Dance fest - fini

So I'm done with the NC Dance fest, and damn, are my legs tired. That joke never works. so over the course of six days I saw and designed or semi-designed better than 20 dances, many of which I saw for the first time the afternoon that they were to perform.

It was yesterday that I kinda took stock and realized that this is one of the hardest gigs I do each year, because I have so little time to tweak and adjust anything. It's talk through the piece with the choreographer once without hearing the music, then run the piece once with lights, and if we have enough time in their tech slot, make changes and run the piece again with lights. Usually we don't have enough time so I get to see each piece once, sometimes marking through the piece instead of dancing full our and about half the time not even in costume, then run it for an audience later that evening.

Without screwing anything up that the choreographer may have mentioned in passing three days ago.

All the choreographers were very gracious and understanding of the constraints we were all working under, some of them just didn't have the vocabulary to communicate with technical personnel. I find that incredibly frustrating, as we as technicians are expected to understand the nuances of their world, but they frequently don't take the time to even think about learning ours.

As I said more than once this weekend, I want to work with directors and choreographers that fall into one of two camps. I either want to work with people like John Gamble from Greensboro, who has a great understanding of lighting and how to achieve the effects he wants (it doesn't hurt that he was a lighting designer before becoming a choreographer) or I want to work with people like Justy Turnow of [project incite] in Charlotte, who doesn't pretend to know much about lighting, but cuts me loose to be creative and trusts my artistic capabilities.

Most of the choreographers fell into the second camp, and that made them fun enough to work with, but a couple simply couldn't form complete sentences when talking to me about what the piece should look like. That adds time to the process that we don't have to spare in this environment. If you don't have a picture in your head, how did you design the dance to begin with? And especially if you're a touring artist, how can you not know what your dance has looked like other places?

But it was overall a pleasant enough experience. I don't know if I'll do it again next year. There's never a guarantee that I'll be asked, but it's even mor up in the air now, as the woman who has run the tour stop in Charlotte says she's burned out and doesn't want to do it next year. So we'll have to see if it even happens next year before we think about whether or not I'll be part of it.

Strike was after the show, and some of the dancers stuck around to help. I always appreciate volunteers, because there are plenty of things at a strike that just require hands, not necessarily trained hands. We had to strike the upstage two booms on each side of the stage so that the opera that I'm lighting this coming week can load their set in tonight and tomorrow.

A boom is a piece of pipe screwed into a heavy base with lights mounted onto it. At UNCC, these booms are around 15' - 20' tall and have a rope that ties off up to the grid. So we send someone up about 80' to the grid, have them untie the boom, and then try to control the descent of a 20' pipe with about an extra 60 lbs of lighting attached to it. It takes about 4 people on the ground and one in the air. The we strip the lights off the pipe while folks are holding it, and unscrew the pipe from the base. Lather, rinse, repeat four times.

Then we put all the lights on a rack and take them down to storage, then we put the booms in storage, the bases in storage, the cable in storage, then we take up the dance floor. See, dancers, especially modern dancers, can't dance on a wooden stage floor. It's too rough and they'd end up getting splinters in places nobody wants a splinter. For ballet, it's more about traction than splinters, but still no wood floor. So on top of the stage floor for every dance concert you lay down a second floor called marley.

Marley is a thick, two-sided (usually) flooring product that comes in about 5' widths and spans the length of the stage. It's also ridiculously expensive. The dance floor to cover the stage at UNCC is probably upwards of $25,000.00 to replace. So we take up all the tape holding down the marley, and roll all that heavy shit up onto rollers. A single panel of marley once it's rolled up for storage is usually 100 lbs. or so. Repeat eight times to cover the whole depth of the stage. Then move the marley cart into storage.

I left before the marley was done. I was off the clock by then and the UNCC work-study studentia had that bit well in hand. They'll probably find a way to get back at me this week as I do the opera, but I'll take it. Me and my busted-ass toe that I dropped an empty boom pipe on. Owie.