Since environmental artist Joy Wulke founded Projects for a New Millenium in 1993, the nonprofit organization, now called Projects2K (www.projects2k.org), has been raising awareness of ecology and the natural world through a fusion of art and science. The group has staged a variety of site-specific shows, turning to the Stony Creek Quarry near its home base in Branford, CT for a number of productions over the years. They include Visualization of Time (1995), Terra Continuum (1999), Terra Lumina (2001), Terra Alchemica (2002) and Terra Mirabila: If Rocks Could Dream (2005).
In February, Wulke, 65, died after a seven-month struggle with cancer. The group she founded continues, however, and in June, Projects2K returned to Stony Creek Quarry for their production of Terra Tractus: The Earth Moves.
The production, with performances on June 19, 20, 22 and 25-29, chronicled tectonic shifts and the emergence of life over millions of years on earth. Climbers performed a series of stunts to tell the story of the earth’s distant past, the frenzied present and the possible future.
City Theatrical Inc. (CTI) president Gary Fails interviewed Jamie Burnett, the LD and production designer for Terra Tractus for CTI’s monthly newsletter. With permission from CTI and Burnett, PLSN presents the following excerpts. For the complete interview, and to sign up for CTI’s newsletter, visit citytheatrical.com —ed.
CTI: How was Terra Tractus conceived? What is the show about, and how is that story told?
Jamie Burnett: The subject matter expands the story of the geological history of Stony Creek to include the geological history of the Earth with continental drift. We take up the show approximately 600 million years ago, when the super continent Gondwanaland begins to break up. We show that tectonic plates expand and contract again approximately 250 million years later.
The audience sees a mysterious orb traverse high above the quarry. This is an Armillary Sphere, representing our world and the galaxy, with a hot-lighted center. The sphere passes three times during the show, each time representing the passage of 250 million years, the amount of time it takes for our galaxy to make one full rotation.
The first traverse shows fireballs and lava creating and destroying land. Simultaneously, a sea opens and the first signs of life are seen. Elemental creatures scurry on the ocean floor, and mysterious glowing tentacled creatures zip across and through the water.
The second traverse shows frogs and other amphibious creatures looking to the sky in wonderment. During the last traverse, the sphere comes to a grinding stop and all goes dark. This, in effect, stops time to a crawl. The dawn of man is upon the earth. Just a blip in the scope of our geological time.
Civilizations spring up, as represented through the climbers [a.k.a. Time Wranglers]… Projections pierce through on the quarry back wall, cave paintings and wall carving appear, communication through art and drawing and symbols.
CTI: What are the various artistic elements in the show?
JB: The quarry itself. This has been in operation over the past 150 years and is carefully sculpted to remove intact blocks of granite. It’s a precise art. We installed a 60-foot high triangular Textilene scrim, hoisted up by a chain hoist motor. This represented the slow growing of the Himalayas and countless other mountain ranges over the eons. This was rappelled down on by our Time Wranglers. I installed two 350-foot-long zip lines to give our Time Wranglers another dimension to represent ancient ocean creatures and fireballs and lava.
The climbers were given four rappel stations as well as a preshow location from the highest wall. There they created a rubbing of the granite live in front of the preshow audience on a 40’ piece of Tyvek. Our dancers took the part of elemental creatures, frogs, and the dawn of man…
We installed three 12,000 lumen Christie Roadster projectors. These were brought to life by our creative team of Dan Fine and Matthew Ragan. They created all the content and cues from scratch in two weeks, with stop motion animation, film, and live VJ type interaction to modify looks and cues on the fly. Each night we tightened and tweaked the show for better pacing and excitement.
CTI: What are the unique challenges of putting on a show in a quarry?
JB: It had been nine years since we had done a production in the quarry. Joy was up for another one, and since it had taken me eight years to forget how much work it had been to produce the last one, I was in. We had done these shows so rarely because of the incredible amount of work they take in a very compact amount of time. [For 2014,] we got the creative team together to go over ideas and decided we would like to include moments from past shows that were most epic and effective and could help tell the story.
