First Evening After Break

My first week at Krannert was filled with room measuring and inventory. Students were on break so there weren’t many rehearsals happening. My first serious work in theatre began Tuesday evening after most students returned. Beginning at six on Tuesday, there was a 5-hour LX hang where a crew of tech grad and undergrad students worked to hang lights for the upcoming February Dance performance. For the first two hours I learned a wide variety of lighting jargon and set up techniques. It was dusty, everyone was tired, and we still had three more hours to go.

Then came break. Out of no where Skittles (a petite woman who changes her hair color almost every week, not literally the candy) pulled out a huge assortment of snack food, water and the crew crowded around for five minutes ate and talked. I haven’t been around legitimate theatre people in a very long time (no offense Urbana High, but the atmosphere and the resources really are different beyond the high school level). I forgot how personable they are…and how colorful their language is. It reminded me a lot of when I’d go to my dad’s rehearsals with him when I was little. It was a brief chocolate and profanity fest.

After ten minutes, we got back to the work grind. Tom, my sponsor, was popping in and out. Grant, the grad student I was mostly working with for the first two hours, set me up with Robert, and undergrad. He was great fun and extremely high energy, which he repeatedly confessed was due to the cup of coffee he had before arriving. Robert’s goal was to “make things pretty”. We revisited all the lights we had set up and attached the multicables that Grant had completed stringing into the appropriate outlets. We made sure all of the cables were untangled, and then we tied any loose cable into a hitch know, which Robert taught me to tie. It’s commonly used in theatre, and is particularly useful because if one end of the rope is suspended to weight or some other object, which is often the case, you can still tie a complete hitch with only one end.

After all the cables were secure, Robert checked got the ok from the master electrician to go through all of our tests before moving on to the next step. First he checked weight. He raised the bar to its performance height and checked all of the safety measures. Next we checked all of the lights themselves using the master remote. You type in a circuit and a light number and it turns the light on if the system is completely functional, and you can move down the line light by light.

Our last task for the evening was to attach the colored gels. The master electrician’s chart denoted which gels were used for which lights. Gels are assigned a color and a number based on the company that produces them and the shade. For example, when we needed a purple gel it was marked as an R78. It may seem like an unnecessarily complicated system, but it helps distinguish between various hues. If someone said “just grab a purple”, with out the gels actually being attached and the lights on, it’s nearly impossible to tell a purple and a blue gel apart.

I was done for the evening, I was only there until ten, not for the full five hours, but Tom said it was perfectly alright if I felt like getting home a little early. I gladly took him up on his offer. As I was exiting, the master electrician told me I was a “lovely unexpected hand”. I told him that I would be returning on Thursday, and he said that he’d be happy to have me around and that they would start focusing, and that they’d be happy to teach me. I don’t know exactly what focusing will entail, but apparently it’s more interesting than the cable and circuit work.