "tormentor" booms for true side-lighting without having them sit right on stage in all their butt-ugly glory. There are two rather sparsely-populated [9 source-fours each] ladder-like hang positions out at the sides of the house that provide almost exact standard 45-degree McCandless angles relative to center stage, but the full stage is a lot bigger than those can really cover and it was obvious that these dance groups were going to use every square inch of real estate. There's a front-of-house arc with a rail that goes almost all the way across, with 42 source-fours more or less equally spaced all the way along it -- mostly 19deg, which makes sense since the rail is 70-mumble feet from the stage on average, but with an odd sprinkling of 26deg and 5deg. There are also two small box-booms at about midstage on either side and about 15 feet up, but light aimed anywhere downstage from there tends to land in the edges of the audience because the front of the stage is a huge quarter-circle with seating all the way around the front edge. There is a single flown truss upstage with some parcans hung on it, which if aimed too far downstage blind the front rows of the audience. Above the stage are these solid white "cloud" panels that block most access from the grid except for where you might be able to peek the snout of an instrument out between them here and there, and in general not nearly enough dimmer circuits available at any of the positions. [Feel free to ask me for the latest circuit map if you find yourself needing one! They really should just make a web page out of it, that someone wanting to light in that space can just pull down and use for reference.] So my challenge was to get a reasonable base wash of mostly side-lighting, and enough of it, and add in the other needed specials and such, from these various extant structures. Fortunately, I had given it a lot of thought for the Israeli festival already and had come up with a reasonable combination of things that would work. Last year's problem was that I thought everything was just too dim, and had planned for a *lot* more instruments in this year's plot. A slight modification thereof would likely get enough light onto the deck for the SAAS show as well. The solution in this case was a split warm/cool wash from different sides, which I have finally decided is a reasonable strategy to conserve instruments because the audience doesn't really care which specific directions key/fill comes from as long as it's different. I would also run out of instruments fairly quickly, since there was a large block of them in the middle of the FOH rail that a> I didn't want to use because it would be straight-on front light and b> Dave Kemp wanted to reserve for some other events he needed to light in coming weeks. So it was going to be warm from one side and cool from the other, with punch-up color washes added in, and all from angles as uniform as possible across all points of the stage. Natural outdoor light would generally dictate a south-facing stage and mid to late afternoon sun, at least in the northern hemisphere, which obviously doesn't map to all of South Asia but by the time I thought of that I didn't want to redo everything and I doubted that it would matter here. So I set it up for warm from house left balanced by the optional deeper blue wash from the same side, and cool from house right balanced by the red and seldom-used green. That way either side could be faked into looking more "neutral" by adding in its respective color components, so for example if I really wanted something warmer from house right I could produce it. I have also seen red and green, hung together but slightly separated horizontally, used to produce a warmish amber/yellow wash but which gives these interesting red and green shadow edges behind objects. [Okay, so that was at Epcot around Christmas, but *I* thought it looked neat.] So I figured having that combination available from the normally cool side would lend more versatility. Because now there were more instruments used on house right than left, I threw in a couple of generic lavenders from the left to fill in stage center-center and because I anticipated a couple of dark areas if the main wash didn't quite match up. To achieve all this, instruments for each wash had to be scattered between the midstage booms, the side ladders, and the FOH rail and then balanced into groups at the right intensities to produce uniform light. The color washes all came from a slightly more frontal angle than the main warm/cool, since it was to add color and not to sculpt dancers' forms. Where twofering was done, I arranged to still be able to separate the stage into roughly left, center and right strips with any upstage/downstage separability left only as a side effect if it happened to work out. Since the areas were so wide anyway, the only anticipated use of this was possibly shrinking down to a more center-stage area for small performer groups. But there weren't really any smaller groups except one single-dancer act, and most single-area lighting wound up being used here and there in the skits. I also wanted to avoid *any* front-light splash on the cyc, so that the cyc color would always stand out even in full wash. This worked out nicely because the angles upstage were somewhat wider than those downstage, almost 180 degree opposed at a couple of points from the side booms, and could completely miss the screen while still lighting the stage. Figuring out how to get all this wired and focused involved