My story is one in which the institutional knowledge gap was huge, and was created by a very odd circumstance.
Long ago, I attended a brand new high school. The older school that my class would have gone to had a 40+ year old Thespian club, a drama teacher who had been there many years, and a tradition of being a local performing arts center where outside local organizations could use the
venue without a lot of expense, with crew provided by the high school thespian club and drama teacher. The new school had none of this.
In the timespan of about 9 months, a new school
system was created by removing about 5 square miles of suburban area from the previous, massive county school district. The new school
system had 3 elementary (1-6) schools, one junior high (7-9), but no high school. In 1.5 years a new high school was built, with no drama teacher, no one in administration with any kind of technical
theatre knowledge, and only two faculty on
hand who had a little knowledge of production work (a band director, and an assistant choir director who had both been a part of a local
community theatre group). But, the high school had a brand new 900 seat
theatre, with a brand new lighting
system, no fly
system, and a standing policy to let outside community groups use it for anything from dance recitals to the city's civic opera company's performances. For the first few months in the new building, band and choir performances, pep rallies, convocations, guest speakers, and commencement ceremonies constituted the school-run activities.
Two weeks before the opening event in the
theatre, a
stage crew service club was thrown together from about 12 volunteer students, originally under the new (right out of college) band director's oversight. His
community theatre experience was as an
orchestra conductor for popular musicals like
Guys and Dolls, and
A Little Night Music. But he had no technical
theatre knowledge about lighting or sound systems other than having seen them used by the paid hands at the local
community theatre.
The new lighting instruments for the new
theatre were not delivered until a couple of months after the opening, which meant that for the first few months, instruments, cables and twofers were borrowed from other local theatres, which had a variety of connectors, but only a handful of adaptors. The installed Altec Lansing sound
system had a patch bay with no patch cables, although the "through" connections allowed
hand held mics and a
turntable to work. The six
channel mixer was backstage, next to the grand drape. The
turntable and main amp were both in the booth in back of the
auditorium. There was a single Voice of the
Theatre monaural speaker cluster in the ceiling at the
proscenium.
There was and 45+ years later still is no fly
system in that
theatre.
Like I said, for the first couple of events (a Christmas Concert prior to the building's opening, and an opening convocation) the borrowed lighting instruments were used. Changing connectors on the instruments that had twist-locks was a p.i.t.a., and some of the newer instruments with a
ground wire The
stage crew that I was a part of figured out everything from scratch. We did have the benefit of some really basic knowledge about hanging lights that someone had picked up from an older brother --you tighten the clamp with a wrench or PLIERS!, and put color filters in the metal frames that slide into the front of the lights--which prompted us to discover which part was the top of the light, and oh yea, the
instrument was pointed towards the
stage. We had no ladders that would reach the lights over the
stage, and the two electrics were on extremely under-rated winches that both catastrophically failed within the first 12 months that the place was open.
The lighting
system was from a new company that I think was called Da-Core and was actually state-of-the-art
dimmer per
circuit design. However, the
dimmer modules were not easily user-serviceable, and had a pretty high failure rate. They lacked the silver sand fuses that other
SCR dimmers used for protecting the SCRs from high
current, and the giant chokes and heavily over-engineered approach that Kliegl had. The control board was a 24
channel two scene
preset, with a mini-slider patch that routed control channels signals to dimmers, instead of
dimmer outputs to circuits. It was an innovative design for its day.
Looking back, I'm surprised that a bunch of 15 and 16 year olds figured out how to get these things to all work without actually killing someone. Although there was one fellow named Jim who discovered the hard way that the handle would slip off of the winches that held up the electrics (his forearm caught the handle on the next revolution, which was really bad), and that the audio
mixer had some live circuitry even when the
switch was off. He went on to become an electrical engineer, so maybe these close calls actually lead to something. I'm glad that he survived the close calls, partly because without his sacrifice, it could have been me making these discoveries instead of him!
The
theatre was a pretty good example of low-bid/bad spec/unqualified installers kind of things going wrong on a new building, as well as poor supervision!