Filling a Different Pair of Shoes: LOGAN part 2

My, how fast 7 weeks can fly! I’d mentally planned this installment to closely follow the last, but, as often happens, life intervened. Surgeries, a trip to Montana to do a show… the beginning of THE MOVE… other things required more direct attention.

But I’m finally back to take a quick swing through the LOGAN CENTER FOR THE ARTS performing arts spaces. There’s likely be a little overlap with the last post, but so much the better… it really is a COOL building…

It may be best to start in the basement and work our way up. I won’t bore you with storage rooms, but I do think it’s worth a couple shots of the costume shop. It won’t mean a lot to many, but having a dedicated and purpose-built space for this part of this program is HUGE, especially given that the costume shop, when I started here 7 years ago, was half of a break-room of a defunct State Farm Insurance building.

pic thru the hallway window looking into the shop

The new Costume shop has an office for a Shop Manager (a position that has ben promised, but has yet to be budgetarily approved), fitting and laundry rooms, a lovely large storage area and a well-organized and spacious room for the building of costumes and pieces.

scary how nice, clean, and.... new it looks, eh?

Moving up to the first floor, we hit the Scene Shop. It’s an odd duck in that it has to serve two separate constituencies… it serves as our Scene Shop as well as the Build Shop for DOVA (Department of Visual Arts). So the tools and some of the space is shared… strange, I know.  But given that the build floor, including the tool area used to be the 2-bay garage of the aforementioned State Farm Building, what we have now, is swanky in comparison. There’s now a large dedicated build floor for us, as well as an attached, but separate paint deck with SINKS and SHELVES, and ROOM TO WORK!!!! ….pardon my excitement in writing such things.

looking from the NE corner of the room toward SW, my (now former) office is the set of window nearest the center of the picture

same location, but showing the stretch into the paint deck

from the build floor, looking toward the  DOVA-dedicated area

looking from the SW to NE, notice the gallery window above

... and the SKYLIGHTS!!!!

The flow of the shops is another thing that I’m particularly pleased and impressed with. Materials go straight from the loading dock into the backdoor of the material storage rooms, then through the inside doors into the cutting area, and from the cutting area to the build floor and from there to the paint deck. It’s a very open, manageable and intelligent layout.

pic from the gallery above looking down into the shop. those platforms you see in the foreground is part of the set for the production of PROOF that will be mounted as part of the grand opening. I've designed the show, but alas will not be here to see it.

And moving on from the paint deck there are a set of large double doors that lead to a hallway and then directly into the first of our two theatre spaces.

THEATRE WEST – is a flexible space (commonly called a black box, in theatre parlance) that can seat between 150-200 audience members. What is flexible about it is the seating. We can place it around the space in different configurations thus allowing the team working on a show more flexibility in deciding what the physical relationship is between the stage and the audience. It has a mezzanine that can be used for audience, or for action, and a lighting grid overhead with easy access to lighting storage areas and the control booth (from which a show is typically run). In each of the room’s corners there are access vaults that allow actors (or audience) in and out, while sound-and air-locked from the lobby areas surrounding it.

 view from one of the mezzanine entrances

looking down into the stage space. there's a lunch event going on in there at the moment, but you get the idea. this set-up is called a 3/4 THRUST because there are audience on three sides. it's one of a myriad audience-set-ups that could be chosen from.

the floor is painted for our last-quarter production of LION IN WINTER, 

but I think this give you a good idea of what that relationship is between stage and audience. This is a very audience-friendly space

Just around the corner from THEATRE WEST is…

THEATRE EAST – a 100-seat proscenium theatre space with mechanized lighting battens and flies that allow for easy access to things overhead. What’s lovely about this space is the comfort level of the audience-to-stage relationship. The audience enters at the same level as the stage, and then moves to seats that are offset lower or higher than that level. It’s not a huge stage, but that’s part of its’ charm, and how it fits into this academic program. At the base of the stage are two towers (one at either side of the stage) that allows direct access from the stage floor to the grid and control booth. These could also be used an ancillary staging spaces (which we did during AN ACTOR PREPARES (see my posting of May 11, 2012).

the seats... yeah... we didn't get to pick the upholstery.

the stage as seen from the audience

the booth! I know it doesn't really seem impressive, but considering the hinky platform-and-window we were using in our OLD spaces...

The challenge of the moment… the very one that we began to realize this past academic quarter of our initial residence in this building and these wonderful new facilities, is that the level of technology is so much higher than what we had available in our makeshift spaces in the Reynolds Club. Lighting and Sound capabilities are top-of-the-line, and frankly, we’re not that sophisticated… yet.

With new staff and a better understanding of what we WANT to accomplish, the program will be able to start growing into these spaces and using them more effectively. I’m sad that I won’t be here to witness this growth and shift, because its’ been so amazing to witness where the past 7 years have gotten us all…. to this amazing facility and wonderful spaces where art can grow.