significant guesswork, since if you haven't done a lot of this before it's hard to really envision how it's all going to *look* in real life before you hang it and play with it. In an attempt to get ahead of this a little bit and pick the right colors, I threw together a quick and dirty light-box at home, with two bulbs and small holes to emit light and converge on a cylindrical object set on a little model "stage" with a white paper backdrop. With this I could drop the gel-book samples across the holes in combinations to see if colors would work together, and to match filter transmission curves and relative brightness. I also made sure to check the looks with the bulbs dimmed, as well as at full. Not exactly a full light-lab, but it really helped get that job done. Later that week it was serious deja-vu as I stopped by BN Productions and bought yet *another* wad of gel and precut it all to fit where I intended that it should go. Showing up to a focus with all the gel pre-cut saves a lot of time. I also had to work around some of the annoying wiring limitations in Kresge, because of the odd mix of stage-pin and twist-lock circuits and instruments and a general unwillingness on the part of the electricians to move instruments around between positions. Focus took a very long day from 7 am until 8 or 9 that night, covering almost two full electrician shifts, the duration of which was likely due in part to me being somewhat fussy about how things were aimed and blended together, but also the simple fact that I had these fellows touching over 50 instruments that day. I decided to just accept the limitation that the 12 parcans on the rear truss could only produce just so much backlight wash and that the edges of the stage would just not get any to speak of. They were in a bit of disarray from before, so I redistributed them into a nice evenly-spaced row, mounted them as high as possible, and gelled them R, G, B to then mix up any given color of backlight. These are the source-four pars, with the rotatable lens rings and changeable lenses, with the MFL lenses currently fitted. Nobody knew where the extra lenses for them were, or I might have changed them all to WFL since the throw is so short. But once all the lenses were prealigned the same way to throw their oval spots upstage/downstage, they matched up much more nicely than I had seen done in the past with them and it wasn't hard to fine-tweak them into reasonably even coverage. The truss was the easy part. It was a bit harder to get nice uniform side and color washes from the mix of 19deg and 26deg source-fours in front, when many of the instruments themselves are in desperate need of proper bench-focus, having been hung up there for three years now without much maintenance and just being periodically wanked on by students and other folks who believe that relamping is just like changing any other light bulb. A lot of them were pretty patchy-looking, and while I could ask the electricians to try and get the field a little flatter here and there by fiddling with the alignment knobs on the back, some of them were just too wacked. The cuts of R114 frost I added into everything definitely helped, however, as did running some barrels farther in or out to help widen or tighten the spreads since precise gate focus didn't matter, and after everything was more or less pointing in the right directions I could go up to the board and mess with relative levels to even things out. Upon viewing everything from way back in the lighting booth, it was easy to see what instruments needed a little reduction to get fairly uniform light across the stage. A few specials finished off the hang -- one on the "choir loft" at house left where many of the skits would take place, a couple of no-color spots on center stage for small acts, and a pair of amber-vs-bluegreen "woodsy" gobo shots just blasted low across the stage crossing each other. Then, it was Dave's turn to come in and focus up his stuff, taken mostly from the center of the FOH rail -- his goal was to just get light on the stage and not really care too much about direction or color, and he and the remaining electrician were done in about an hour. We traded some notes about what the other had in case we wanted to use some of it in our own shows, and sat up in the booth for a while tweaking and balancing and programming subs, and finally got out of there pretty late that night. The board, of course, was that same Express 48/96 which seemed completely scary and complex last year even after studying its manual, but this year I had spent enough time on other boards and ETC's offline simulator [even if it meant having to boot NT] that I now regarded the Express as a useful and versatile tool that I knew exactly what to expect from. This is a valuable skill, because apparently the overall ETC user interface has become sort of a lingua franca when the industry talks about lighting boards. Where last year I could barely put together a few submasters to run some washes up and down, this year I felt completely confident using many more of the board's features. First thing I banged in were some macros to bring channels up in a filament-saving fashion -- to 2%, wait two seconds, then up to 80 -- and some groups to quickly access the house lights or the ugly over-stage tophats. And that was in conjunction with the preheat sub to just let *all* the stage channels ghost to the lowest possible level of 1%, which with that dimmer rack still produces a bit more than the barely visible happy