Ken Longert Productions, the New York-based provider of production, sound, and lighting services for live staged events, has recently added to its lineup of available products.
The new products available for rental are the Color Kinetics line of LED lighting units and Accord Exhibition’s CLICK line of structural assembly systems. Longert praises the latter product as a cheaper and faster system for building almost anything; KLP is the New York area’s exclusive distributor for the Accord line.
Longert took on the Color Kinetics line after seeing the Broadway musical Hairspray, which makes extensive use of the units (Kenneth Posner is the lighting designer.) “The key to success is affordability,” he says. “To make things cheap and easy, you have to own your own equipment, and it has to be the latest and greatest. This means staying on top of all the latest technology.”
KLP has gone through a period of change since the events of September 11, 2001, when it was displaced from is home at New York’s Pier 92, one of the city’s top trade-show venues, where it had served as the in-house production company for 20 years. (The venue was taken over by the Red Cross and FEMA during those terrible days). Since then, it has become a different entity altogether. “I had always wanted a full-service company that was unlike anything else in the city,” says Longert, “a play that would do just about everything and offer an alternative to the multiple specialists out there.”
Indeed the company now provides comprehensive lighting, sound, staging and rigging packages, complete installations services, and project management out of its new shop in the Bronx. In the last year, clients have included Disney, Barney’s, The Rolling Stones, Off Broadway’s Cherry Lane Theatre, the New York City Marathon, and the Black Congressional Caucus.
For more information about the company, click here.