I am the technical director for a production of Blood Wedding at an arts high school. As per the designers request, we are looking to have a 14' x 40' lace curtain that can track upstage to downstage over a span of 20' several times throughout the production hopefully with ropes/pulleys and as little noise as possible. The set is basically four wooden beams that are connected at the top to create a frame that is 14' tall (small budget), whereas the grid of the space is 20' tall and the lace curtain needs to hopefully be contained within the wooden structure. I have been researching pulleys and tracks but have not found the best solution for tracking up to downstage. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!!
Large lace curtain needs to track upstage to downstage on a small budget
- Thread starterdanielh01
- Start date
MPowers
Well-Known Member
To clear things up a bit, are you saying you want to have the curtain hung across the stage, left to right in the 40'wide orentation and then you want the whole 40' width of curtain to move upstage and down stage? How is the curtain to be hung? On a pipe batten, on box truss, on a left right track of it's own, stapled to a wood batten like a 1x3 or .....? At any rate, for 40' you will need at least 4 or 5 tracks for any support method except truss. That's about 80' to 100' of track which is out of the "small budget" catagory if you have to purchase it.
Any standard stage track will do the job, it's how you use it that will determine what is best for your application. Most track systems of medium or stronger duty rating have what are called scenery carriers. These are what you would use to hang your lace curtain batten from. Quiet will depend on how well you hang the track, which type/size/brand of carrier you use, and the manner you wind up running the operating lines. The hardest part of rigging the lines will be to get them to work together. If you hang the curtain from truss, you can get away with only two tracks so you will need only two operating lines. With practice two operators can learn to work together or if you have the time and skill you can rig it to operate like an old fashioned drafting parallel bar, so a single op line will do. However the specialty rigging uses a lot more pulleys and each pulley adds friction to the system, so a single line will take, for example, about 3 pounds pull for every 1 pound pull on each of two single lines.
Hope this helps a bit.
Any standard stage track will do the job, it's how you use it that will determine what is best for your application. Most track systems of medium or stronger duty rating have what are called scenery carriers. These are what you would use to hang your lace curtain batten from. Quiet will depend on how well you hang the track, which type/size/brand of carrier you use, and the manner you wind up running the operating lines. The hardest part of rigging the lines will be to get them to work together. If you hang the curtain from truss, you can get away with only two tracks so you will need only two operating lines. With practice two operators can learn to work together or if you have the time and skill you can rig it to operate like an old fashioned drafting parallel bar, so a single op line will do. However the specialty rigging uses a lot more pulleys and each pulley adds friction to the system, so a single line will take, for example, about 3 pounds pull for every 1 pound pull on each of two single lines.
Hope this helps a bit.
You could use Unistrut and trolleys. It will cost you $400 or so for the strut track and trolleys plus however much you need for rigging hardware to hang the strut safely and rig the curtain to the strut. That additional gear could easily run as much as the strut or more, depending on your theater and where you can safely attach the strut.
The cool thing is that Strut is AMAZINGLY useful. Once you have it in house and realize all the things you can do with it, your world will change. Uni-strut and all the other knock off "struts" out there are like an Erector set for the scene shop. But it isn't cheap to get started.
EDIT: After further thought I want to add that depending on your theater's design, safely hanging the Unistrut in a way that is perfectly level (so that the trolleys roll nicely) could be pretty difficult. Neither my solution or MPowers above is a simple hang for a novice rigger.
The cool thing is that Strut is AMAZINGLY useful. Once you have it in house and realize all the things you can do with it, your world will change. Uni-strut and all the other knock off "struts" out there are like an Erector set for the scene shop. But it isn't cheap to get started.
EDIT: After further thought I want to add that depending on your theater's design, safely hanging the Unistrut in a way that is perfectly level (so that the trolleys roll nicely) could be pretty difficult. Neither my solution or MPowers above is a simple hang for a novice rigger.
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