filament glow I really wanted. But then I could use all this from the keypad-only remote focus unit down on stage, and right from there start collecting channels into groups for the full-stage washes. By the time the show ran, I was freely using a whole bunch of board features and capabilities -- full timed cue lists with much of it created blind and just typed in, realtime cue updates, groups, macros, complexish effects-subs, manual grabs of fades, different submaster pages for Dave's stuff vs. my stuff, preheat, offline editing, and dimmer soft-patch. Soft-patch? Yes, because despite careful allocation of the existing circuits near the stage, we agreed that a minimal amount of extra equipment would have to be rented anyway to handle the backdrop lighting. Dave came up with the really great idea to use the existing and enormous projection screen as the cyc, especially considering that the show was going to include some video projection anyway. But since I had stolen all the truss parcans for backlight we still needed some kind of border lights for the cyc. The screen is about 25 feet wide. Options were discussed and angsted over, covering far-cycs flown up top and/or a groundrow of striplights, and since the only available time to deploy whatever it was going to be was the morning of the show, it was finally decided that a simple groundrow of four zip-strips was the right answer and that the dancers would simply have to avoid them. These would need six additional circuits, for which stage-pin outlets are available at the sides of the stage but only run back to the big "mystery panels" backstage instead of over to the main dimmer rack. These additional circuits actually exist all over the venue, but are rarely used because it means bringing in additional gear to connect to them. We decided to rent a small dimmer pack and tie it in backstage -- there are already three 400A disconnects back there, and DMX already patched to a nearby outlet, and a hamper full of socapex fanouts that hook into the distribution panels, so the rest would be a no-brainer of just laying out the striplights and plugging them in. The Express can address some huge number of channels but only has 96 physical channel sliders, so accessing higher channels can only be done through the keypad. It turns out that in the current setup, channels 91 - 96 are unused anyway, so what I wound up doing was softpatching *channels* 91 - 96 to address *dimmers* 97 - 102 and set the base address of the rental pack to 97. Then I could have direct sliders to the cyc lighting at the top of the board, even if I didn't really need them after the groups and subs were set up. What thinking out the channels ahead of time bought me was the ability to fake up the cyc colors by throwing three extra instruments into the base focus -- a trio of mostly unused parcans hung off the upstage cloud rail, aimed vaguely at the back wall. Why they're there I'm not sure, since all they can really light is the door to the freight elevator that opens onto the stage, but what we were able to do was gel those three units with the same colors as I intended for the striplights, and aim all of them at one spot on the back wall where the screen would drop. Then I scared up three more in-house circuits to run over to them. This would allow us to rehearse and at least see roughly what color the cyc *would* be behind the dancers, even though the full effect wasn't there, but most importantly it allowed me to group these units and the repatched cyc channels together and get them into the *cues* at the lighting rehearsal a couple of days later. It also confirmed that the screen would scatter light well enough to function as a good backdrop. And all without having to rent the strip-lights for an extra week. The lighting rehearsal was one of the most important parts for me, and gave the choreographers more confidence that I had my shit together for them. I arrived way early on that Easter Sunday to get some things set up for it, only to find that one of the other event that day was still going on -- a huge hell-n-brimstone Baptist service with full choir, several preachers, and a large band including a grand piano and classic Hammond organ. They were using my fake-cyc set to light up a *banner* they had nailed up to the back wall of the stage. I had to wait around for that to finish up and load out, and they never came back that afternoon for the rest of the organ or the genuine ol' Leslie speaker that went with it, so I had to just push these items off to the side of the stage and leave them there. After they were clearly not coming back for any more stuff, I once again had the entire hall to myself, which seems to happen a lot and makes me wonder what those large "reserved for CAC setup" blocks in its schedule really are. Anyway, I wanted to set up as much of the show environment as I could for the dancers, including getting them used to setting in full dark. I lowered the screen and spike-taped out about where I thought the groundrow of strips would go, spotted in some bits of glow tape [which I was glad I had thought to buy], and then went off to load my floppy full of prestaged framework of all-fade cues to frame each act into the board's memory. I also dug up an intercom headset and cable and ran it out to about where in the seats I wanted the choreographers to sit to see how their dancers would look. [Dave K. didn't want us to move the whole board down into the house, as is often done for such things, but it is still way cool that he