Well, in my time off, I got a ticket to see Kneehigh Theatre's The Red Shoes. It was amazing. This girl looses her mom and stuff, so she's sad, and she doesn't have shoes. So she paints her feet red. This old lady finds her, and makes her wear proper clothes and has new shoes made for her. But instead of getting proper black shoes, the girl gets red. She gets cursed with her red shoes to dance in them for the rest of her life, and she becomes miserable. She can't get the shoes off of her feet, so she cuts of her feet, but the shoes still haunt her. The church wont save her, but then God comes down and tries to take her to heaven, but she refuses, grabs the shoes, and renounces them on her own. She exits the stage, clearly free. The narrator says most people think she went to Hell, but the narrator disagreed. So basically, they took a story meant to tell people to follow the crowd and twisted it around to say that you should dance to the beat of your own drum. The whole thing was done with the cast in whitey-tighties and white wife beaters and the narrator would tell the story and pick who would play which role, so they would grab a suitcase labeled what they were and don the minimal costume inside of it. The set was minimal, but the doors would fold and unfold, white on one side and black on the other, and the stage would become the different places that the narrator spoke of. There was minimal talking besides the narrator - mostly dancing and music - but you still got all of the emotion. It was incredible..I was pretty blown away. Spoleto Festival pulls in some great talent. I'm so glad that I can say I was here and that I worked with that talent. I've gotten to experience so much.
After the show, I had just enough time to debrief a little bit while I ate and changed and got ready for my own show call. We had two shows Saturday - one at 7pm and one at 10pm and then strike. It was going to be a bit of an evening. I was coming down with a cold too, so that wasn't helping much. But I took some antihistamines and got on with my day. The first show went pretty smoothly. I felt bad for the stage manager though - at the end of every show he has cues planned for an encore and he always tells Katie to watch and see if the band comes back. Even when he really thinks there will be an encore, they never come back. Finally, on Saturday, he stopped planning for it and let them keep walking of stage. You'd think at some point he would have talked to them about an encore, but he never did. I wonder if they are used to playing in front of huge audiences who really dig the indie style of music. The crowd here is a lot of older, uppity people with some younger ones mixed in, so it was probably a really big difference in energy and response - and you know the performers could feel it. It's not only loading, teching, and managing a show that changes across cultural and local norms, it's the performance too. The whole show changes. That will be something good to thing about for my thesis.
Anyway, in between the first and second show we had time to eat. I ran to CVS - I think my cold got worse during the show so I grabbed some last minute necessities like Kleenex and cough drops and the like. I was pretty miserable. I tried to balance in and doze during the second show - I paid attention to the music and the stage manager and never missed a cue, but I was not fully attentive though the whole show. It wasn't very professional, but I got through the evening.
Once the show was over, we got right in to strike. The band and their roadies got the instruments and all their personal equipment out of the way. We started pulling up the Marley that masked the cable clusters in front of the monitors. All the sound cable was pulled and coiled. We pulled up carpeting from the booms and everything - basically just clearing the stage so we could work on booms and electrics on Sunday. It was pretty fast going and we were done a little after midnight, called back at 8am.
So we went home. I got straight in bed. I didn't need to wear myself out anymore than the sickness already was. Morning came pretty quick and we were back at the Robinson to start the load in for the third and final rep. We were only working a half day though - off at noon so we could relax before our tough day Monday (We were scheduled to go to Middleton and load in the outdoor theater there and then help with a bunch of rigging at the Memminger). We got right to work bringing in the electrics and preparing them. We were changing over from 2 electrics with 20 fresnels each to 4 electrics with 10 fresnels each. So Chris and Sean went up to the grid and started transferring weight while the rest of us stayed on the ground and started transferring lights. We also had to move some of the legs, borders, and raceways in order to get the electrics in the right spot but it wasn't too bad. Basically, we were putting most of the line-sets back to the way they were before Spoleto got there, so we all knew the process and got it done quick. It will make our final strike at the end of the week go a lot faster.