We all take two things for granted in a normal theater: gravity, and a flat surface. There are no flat, clean, surfaces in the quarry. Everything takes longer, and there is more lifting and climbing involved. I cut down the number of fixtures on the high wall because there is no way to get a light there except for three people to climb and carry it there. Thank goodness I was able to hire my climbers two weeks in advance as crew. They were so into it they couldn’t wait to get there every day.
This time, the quarry was in full operation — it’s a working mine. Our time there was restricted to being there after quarry hours at 3:30 p.m. till dark each night. Once we got the projectors set up, there was no sleep. I stayed up with Dan and Matt for four nights as they focused and tweaked and viewed content on the quarry walls. We would leave as the quarry workers arrived.
I waited for the second week for lighting load-in so that we could save money and wear and tear on the equipment and crew. That week until opening gave us the opportunity to spend another four all-nighters. Fortunately, we could work all day on weekends. However the heat of mid-day made us grateful for the night. We set up a 9-by-20-foot tent and installed a floor and tables and chairs for our control booth. This is where we lived for the duration.
CTI: Regarding the technical aspects, how was the show laid out?
JB: [We had] feeder cable spread out 300 feet in each direction from the generator to distro panels and finally to multi cable and Edison cables to the lights. No incandescent lights were used this time. This kept the power requirements way down.
I used 26 Elation Elar 108 Pars, 26 Chroma-Q Color Force 12s, 26 High End Systems TechnoArcs, nine Martin MAC 2000 Performances, five Martin MAC Quantum LED washes and two Chauvet Rogue R2 LED spots.
I divided the rig up into four reasonably sized universes, each one headed up by a SHoW Baby 5 at the beginning of the run. The fifth SHoW Baby 5 was installed on the sphere to control the LED RGB pixel tape around the circumference of the sphere. I set up a block of five SHoW Baby 5s at the console and it all just worked. I used four SHoW DMX D4 Neo wireless dimmers for the LED tape on the climbers’ helmets. These worked perfectly as well.
We lucked out on the weather. There was no rain on show days, and minimal to no rain on days off. Lots of large garbage bags covered lights when rain did threaten.
CTI: How were the lasers and projections sequenced with the rest of the show?
JB: We cued the show very interactively; as called by the stage manager and the director, we were able to respond instantly to new timings and even intensities in projection, laser and music [by composer István Péter B’Rácz]. The laser operator was given parameters to follow such as types of shapes, speed, and where to project. These moves were then called live to cover other moves or to accommodate changes in smoke direction or speed of other transitions to fill.
The projection content came about through descriptions in the script. We described the concept of the content but gave Dan [Fine] and Matt [Ragan] free rein on how to create and execute it. They knew we wanted things fluid and flexible.
CTI: What was the most challenging part of the design or installation?
JB: Putting fixtures in place on site. For some, we made pipe goalposts. For others, we were able to place on blocks of granite and level with shims. We placed the Elar 108 Pars in the granite piles in the bottom of the quarry, both to act as side light for dancers and to light the tall walls opposite. These were waterproof, thank goodness.
Thank goodness also for Google Earth, which seems to update and have better resolution yearly. I was able to do the entire ground plan on Google Earth photos and scale for cable runs. I scaled up lighting fixtures so I could actually see them on the plan…
[Also], in Connecticut, June is the worst month ever to do an event. Everyone is doing an event. If you don’t have your equipment lined up well in advance, you might not get it. My generator rental had to switch to another company who said they would get it here on a Friday, but then the rains came and the location where the generator was needed it for their weekend rain date; I didn’t get it till that Monday. We used a smaller rehearsal generator to run the projectors for a week before lighting load-in. Lighting load-in took long enough where I could do without the big generator until Monday anyway.
CTI: Were there technologies in this show that you had never dealt with before?
JB: I had just set up the new MAC Quantum wash for the LED demo at BLMC the week before, and knew I had to include them in the rig. Being June, I was only able to get five of them, (or afford five of them). Glad I did. They were able to cut right through 400 feet across the quarry as my key back light and high side back light. Such a powerful and flexible and amazing light.
CTI: There was a great effect that made the water in the quarry lake appear to be moving, as if there was something in the water that was about to erupt. How did you do this?