trusts me enough to be in his hall and the booth alone and take proper care of the equipment.] By the time the groups started arriving I was actually ready to rehearse, except that I hadn't really had a chance to listen to the music yet. My notes were still sketchy, and they were still running off a boombox at this point, and I was stuck way up in the lighting booth away from the stage so that even with the booth window removed it was a little hard to hear musical details. Nevertheless, we soon got into a groove where I would get the choreographer on the clearcom and just bring up looks one by one, while the dancers would just have to hang on stage and be patient. Keeping them quiet was often difficult, but at least they understood why we were doing this and could help out by modeling some costumes in various areas of the stage. I would remember as much as I could from my early notes and we would natter back and forth on the 'com and noodle out the whole sequence, while I saved it into the cue stack and made more explicit notes on what accompanied each cue. For convenience I numbered all the cues with a base of ten times the act number, using point-cues to stuff enough of them in between, and only using even-number decimals [30.2, 30.4, etc for the third act, for example] in case I needed to insert something later. Sort of like line numbers in traditional BASIC programming. There was still plenty of space left to put in cues for the skits later on. I already had built a framework of fade-to-black cues numbered n9.9, which the last cue for a piece would just fall to at the end. Then, I ran back through the stack just for the choreographer to make sure it was right and the crossfade timing was reasonable, and then she would finally start the music and run the dancers through the dance while calling the cue changes back to *me* so I could take better note of when they occurred. It all went surprisingly smoothly, and I left that evening with the hits mostly noted down and my own CD of all the music. Later I had people email me MM:SS times from the CD where there were changes I still wasn't sure about. Over the intervening next week I listened to that CD about 20 times, which required a little more effort to pay attention because I didn't understand any of the words and had to do it all by rote abstract sound. So the notes were full of things like "staccato dry male vox" and "4 drumbeat measures, then GO" in an effort to describe places in the music, since I wasn't going to have a time display at runtime. Along with this I ran the stack on the ETC simulator and made yet more notes until I really knew the music well and figured I had all the change times down cold, even though I *still* thought some of them occurred at strange times. But I wasn't about to mess with the choreographers' part of the art, if my role at that point was being the monkey to hit the "go" button at the times they wanted. Anyway, that evening we were all pretty happy with how things *looked* -- all told there was plenty of light, and I wasn't even running quite at full all the time. Angles were pretty consistent and made a nice uniform lattice of flattened-X-shaped shadows between arrayed dancers, and they had brought enough costume examples along that we could really see how to make the colors jump out. The backlight I added in really helped outline figures, at least under where the parcan wash hit them from the truss, and center stage would be where the audience mostly looks anyways. The fake-cyc splash up on the screen was sufficient to see how that would blend into the picture, and I assured everyone that the color they saw there would be the same color, but a lot more of it, from the real cyc lighting once it arrived. Several pieces ended with a front-light fade to a final freeze silhouetted against the cyc, and then fade that, so having a strong notion of how that would work was important. After the dancers cleared out, the director and I noodled up a few of the cues for the between-act theme skits, we saved it all to disk [twice] and finally got out of the building around 1am. Another long but productive day. Now, everything had to just sit undisturbed [and dry!] for another week or so while other events ran in the space. The other leadup tasks were mostly paperwork. It turned out that the student activities organization behind the event wanted me to have an actual contract and some kind of insurance coverage, and since I wasn't a commercial vendor carrying my own liability, we arranged to waive part of that and have me covered under MIT's insurance in some way. Well, the lawyers would probably have a field day with it if I dropped a light on someone's head *or* vice versa, but having this paperwork seemed to make them happy so they would quit interposing yet more bureaucratic busywork in the way of getting the job done. It's sometimes amazing how minor functionaries in a large organization can totally hold up progress by insisting that some little procedural nit be dealt with, especially when they are also the office that cuts checks for things. But the woman handling this was very nice about it all, and in theory I'm now on record with MIT as a "contractor" of some kind. Ironically, that still doesn't let me go up in the catwalks and wrangle electrics, so it really is just a paper-ass gesture that serves little useful purpose except to make the lawyers richer. But back in the real world, I also wound up dealing with the various rental orders for the striplights and blacks to flank the