Valley Christian HS Theatre: Making the Hard…Easy

“Children have a natural antipathy to books—handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.”
– Oscar Wilde

(Growing) The Hard Way
Dave Dunning, CEO of Legend Theatrical, says, “There’s an argument that’s been made that ‘most colleges are using a counterweight system and kids should learn that.’ But, in reality, you’re not going to school to learn to operate a fly system. You’re going to school to learn to be a technician or be a designer.”

Dunning and his staff have a long- standing relationship with the Valley Christian school system, a rapidly-expanding group of Silicon Valley private schools. When the high school built their theatre five years ago, the need for a performance space was great, but the funds for a fully operational space weren’t available yet.

Matthew Demeritt, director of the VCHS theatre department, says they built “a beautiful theatre that was built to have a fly gallery installed in it. But, unfortunately, we found ourselves without the finances initially.”

Instead, a drop tile ceiling and a pipeand- grid system were installed as a temporary hang structure for the theatrical lighting.

(Learning) The Hard Way
“As we did our research in years subsequent, we found that we didn’t actually have the room in the wings of our theatre to install a traditional fly gallery,” says Demeritt. “So we started looking really seriously at the Vortek system.”

Vortek, an all-in-one theatrical rigging solution manufactured by Hoffend & Sons, includes motorized theatrical battens and a computer-based control system.

“I think one of the main reasons we started looking at it was the space. With a traditional fly system you have to have the catwalk, the pulleys, the weights and everything, on the side of the stage,” says Tim Mendolia, the technical director at the VCHS theatre department.

Demeritt adds, “We only have about 8 feet of wing space on either side. So the traditional fly gallery where you’ve got the ropes, pulleys, and weight systems would have just decimated our wing space.”

The staff at VCHS wanted to make sure that whatever decision they made was going to be the right one, as they knew they only had one shot at getting it right.

“We looked more into what it was like. We went and looked at another facility and really liked the way the system was laid out…the simplicity of it,” says Mendolia. “So there are no pulleys and weights and everything that sits on your side stage. It was an extremely simple system for what it did.”

(Teaching) The Hard Way
Being an educator generally isn’t easy on the best of days. Add in a stage, electricity, heights, and—dare we say…actors—and the simple act of hanging a light fixture can become a tough assignment indeed.

“In the past, we were using Genie lifts, Skyjacks, scissor lifts and single man lifts to get the kids up into the air to load lights onto our dead-hang,” says Mendolia. “We had no dedicated circuitry over the stage, only over the house. We had to run a lot of multi-cable over the stage. So every time we’d have to load a new show, we’d have to almost rewire the entire system to make sure that we had enough circuits to run all the lights that we wanted to work.

“Then we found out that if you’re under 18, you’re not supposed to use lifts. It’s illegal. So we had to stop that, which means that for me, as the technical director, I, or someone that we found, would have to load everything. So everything from our legs, to our borders, to the lights, to the cyc—all that stuff—had to be hung by someone over 18 years old.”

With a busy year-round production schedule, the wear and tear on drapes and equipment was becoming worrisome as well. The school puts on a major production each semester and shifts quickly into an all-ages theatre program in the summer. With no way to fly soft goods in and out, construction and painting were performed in the midst of on stage blacks.

“And then anytime we had to paint the floor, we had to basically ball the legs up so they’d come up off the floor,” says Mendolia. “The kids were constantly running into our curtains with equipment, ladders and screwdrivers. They’d just run around and run into stuff. We’d get accidental tears in our legs.”

(Deciding) The Easy Way
Matt Gordon, the project manager for Legend Theatrical, says, “This was originally the dream. We kind of brought it up to them as, ‘Hey, check the system out. I really don’t think you guys can afford it, but this is what it is and we wanted to set it before you.’ The plan, really, was not to install a fly gallery this year, but they got so excited about this system that they went ahead and pulled the trigger on it.”

At the end of the day, the most important selling point was probably the added safety of the system. With built-in load sensors on every Hoffend batten, the system can sense load changes as small as plus-or-minus five pounds.

“I think we got a big push because it was a safety aspect for us as well. Having the students climb the ladder to get to the catwalk to load the weights is dangerous. Dealing with the weights is dangerous. And the oldstyle traditional braking systems are dangerous,” says Mendolia. “And Valley Christian has always tried to be extremely safety-conscious when we do anything. So the braking system that we saw in the Vortek system proved to be superior to anything we saw out there.”

And as it turned out, when Dunning and his team did a cost analysis of the Vortek system, he says, “it wasn’t going to cost the school much more, if anything than doing a counterweight system.”

Without the standard summer break, installation time was a serious concern as well. Demeritt says, “It was a hit right away, with myself, the rest of the production team and also with the school’s administrators. They liked the cost benefits, the ease of install—a month tops getting that put in there.”

(Installing It) The Easy Way
“I think we got the go-ahead in the middle of December,” says Gordon. “Typically, we would need around a month or two months of prep time just to get ready for a project of this size.”

When the school finalized their decision, they proposed a Jan. 1 start date for the installation and a completion date of Feb. 1 in order to rehearse for the quickly- approaching spring musical.

This was a pretty major request for the Legend Theatrical team, who not only had another major install going on simultaneously, but also had to await delivery of the vital system components.

“You have to budget in a week to ship the units, because they come in from Europe, and you’re not going to get them here any faster than that,” Gordon says.

He adds, “We’ve been running right on schedule, and they’ve been very happy with that. They were a bit nervous at the beginning that it would actually be able to be done that fast.”

Dunning and Gordon also worked with the school to upgrade some of the related stage systems. The school doubled their total dimmer count with the addition of a Strand dimmer rack to power the raceways on the new electrics. Up-to-date work lights were installed, and a full set of stage drapery is in the process of being purchased.

With a brand-new pair of SGM moving head fixtures and a SGM Regia lighting console, the students at VCHS will also have access to moving light technology for every one of their future shows.

Dunning commented on the installation of advanced technology at Valley Christian; “This school pushes toward new technology. They are an organization that wants to provide the best equipment for their students, so that they are the most well-equipped when they go out into the workforce or go on to other colleges.”

(Teaching & Learning) The Easy Way
But at the end of the day, the most important thing in any learning environment is not motorized battens, moving lights or the latest flashy piece of gear. All of these things are only tools for the teachers and the students. Working with Legend Theatrical, the teachers at VCHS are striving to offer the greatest possible learning environment possible.

“We really have a heart to help better the school in whatever way we can,” says Dunning. “It’s been a good relationship.”

Demeritt comments, “It’s a real passion of mine to see the theatre continue to grow and be able to accommodate larger scale productions, more shows a year, students becoming more and more involved at every level. We felt like this allowed us to do all of that, but it also really maintained safety, which is incredibly important, especially in the litigious society of San Jose. We want to make sure that our students are having an exciting theatrical experience, but are a 100% safe at all times. This is the perfect unit for that.”

Mendolia says that it is going to allow him more time to actually teach his students, “…which is awesome for us, being able to teach the students lighting design and allowing them to actually go, and in a timely manner that’s realistic for us, load a lighting design project.”

“It’s going to make the technical side of the theatre much easier for myself and for the students as well. So hopefully our shows will be that much better for it.”

Phil Gilbert is a freelance lighting designer/programmer. He can be reached at pgilbert@plsn.com.