Vintage Lighting St. Olaf College Electro-Controls DPC Installation

Scenemaster60

Well-Known Member
This spring, I am serving as the Supervisor of Lighting and Sound as a sabbatical replacement at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. This college is probably most famous for their acclaimed choral music program and the "St. Olaf Choir". However, not 50 yards from Christiansen Music Hall, stands the theatre building. Originally constructed as the women's gymnasium in the 1920s, it was gutted in 1976 and reworked into a theatre building with a 300-seat proscenium stage, a 100-ish seat experimental theatre space and the attendant classrooms, offices and support spaces.

One of the more interesting things that I have learned abut this space is that, at the time of its creation, it opened in 1977 with a full dimmer-per-circuit lighting system. While that seems entirely normative these days (and is actually probably on its way out, actually) it was at the front end of that paradigm shift from what I can tell.

Amazingly, much of the equipment from that system still resides in nooks and crannies of the building and I also have access to the original drawings.

The proscenium stage originally had 155 dimmer circuits and 10 non-dim circuits. This was controlled by a 3 scene preset console which consisted of a 40-channel pin-patch matrix, 3 banks of preset controllers and a master control console. The pin-patch and 3 scene patch shared the same console.

Here is a picture of that console:
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On the other side of that tower was the 3-scene preset board. Here is the "skeleton" of that. My best guess is that the individual pots were removed and given or sold to others who needed them to keep an aging system operational:
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Here is what is left of the Master Console controls. The actual console was cleverly re-worked into a very nice desk that has held various computerized consoles over the years.
The "left side":
IMG_3195.JPG
and the "right side" (minus the independent controls, which appear to have been cut off):
IMG_3198.JPG
This was the backstage "Stage Manager" panel:
(the large cut-out held the "house phone")
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Here are some snapshots of the circuiting arrangements for the room.

One thing that is interesting about this installation is that almost every circuit is doubled somewhere in the room. This is indicated by the A/B designations. If you study it long enough, it mostly makes sense.

One of the most interesting aspects is the Third Electric arrangements. Circuits 119-125 actually consist of five 2K dimmers each such that these 6 "channels" of dimming actually control a total of thirty 2K dimmers.

Stagehouse Left circuiting:
IMG_3191.JPG
Stagehouse Right circuiting:
IMG_3192.JPG
FOH circuiting:
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