screen. After being assured by MIT's head electrical supervisor that Kresge's backstage disconnects were already equipped with full cam-lok output, I went by to check and realized that no, we would have to tie in the usual bare-end tails anyway and made sure they got added to the order. I have already written about my miserable experience with High Output and their snooty theater rental manager, but that aside, I scheduled delivery of four zip-strips and the dimmer and various cabling for late on the Friday afternoon before show-day. I arrived with the blacks from BN and when High Output showed up, a small gang of us staged the gear in the hallway and attacked it with *more* pre-cut gel, loading those 60 little rectangular frames with combinations of clear silk and color. Why? Because I don't like the pre-colored cyc silk that Rosco makes, it just doesn't let enough light out. I had come up with an R/G/B set of better matched gel that emits much more light, but still wanted the spreading and smoothing effect of the striated silk filter. And getting them all pre-gelled would save a lot of time the next morning too. Using my silly little prototype 1kW "linearized" Torchiere dimmer, we tested all the circuits in the units, and noticed that some of the blue and green gels were already starting to smoke. Eep?!?! I ran down the hall and found Gonj, and sanity-checked with him that this was normal behavior and that one should just run up new strip gels and let them "burn off" for a while after which they'll settle down with out any damage and be fine. But I didn't want to do this in the downstairs hallway with a nearby smoke detector, so I figured it would wait until the next morning when they were on stage in the bigger space. See, this is one of those little things where experience is the best teacher, or failing that, reading a rant that someone else writes up after having been through an experience. Still with a little remaining apprehension, we stashed all the gear in Little Theater's dimmer closet down the hall and went off to yet another rehearsal over at Walker. Here I talked to the choreographers again [where it was nice to speak face-to-face again, instead of them just being voices on the other end of the clearcom] and firmed up my grasp of the music and the timing. Many more people had brought in the real costumes, many of which are really vivid and pretty and elaborate. More run-throughs happened, in which I played "virtual lighting booth" and tried to use arm gestures to indicate the lighting state changes during the pieces. They probably all thought I was totally nuts. Show day finally arrived. I arrived at the crack of 7am again and of course nobody else was there yet, but they began to trickle in and eventually we got the downstairs dimmer room opened up and could bring the gear up to main stage level. John Quinn, the same really gung-ho electrician from last year, arrived to start the tie-in, and he not only tied in the feeders but also labeled everything and strain-relieved the multi connector. He rocks. Meanwhile I was on stage hanging the blacks from the aluminum curtain track that runs along the back wall. Kresge already does have its own stage drapes that normally run on these tracks, but they are a fairly ugly off *white* for some strange reason and not suitable for any event I could imagine. We had requested two MIT "stagehands" for that morning, but the two guys who showed up had never even *seen* drapes like our rented ones let alone flown them. This is completely typical of how various MIT offices meet stated needs, by the way. I wound up in the Genie lift again, big surprise there, but this time my use thereof was blessed by the *CAC manager* on duty who came over to make sure we were okay, so I guess that really made it legit. When it's crunch-time, necessity makes some of the rules. Even the medium-weight commando cloth is bloody *heavy* when you're holding 22 feet of it up in the air, but I sort of ran the rest between my legs and sat on it as it came over the genie bucket rail and managed to get the first few ties on without dropping everything. The two 12-foot wide sections neatly filled the space between screen-edge and where the curtain track dove into the wall, so I never used the extra 4-foot sections at all. I was a busy boy, but today I had plenty of help. The other show-staff folks understood the concern about keeping the drapes clean and helped feed them out of the shipping box without dragging, and then they helped uncoil and run out the power cables and did a great job hiding them neatly under the excess drape and making it all look nice. We laid out the strip-lights in a row about a foot and a half from the screen and fired them up, where I confirmed that my soft-patch and grouping had done the right thing. They finished smoking out as I did initial alignment. I changed one lamp, that wasn't actually blown but just somehow weak or internally half-shorted, and since they're all in series, it seemed to be feeding all the other lamps too much voltage. The "fake cyc" fixtures had been aimed a bit too high, it turned out, making strange shadows of the truss against the backdrop, and John and I agreed that physically moving them lower on the rail wouldn't really make much difference but that they should simply be aimed a little farther down to blend in with the strip wash. After a little fiddling, during which there were allegedly *no* incidents of midair climbing between genie-lift and clouds to tweak certain instruments, the