I think Jarrod got a little too confident that we knew the system though - I knew what was going on and I knew which cables to leave on the pipes and which to strike, but Katie doesn't do electrics so she didn't have as much information. So she struck a few cables that shouldn't have been struck and Jarrod got frustrated that we had to re-do them- it was a minor misunderstanding. But it goes to show, even when you have all the steps down and you know what you're doing, you still have to be just as careful and not cut corners and take all of the same precautions. Whether it's simply transferring cable, transferring weight, or doing a whole load in. We've all learned a lot and done a lot, but we aren't perfect yet. But even despite that, we got all of the electrics hung and cabled in no time.
We began striking the booms and coiling the multi off to the sides. The lights got stored still with their sidearms because we were just going to have to turn around and build new booms later. But that was for another day. Once the stage was cleared and safe, we were done for the day. We took the afternoon off and went to Jarrod's beach house and grilled out and swam in the pool in order to relax before our tough upcoming day.
After the show, I had just enough time to debrief a little bit while I ate and changed and got ready for my own show call. We had two shows Saturday - one at 7pm and one at 10pm and then strike. It was going to be a bit of an evening. I was coming down with a cold too, so that wasn't helping much. But I took some antihistamines and got on with my day. The first show went pretty smoothly. I felt bad for the stage manager though - at the end of every show he has cues planned for an encore and he always tells Katie to watch and see if the band comes back. Even when he really thinks there will be an encore, they never come back. Finally, on Saturday, he stopped planning for it and let them keep walking of stage. You'd think at some point he would have talked to them about an encore, but he never did. I wonder if they are used to playing in front of huge audiences who really dig the indie style of music. The crowd here is a lot of older, uppity people with some younger ones mixed in, so it was probably a really big difference in energy and response - and you know the performers could feel it. It's not only loading, teching, and managing a show that changes across cultural and local norms, it's the performance too. The whole show changes. That will be something good to thing about for my thesis.
Anyway, in between the first and second show we had time to eat. I ran to CVS - I think my cold got worse during the show so I grabbed some last minute necessities like Kleenex and cough drops and the like. I was pretty miserable. I tried to balance in and doze during the second show - I paid attention to the music and the stage manager and never missed a cue, but I was not fully attentive though the whole show. It wasn't very professional, but I got through the evening.
Once the show was over, we got right in to strike. The band and their roadies got the instruments and all their personal equipment out of the way. We started pulling up the Marley that masked the cable clusters in front of the monitors. All the sound cable was pulled and coiled. We pulled up carpeting from the booms and everything - basically just clearing the stage so we could work on booms and electrics on Sunday. It was pretty fast going and we were done a little after midnight, called back at 8am.
So we went home. I got straight in bed. I didn't need to wear myself out anymore than the sickness already was. Morning came pretty quick and we were back at the Robinson to start the load in for the third and final rep. We were only working a half day though - off at noon so we could relax before our tough day Monday (We were scheduled to go to Middleton and load in the outdoor theater there and then help with a bunch of rigging at the Memminger). We got right to work bringing in the electrics and preparing them. We were changing over from 2 electrics with 20 fresnels each to 4 electrics with 10 fresnels each. So Chris and Sean went up to the grid and started transferring weight while the rest of us stayed on the ground and started transferring lights. We also had to move some of the legs, borders, and raceways in order to get the electrics in the right spot but it wasn't too bad. Basically, we were putting most of the line-sets back to the way they were before Spoleto got there, so we all knew the process and got it done quick. It will make our final strike at the end of the week go a lot faster.
I think Jarrod got a little too confident that we knew the system though - I knew what was going on and I knew which cables to leave on the pipes and which to strike, but Katie doesn't do electrics so she didn't have as much information. So she struck a few cables that shouldn't have been struck and Jarrod got frustrated that we had to re-do them- it was a minor misunderstanding. But it goes to show, even when you have all the steps down and you know what you're doing, you still have to be just as careful and not cut corners and take all of the same precautions. Whether it's simply transferring cable, transferring weight, or doing a whole load in. We've all learned a lot and done a lot, but we aren't perfect yet. But even despite that, we got all of the electrics hung and cabled in no time.
We began striking the booms and coiling the multi off to the sides. The lights got stored still with their sidearms because we were just going to have to turn around and build new booms later. But that was for another day. Once the stage was cleared and safe, we were done for the day. We took the afternoon off and went to Jarrod's beach house and grilled out and swam in the pool in order to relax before our tough upcoming day.
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