I have to echo the advice about avoiding booms if you can because they WILL get run into by young dancers. They make for beautiful sidelight, but instruments on the
pipe ends will look good too and don't bruise knees and faces.
As to your original question about what fixtures to use... My answer may well be 'all of them.' To do a sidelight
system from the pipe end you may want the 50's making the near shot (almost straight down) and the 19's for a long shot to the far side of the
stage.... and perhaps fill in with a 36 or the parnels for a medium shot...
To figure out what fixtures you need to use to accomplish even coverage from a given setup you want to draw a front elevation of the
stage. If you've never done any design drafting before, don't worry, this isn't a difficult thing to do. I'm attaching a couple of quick examples I had laying around... one shows the difference between pipe-end sidelight and constant-angle sidelight and the other shows how my various
boom systems worked for a dance show.
To draw this, you just need to know the basic dimensions at
play in your space...
proscenium height and width, what
trim the electrics will be at, where the booms would be placed,
etc. You draw all of this out in some scale... 1/4"=1' or 1/2"=1' being typical for this sort of thing, but if your space is small, you've got lots of paper, or you just find it easier to do the conversions this way, you can use 1"=1' just as well. If you need more basic info about drawing in scale, feel free to ask.
Once all these known distances are sketched in, you can use a protractor to draw the beam spread of your various available fixtures onto tracing paper or
clear acetate... then slide the little tracing paper beams around your paper until you've got the
stage covered in a way you want. This will tell you what kind of
fixture you need and where it needs to be placed. Nobody ever needs to see this elevation, so
mark it up, try new ideas, and make liberal notes all over it until you're happy and convinced that you're going to
cover the
stage in an interesting way.
About booms - head, mid, or shin refers to where the light is hung (or which part of your body gets bruised by it) not the part of the dancer it lights. It's generally the idea that the light fills as much of the playing space as it can... which means that the beam of a shin usually 'skims' right above the floor so as much of the light is pointed up as is possible.... conversely a
head high is usually focussed so that the top of the beam shoots straight across the
stage at headhigh and the rest of the beam spreads out below this... so you get as much light on the dancer as possible... my
boom elevation attached shows this idea on the right side of the
image.
If I were in your situation and wanted to use the booms as you described, I would go with 3 lanes of light with 2 lights each probably (unless I had an artistic reason to need three lights in 2 lanes) because most stages need more than 2 booms to
cover all the way up and
downstage. The 2 lights I chose would most likely be a shin, in a pale tint, focussed to skim just over the floor (useful to 'lift dancers up, by lighting their body but leaving the floor dark) and a light placed as high as was safely possible on the
boom for general sidelight. I would place this light as high as possible and
point it slightly down (personally, I would stand 2/3rds of the
stage away from this
fixture and have it tipped down till it just hit my head) so that it would pass over one dancers head and hit the next one to some degree - if 'head highs' are actually '
head high' then one dancer completely blocks the next in
line.
Hope my 2-cents helps a little! Ask for clarification if I left anything vague!
Art Whaley
Art Whaley Design