shadows were pretty much gone and the cyc wash was about as good as we were going to get it. Zip-strips just plain can't spread that far, but here the idea was to have cyc light behind the dancers, not way up above them! The strips and the extra parcans all together formed sort of a "mound" of light on the screen which in the end looked fine for the purpose. I had bought a roll of blackwrap, and to dress the groundrow and hide the inevitable white-light leaks we folded it lengthwise which perfectly matched the 1-foot height of the strips and covered the fronts thereof with a uniform featureless black band. Together with the drapes, all this nicely framed the screen, on which I could now throw some really nice, pure colors, and my previous concerns about the dancers looking sliced in half by an ugly row of lights quickly faded. I ran around doing or delegating various other stage-manager type safety tasks, such as making sure to stick little bits of glow-tape on the corners of various things on stage and along the groundrow safety-line, so that dancers wouldn't trip over the monitor speakers while entering or bonk their heads on the striplights when setting in black by crouching down upstage. I also spiked center-stage and the corners of the "magic box" single spot where several acts would sit, and gaffed down whatever else seemed a hazard. The audio guys needed some indication of where to place mikes, except that they couldn't be too far downstage or else the two front fills of the new "distributed" Bose system in there would cause feedback. [There are a number of annoying problems with the new house audio setup, not the least of which is that two of the front speakers are mounted in a way to cast big fugly shadows into light coming from the side ladders.] I guess it sort of falls to the lighting people, who get to make it dark in the house as well as light, to be sure these safety issues are covered. The directors wanted all changeovers done in full black, even if it meant leaving the audience sitting there wondering what was going on. We eventually decided that for some of the complex changeovers, it would be safer for the audio guys if I cheated just a little bit of light onto the stage even though it would look kind of silly with random people scurrying back and forth. The stage was never totally dark anyway, because the big video projector's notion of "black" still threw a dim but visible greenish-gray rectangle on the screen and backscattered a little onto the stage. We didn't find an extra person to stand near the front of the projector and "cue the cardboard" to fix this, but the a/v folks claim that they're well aware of the problem and someday are going to build an automated widget to drop a flag in front of the lens when needed. We confirmed that said big video projector had been repaired and was working again, so that we'd have full video capability from peoples' various sources including laptops and DVDs. This meant having a couple more people up in the booth to run the various sources, and also meant that there was no longer the anticipated risk of a video throw from lower down being blocked by objects on stage as we were somewhat apprehensive of a couple of weeks before. Video was an important part of this show, with section titles and logos and silly in- between shorts. One dance piece by a solo woman had her start on stage in a dramatic single-direction cold wash, where she performed lots of martial-artsy kata while DVD video ran behind her showing lots of rather chilling pictures of some of the current problems in Nepal. About halfway through the piece the theme turned more hopeful and showed much more pleasant scenes in the video, along with a minute-long fade into warm wash instead and all ending on a positive note. Very subtly thought out and nicely executed, I thought, and right in keeping with the "Ummid" theme of the festival, or "hope" in Urdu. Next thing was to try and firm up all the remaining cues between the acts themselves, which was interesting because the skit script had changed a bit from the copy I already had. The "theme" folks and I sat down and worked through it and I had a little time to get most of that pounded into the board and make notes on the remaining bits to fix up later. But it was time for the full dress run-through, which we needed to have *done* by about 4pm so that people could go eat and change and do makeup and get ready for the actual show later on. The producers got on the clearcom as the show callers, and we worked out some clarifications on cue-calling methodology and who should call which parts. I did some amount of clue-dropping over the 'com as usual. It was clear from listening that the producers and people backstage were rapidly learning more about how to call and run a show, because there was less and less confusion and extraneous chatter as things started to pull together. And the music sounded *so* much better through the real system! The runthrough went pretty well, with the bits known to still be missing sort of arm-waved past. While watching the stage full of dancers in costume, I found myself sneaking up a little more level here, a bit more color there and updating some of the cues. Because of that I screwed one or two cue-hits but at least knew exactly where and why, and noted a couple of last-minute changes that some of the choreographers popped into the booth to ask for anyways. Things flowed reasonably well in general, and everyone was starting to get really psyched and cheering each