JB: Low-tech effects work best. We used a perforated hose at the end of a pressurized scuba tank for bubbles in the water along with sound, and effects from the MAC 2000 Performance fixtures. Later, we had water jets shooting across, simply from two sump pumps.
CTI: The air currents in the quarry seemed to change from moment to moment. Did this create any challenges for you with projections or lasers?
JB: To allow for shifts in air current, I employed two fog machines and a hazer plus another fogger at the source of the laser. There were fans behind each, but still currents in the quarry took over. Since I had individual manual control over each fogger I could boost the best one for the situation…
We had wanted pyro effects as well, but our pyro tech donation fell through. Another hazard of doing events in late June — everyone who does pyro is too busy. If we do another event there, it will be in September for the Equinox.
Online Extra: Projecting Visuals to Fill “An Impossibly Huge Venue”
Along with its Q&A with LD Jamie Burnett, City Theatrical spoke with Terra Tractus co-projection designer Matthew Ragan, who worked alongside Daniel Fine to tackle the challenges of filling the quarry with projected visuals. Here are excerpts; for more, go to citytheatrical.com.
“In the planning process, Dan and I found ourselves staring down the barrel of an impossibly huge venue and asking ourselves how we were going to help projection fit into this place. We finally settled on a projection area roughly 120 by 33 feet to give the audience an ultra-wide screen experience.
“Talking with the creative team gave us a sense of the scope of show…Our journey would be part visual triptych, part auditory journey, and part poetic musing. Composed by István Péter B’Rácz, the audience takes a sonic journey through space and time. Simultaneously, the lighting designer, Jamie Burnett, teases the viewer with a design that reveals an ever-shifting quarry that’s both delightful and hellish…
“Unlike a traditional cued show, Terra Tractus is something between an improvisation and a rehearsed live set. The director Tom Burnett often felt more like a conductor than a traditional director, always looking for the moments of interweaving and resonance between the sound, lighting, media, and live performers.
“In the pre-production process, Dan spent countless hours prepping and shooting the models that would be central to the construction of the media. As a design, we strove to create something that sat at an intersection of stop motion models and digital geometric forms. Creating a cohesive design from these mixed materials was challenging, but also tremendously engaging and inspiring. The blend of real and digital feels at home with this show, and gives the projection a slightly modern flavor. During our short pre-production period we recruited Alex Oliszewski to help us with the monumental task of completing all of the animation and editing work for the show.
“The three of us have previously worked on Wonder Dome (wonderdome.co), which had left us with an established rhythm for collaboration. Having limited dark time at the venue meant that we worked on site from sun down to sun up in our days leading into tech. We also spent a good piece of our time continuing to make content while we were away from the site.
“Because of the fluid nature of the show it quickly became apparent that a traditional cueing system might not be the right fit for this production. The media needed to feel more like an instrument than like a fixed volume. This caught all of us slightly off guard and required that we make some changes to our plans for creating media and controlling playback.
“After several hard conversations we finally came back to the question, ‘What’s best for the show?’ Starting from there, we decided that we really needed to move towards a VJ-like system that gave us some flexibility for live mixing and quick content replacement.
“With four days until opening, programming a VJ system from scratch wasn’t an option. To meet this challenge we turned to Mary Franck’s (maryfranck.net) highly flexible and modifiable Rouge. Built in TouchDesigner, Rouge gave us exactly what we needed — a flexible live visuals platform with the ability to modify and change any piece to work for the show. This allowed us to continue using the custom programmed blending and warping tool that we had made early in the week, as well as giving us access to quick visualization methods by capturing the output from our content creation machines.”
Terra Tractus: The Earth Moves
Creative Director: Joy Wulke (1948-2014)
Managing Directors: Gioia Connell, David Connell
LD/Technical Director/Production Manager: Jamie Burnett
Director: Tom Burnett
Musical Director/Composer: István Péter B’Rácz
Projection Design: Daniel Fine, Matthew Ragan
More cast and crew listings, along with more details about how the rigging challenges of the production were tackled, can be seen in the original Q&A posting at www.citytheatrical.com
