This past weekend marked the end of dance studio spring recital season, a season that included 6 weekends of performances from 5 different dance studios over the course of 7 weeks. The weekend before last was my favorite dance studio: Dance Repertoire out of West Allis. They have a combination of professionalism and talent, along with skillful and visually striking choreography that makes them truly stand out.
The lighting systems included a light blue and light pink front wash (Rosco 60 and GAM 160), dark amber, dark blue, and teal top lights (Rosco 21, Rosco 80, and Lee 116). I used four side lighting systems, an amber low "shin kicker" light (Rosco 09) right at floor level, a mid flesh pink (Rosco 34) wash at chest height, high lavender (Lee 052) wash about 8 feet off the deck, and a system of PARs about head height with a saturated indigo (Rosco 59) color.
All photos were taken from the back in the booth as I was running lights. sadly there were plenty of amazing looks that I wish I would have been able to get photos of but could not because they were too close to another light cue. All were taken with my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens at f/2.8 and 1/250 shutter speed and ISO1600. They were shot in RAW and then color corrected, tweaked for exposure, and exported to JPEG in Canon's Digital Photo Professional. Several are also cropped.
This was an exciting dance show for me for one other reason as well: it was a new technology experiment. I am in the process of selecting a new lighting control console for the PAC to purchase next year, I've narrowed the options down to two choices and was able to use a demo model of one of them for the week of this show. The console we demoed for Dance Rep was the ETC Congo Jr.
This show is normally a control nightmare. This year it consisted of 57 unique dance numbers spread out across two days of performances, with about half of the numbers being performed each night. This is just about the perfect console for this type of show, as it is both fast to program and incredibly flexible.
The hardest thing to wrap one's head around with this console is that it uses Reverse Polish Notation (in reference to the Polish logician Jan Lukasiewicz) where the operator follows the number. In this console then, any operation keystroke both executes a command and appends onto previous ones, eliminating keystrokes and allowing one to build command lines dynamically rather than all at once. For example if I wanted to set channels 12 through 18 and channel 24 at 75% intensity, the keystrokes on a typical command line console would look something like this:
[Channel] [1][2] [Thru] [1][8] [And] [2][4] [At] [7][5] [Enter]
It's fairly self-explanatory and relatively close to common phrasing so it's easy to learn and master. The problem is that none of this is executed until you hit [Enter], it's just built up in one long command line as you type, and on some consoles you can't actually see the command line you're typing, and frequently if you mess up somewhere you have to go back and start all over from the beginning. That same command in RPN would look like this though:
[1][2] [Channel] [1][8] [Thru] [2][4] [+] [7][5] [@ Level]
The primary advantage to this is that the above line is actually 4 separate commands, as each operator key (a non-number key) executes a command. So, simply hitting [1][2] [Channel] selects channel 12, all commands after that simply continue to append the previous command until you hit [Clear]. So if I mess up typing and select [1][2] [Channel] [1][9] [Thru], accidentally including channel 19 in my selection, I can just insert the commend [1][9] [-] right after to remove channel 19 from the selection, without having to go back and reenter anything. Once you get your head around it, it's actually much faster.
The Congo also handles cues far differently - to start with, there are no cues as a normal person thinks of them. Finally this console answers the burning question of anyone who's ever programmed on ETC's venerable staple consoles Expression or Express (the most popular lighting consoles in the world): aren't cues and submasters the same thing? The answer is essentially "yes, they are" and it's why Congo just records everything as a "preset" - which is nothing but a snapshot of channel intensities and attributes - essentially a single look on stage. Any preset can be assigned to a master playback fader (pictured above) and used as a submaster. You can also stick presets in an order in a list, which Congo calls a "sequence," assign them fade times and you've got yourself a cue list. It's a remarkably simple concept, but makes the system far more powerful.