others' groups on. After runthrough, almost everyone vanished for dinner, and I emerged blinking into the nice warm afternoon sun to get some food myself before going back in to finish the cue stack and work up a couple of quick fancy effects for later. Somewhere in the middle of this the camera crew showed up, and for a while they were about the only other people in the building as I sat there at the board trying various silly things and doing final tweaks on some of the looks. Then I threw as neutral a wash as I could on stage and left it there so the video folks could hang a sheet and white-balance, and by then the performers were starting to return. I got the attention of the right people and finalized the missing cues for the skits, made sure there weren't any extra cues in the stack, and at some point realized that the house was open even though nobody had announced this over the 'com. It was time to stop dorking around; I brought up a gentle three-color splash on the cyc and left it there as a curtain-warmer. It took a long time, several house-to-half hints, and some announcements piped out to the lobby to finally get everyone to clue in and sit down, and finally things got rolling. Kresge's new audio system has a subwoofer mounted up above the stage in the clouds, just pointed out across the house, which happens to directly target the lighting booth. Bass is mostly nondirectional, but perhaps not entirely. The thumping was coming straight in at me through the open window in front of the light board, and I thought the damn booth was going to rattle off the ceiling a couple of times. But it was really excellent. I heard the audio guys muttering something about "almost distorting" over the 'com at one point, so I popped in to say "yeah, but for *this* piece it can't hurt to push the limit!" The answer came back, "hmm, I thought you were the *lighting* guy..." which made me mumble something about wearing several hats, but we were all having a pretty good time with it. For all its hard work and hidden logistical headaches, the actual show was beautiful. This time, all my cue-hits were *dead* on in the music -- all that listening to the CD really paid off. The endings with fades against the cyc worked *really* well, as did the piece with a bunch of handheld blue-LED lights in black and then against dim amber. The music was loud, the dancers expressive, their lines straight, the costumes gorgeous and almost luminous at times, and the crowd was rowdy and very appreciative. Changeovers still took a while, but nobody cared. The audience could just barely see when dancers came out to set in the pseudo-black, and started howling and cheering before anything actually happened! Even the "meatball theater" skits ran smoothly, with no stumbling, and high kudos to the sound guys for juggling all those cantankerous lavalier mikes. The video cues ran correctly, after a little prodding. Nobody dropped their sticks or fell over anything, there weren't any nasty bursts of feedback, and I didn't lose any lamps. By the time the final "Bhangra" act went on, the whole house was a-rockin' and after that, all the performers ran up on stage to hang out for a while and I just *had* to go down and mill around amongst them and share their joy at having pulled off a successful show. I got to play a bit here, by leaving the board running a couple of effects-subs to slowly and randomly crossfade combinations of the various color washes, backlight, and the cyc so it would all make sort of a surreal changing light on everyone. Maybe that *wasn't* such a great idea since the groups started clumping up and taking lots of pictures, but nobody seemed to object. I got several positive comments from people, and if there were any complaints about my work, they were never voiced in my hearing. Eventually people started to drift out, leaving the organizers milling around and starting to clean up. There was still a lot of teardown work to do before we could go home. We wolfed down a couple of samosas and some of the other yummy food that had been brought in from the vendors out in the lobby, and got busy. The drapes had to come back down, the striplights had to get un-gelled and readied for return, the dimmer pack disconnected, the wires coiled up, and everything loaded back into the High Output hamper. I donned my TD hat again and several people pitched in to help, and we were *supposed* to have more stagehands for this to Officially Run The Genie. The producer had to call over to CAC *again* and eventually this *one* guy who only speaks Portugese shuffled in and brought forth the Genie. But again, he had no clue about drapes so I went up to untie them. The SAAS folks did an excellent job of feeding the stuff back into its box and actually making it all fit, which initially seemed somewhat iffy. I taught a couple of people proper cable- rolling, the striplight gel-frames were bundled back into their little sets of 15, and in a surprisingly short time, everything was tidied up and ready to roll back downstairs to storage. The rest of my gel would have to remain for a while, since the catwalks were already locked up, but I would get it later next week after Dave recovered it. Watching the show come together like that and being part of it was a really moving experience. I woke up the next morning with a lot of its music pleasantly stuck in my head, and sort of rode the buzz for the next couple of days. Eventually I'll be able to hear that music *without* mentally twitching the "go" button... _H* 020422