This spring I’m flying south…well, riding a train…
Held in Valencia, Impro Narrativa’s festival begins March 26, and features workshops and multiple performances each night of their four day improv festival. I’ll be serving as their “Light Magician,” sitting in the sky with their lighting console and looking out over the grid.
My experience in theatrical lighting began in high school where I was recruited by my friends who specialized in design but needed a gofer to sit behind the board and push buttons. From there I learned to use an ETC Element board (no, not one as fancy as the image above, try a model four or five decades earlier), hang lights, secure cables, and a basic understanding of live-busking. At my university, I went on to choose electrics as my area of technical-concentration and continued hands-on training along with the theory behind it all in a class officially called, “The Fundamentals of Technical Theatre Design” – fondly christened by students as “Fundies: where fun goes to die.”
But the class, and the manual labor, proved more than useful when I found myself trouble-shooting console control in a museum made theater in Germany. And I really pulled VectorWorks from the depths of my brain when I was commissioned to design and install an electrical grid in a budding theater space here in Barcelona.
I now work freelance gigs like this one as well as design and board operator jobs among my friends, colleagues, and hopefully many more to come.