Baltimore Theatre Project plays host to the performing arts aspect of Baltimore's enormous annual visual arts festival: ArtScape. Theatre Project is a studio black box performance space with 150 stadium-style seats, a 19' lighting grid, and a full-size, original acoustical band shell at rear of the performance space in full view of the audience.
Baltimore's Office of Arts and Promotions, the think-tank that makes ArtScape a successful experience year after year, accepts applications from local performance teams in all fields of performance work: opera, dance, theatre, musical, experimental, and even puppetry. The team selects 12 different shows to be performed every two hours over a three-day period. Each show requires a different lighting and sound plot with only a one-hour period of load in and load out between each show. As technical director and lighting designer, I looked to automation to make show transitions smooth and fast…using a small arsenal of intelligent lights to achieve the looks required for the vast spectrum of work: 10 High End Systems StudioColor 575s for general wash (five high sides stage right and five stage left); eight Vari-Lite VL3000 Spots for specials and effects (four downstage and four upstage); six Arri 2Ks with Wybron ColorRam II — for the top/back (Color Wash w/32 Custom Frames); and seven Color Kinetics ColorBlaze48 mounted on deck in the band shell to provide color wash.
Even small spaces need time to recover from performances. Using moving instruments and color scrollers in this year's lighting plot allowed valuable rehearsal and prep time to be focused on the performers, not the lighting rig.
Kel Millionie, technical director/resident lighting designer
Baltimore Theatre Project
Baltimore, MD