Today I received an email update about a Cirque Du Soleil show I ordered tickets last month to go and see. It is a new, limited time only, show being produced at Madison Square Garden called Wintuk. I am a huge fan of Cirque Du Soleil and ordered tickets as soon as I heard about it in August, even though the concepts for the play are still being worked out. Cirque redefines the way I think about theatre every time I see one of their productions, which is why I enjoy watching them so much. Wintuk seems to fall right into this category with a promise of acrobatics, puppets and projections. There is a simple story line behind the performance that is set in a city that gets no snow and the journey of a boy to find where it has gone and to bring it back. I‘m pretty psyched because the shows going to end in what I can only expect to be the greatest on-stage snow storm ever. I‘m particularly intrigued to see the snow effect since the current show that the Opera is teching uses snow too. If you want to find out some more information about Wintuk the go to Click. There‘s a short video about the show on the site too, but I am a little disappointed they took down a video of their early storyboard and sketch ideas for the show. I‘m counting down the days to I get to see it. It runs from November 1 - January 6.



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Tailers set designer Lara Fabian provided me with a prelimary set sketch this morning. A short drama about the nature of want, the Tailers is set in a hotel room. We’ll be relying on a drastic color shift to turn this warm, welcoming space into a more cold antiseptic space as time goes by.

Gear selection is a problem. The budget for Crown Point is tight. Here’s the situation. The space has a lighting stock of about 70 Source Four fixtures ranging from 36 to 19 degree. They also carry 30 PAR 64’s all WFL. There are 36 dimmers in this antique space. These have varying, large capacities, and are re-patched using a patch bay with sliders.

That system would be entirely adequate, if not for my needing to light a new musical act every night and create a comprehensive lighting design. For budgetary and, thankfully, artistic reasons I have really tied whatever lighting elements I pull in for environmental design to the music element. I think in the scope of the festival they share the same space for an audience member, they both represent living art the audience gets to actively participate in; whereas film, and to a much lesser extent theatre are more passive mediums. Thus the design for the environment and music need to be more alive, more personal, and more organic. To me this takes the design to a place where the entire theatre can change it’s depth and form, but we can also choose to focus on individual musicians or points of interest on the stage or in the house.

There is simply not enough room in the budget for an LED and a Moving light solution. To level with everyone, my total gear budget for Crown Point is $3500, for a five week period. 4wall entertainment gave me an excellent quote on a dream package that is still about $3000 over what I can afford, before perishables.

I am going to try and pair down, it looks like renting additional dimming is out of the question and its going to be a PA‘s job to run the re-patch for every play. Budget and toys are really all about resources and if we lack funding in one place we can make up for it with man-power. I hope we have lots of man-power.