For comparison let's look at how I programmed Dance Rep last year with an Express console. The Express console has a single cue list, which is played through in numerical order, and can store up to 600 cues with numbers between 0.1 and 999.9. Because Dance Rep consists of multiple dances across multiple days with some commonality I couldn't just start recording at Cue 1 - as the cue list would turn into a chaotic list of cues with no way of easily telling which cue belonged to which dance. So, I devised an organizational system for cue numbering which looked like this:
{Day Number} {Dance Number} . {Cue Number}
The Friday show was day #1, Saturday day #2, and each dance on each day was assigned a number in the order in which they were performed. Thus I could know that the first cue for the 15th dance on Friday would be numbered 115.1. Since they would be played back in order, so a cue list for the Friday show might look like this:
100.1 Walk-in House Lights
100.2 House to Half
100.3 Black Out
101.1 Dance #1 Start
101.2
101.3
101.4 Blackout
102.1 Dance #2 start
102.2
102.3
102.4
And so on ... It works quite well so long as I know exactly what the show order will be when I'm programming and no one dance has any more than 9 cues. The annoying part is when there is cross over between days; say I know that dance number 15 on day one is the same as dance number 27 on day 2, that means I need to manually copy all the 115.X cues over to 227.X and do that for all 15-20 dances that are performed both days. Since all the dances have a different number of cues I need to be very careful that I get them all. It is, frankly, a pain in the ass. The worst part is when the show order changes at the last minute (and it always does); because you're screwed. You either need to try running the cue list out of order on the fly (not fun) or spend half an hour (at least, if you rush) reprogramming every dance number to be in order (even less fun). That situation is simply the closest to lighting hell I have ever been in.
Congo is much different. As I stated before, Congo saves everything as a preset, you can save up to 9,999 presets numbered between 0.01 and 999.99. These presets can be arranged, in any order, in sequences. You can have up to 999 sequences. A sequence works very much like a mini cue list, and it contains all the crossfade information normally associated with a cue. That information stays with the sequence, so even if a preset is used multiple times in different sequences, or even multiple times within the same sequence, it can have different fade times each time it is used. Finally, you can create a master playlist, which plays sequences back in an order you define.
So, what I did for Dance Rep was to assign each dance number it's own sequence number, ranging from 1 to 57. Each sequence was also given a name that matched the name of the dance. Custom presets for each dance number were numbered starting with the dance number; so for example custom presets in sequence number 23 would be numbered 231, 232, 233, ect. Some presets were used multiple times, for example preset 10 was a blackout and inserted at the beginning of every sequence as a transition between dance numbers. This is especially useful because if the dance group had decided they waned a little bit more light on stage during the blackouts, usually so the dancers and stage crew could find marks on stage, all I would have to do is add some blue top light to preset 10 and bam, every blackout in the whole show is updated. In the picture above you can see the completed sequence list for Dance Rep on the left side of the screen, and the details for sequence 2 "None of this is Real" on the right. On the bottom of the right tab is the list of all 7 cues in sequence 2 and on top it is showing the details for the selected cue (or "step") 4, which is preset 23, displaying channel and intensity information for that preset.
Each night before the show all I had to do was type out the show order into the playlist, a very simple task. In the photo above you can see the arrangement of information I normally used during the performance. The left screen is split into the Live view on the left, showing currently active channels and intensities on stage, and the right side shows the current playlist (which also doubles as a great on-screen show order so you can follow along). The right hand screen is entirely occupied by the master playback, which shows the current sequence, the cue list, what cue is currently active, and cross fade information. If you look closely you'll notice that when I took this photo we were rehearsing the finale, sequence 37, and I was on cue 2 / preset 371. Of course, as I mentioned, something always changes. 15 minutes before we opened doors for the Saturday show the head of Dance Rep stopped by the booth, she was concerned about the amount of time a few consume changes might take and wanted to insert two solo numbers from the Friday performance into the Saturday one to cover the changes. On an Express console this would have been a major hassle, I couldn't have simply inserted the numbers because the cue numbering system is rigid, I would have had to copy 3/4 of the show to new cue numbers to make room. On Congo it was a simple matter of inserting the proper sequence numbers into the playlist, it took less than one minute.
I really enjoyed my time with Congo Jr and really did not want to take it back after the show. But now I get to look forward to my next demo, with the ETC Ion console, in August for CCYM's production of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
