Elation on the Yellow Brick Road
- Details
With three top-tier theatre programmes only miles from each other, Southern Indiana is a proven mecca for high school theatre. After sister school Floyd Central High School received a lighting upgrade of Elation fixtures a couple of years ago, New Albany High School was ecstatic when their opportunity came.
“When funds came around, we were next,” said New Albany High School’s resident lighting and sound designer Crit Fisher, who was employed by the school five years ago to help resurrect what he says was an increasingly neglected programme. “Although New Albany High School has roots in theatre the program was in dire need of an upgrade when I arrived. We had a hodge podge of instruments and no LED units or moving heads at all. I was renting $4k of lighting for our shows.”
All that changed over the summer of 2018 with a lighting upgrade made up of seven of Elation’s award-winning Artiste DaVinci LED moving head spots along with six Platinum Seven LED moving heads, 18 Arena Zoom Q7IP and 15 Arena Par Zoom LED Par lights, 7 SixBar 500 LED battens and four Cuepix Blinder WW2 units, all supplied by Phoenix Lighting of Louisville, Kentucky.
“All students learn the basics of lighting and I come in and teach the specialized instruments,” Fisher explains, noting that all shows are student run from stage manager to deck crew. A mix of fixtures was used on The Wizard of Oz, which ran 9-18 November 9-18 as the first performances to utilise the new gear.
Keeping true to the 1939 film, Fisher kept the look ‘muted’ with no colour in the first two scenes then let loose with colour once they reach Oz for a visually stunning look. “With our LED units, including the DaVinci, I could wash the stage in different colors then use them for spot work. They are quick and silent. We would have had to hang 40 conventionals to get the same variety of colour but we did it with just a few lights.”
(Jim Evans)
