Category: 1st Year

By the time we reached CPP1/4 we’d found our way of working, both with each other and with the groups that came through the space. I’d also learnt that, in order to make the process go by easier, I should prepare to take on the HOD role at any moment, due to my TSM’s continued ability to disappear from the venue for long periods of time. The first of these groups brought our venue back to how we were used to having it, our seating bank coming back out and another sacrificial floor going down. This time, we had taken elements of the Opera set to create a stately home, with the lower section of the Fledermaus staircase joining us as well, installed along the back wall. What was different about these shows, however, was the turnaround time we had been given. Between each of these performances was only a morning session to install the appropriate scenic elements, an afternoon session to focus and pre-plot and an evening session to tech with cast. Had this been at the beginning of the CPP run, someone would definitely have ended up crying on the floor – and yes, it likely would have been me. However, at the point we were at, we needed a challenge to keep us working effectively, and I felt that this fast a turnaround was exactly what we needed to keep spirits and momentum high.

When Opera Needs to be About 12m Shorter

The only other element of the first group was a chandelier that we had borrowed from the Citizens Theatre – with the job of hanging it falling to me. In an effort to prove I knew what I was doing, and to practice something I had been shown on Opera, I decided to open basket rig from the ground, my equipment taking the form of a couple of one tonne shackles and a two metre strop which would be lashed round the bar and secured onto itself. We then strung a line to the chandelier which I tied with a figure of eight onto a further shackle to ensure that, no matter how much pressure was applied, it was in no danger of falling. Like all of my other rig plans, Malcy listened as I explained what I wanted to do and, with some minor alterations of shackle positions, we flew the beast with James in the air to affix it to its final point. We then took the tied on line up onto the catwalks and left it coiled, so as to make our strike easier as our point was already on our fixture. It was nice to have been given a challenge like this again, and be put in a position to think on my feet. Whereas earlier this seemed an undue burden, I now felt in a position where I could speak with self belief, which was a refreshing change.

After the first group had finished their performance, we set about turning the venue into a traverse space – striking everything to turn it into a black box with only steel deck risers and a piano to give it character. As the LX rig was the main focus of this show, I joined their team, working from the air with my knowledge of rope work to safely raise and lower their boom poles and Solar Spot fixtures, before jumping to the ground to help with a plug up. This cross discipline kind of work was the only way this turnaround could have been done in the time and – for future – I feel it is very important that this should be stressed by all parties and HODs as the primary method of working and crewing festival style allocations like this. As an added bonus of these shows, I was given the opportunity to DSM, putting into a production context my favourite part of the Stage Management experience; calling the shows. To do this with Group B, directed by Tammy, was a joy as she was really supportive and constructive when dealing with the production process. Having never called a CPP show before it was a strange experience not working from a script or score, but with the guidance of Miranda – our SM – and Sue I worked out my own way of notation and began to build up a book that I felt comfortable using. It was also nice to have James as an LX op, a recurring factor in almost every show I have called in my SM career. So, from my SM desk, I watched as Group B went up, the two performances and three rehearsal sessions passing slickly and with few faults, to the surprise of everyone involved. It had felt, by this point, that the learning side of the experience had mostly passed, feeling more like a professional working festival environment producing professional level content.

My Beautiful (Freshly Cleaned) DSM Booth

Due to this, I was given the chance to call the final show as well, something I wouldn’t live to regret, but would certainly challenge my ability. In our continuing style, our flooring went down, this time in our best time of six minutes, working around LX raising boom poles and fellow Stage crew assembling a seating bank out of our steel deck and pucks from previous performances. The directors wanted to create a projection screen out of wadding, which we cable tied to conduit and flew on hemp from the upstage right corner, creating a snow drift effect which was quite beautiful when lit from the right angle. Though not our most impressive rig, it was certainly the cleanest and quickest to go up, which I thought was a nice way to end our CPP experience.

DSMing in a Winter Wonderland

Clean and quick could in no way be used to describe the tech process, however, as directors clashing on ideas and not understanding the process of how a tech session works, combined with actors who didn’t appear like they wanted to be in the space, left me with what was quite a complex show in a book that was rewritten three times before we had the chance to run it. Combined with overlapping sound cues, AV cues, and performers unwilling to take cues from anything except cue lights, this really tested my ability to work under time pressured circumstances, pushing me to focus and drown out everything except the improvised text and the book in front of me. And yet, we did it. The shows ended up remarkably clean and both performers and directors were happy with what we’d all managed to achieve. Five hours later the venue was pristine again, the catwalks hoovered, the floor painted, and everything back where it should be. CPP had left the Chandler better than it had found it – something I can relate to as well.

That One Time The Chandler Was Clean

So why was this the best allocation I could have hoped to end first year with? Because, in short, it made me believe that I could keep up with this course. These shows tested my ability to work in conditions I wasn’t comfortable with, and come out stronger because of it. They pushed me to think for myself, to take control of a team, and to have faith in my own ability. They have allowed me to expand my learning in so many different ways and have given me the opportunity to fail and learn from those failures whilst still pulling off great work at the end. Taking this forward into next year, I would hope to give others the ability to experience what I have here, whilst giving them all the support they may need so that they never feel under the same strain and pressure that I did. I understand that asking for help doesn’t mean that you are inherently weak, so I would like to create an environment where questions are seen as opportunities for learning rather than as a threat to my way of doing things. In management roles, I have learned that support is vital, yet sometimes trusting the ability of others can give them such pride in the work they do that freedom is vital too.

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The arrival of the CPP2 show brought with it a new lighting designer and two new crew members in the form of Poppy and James. It also brought Vectorworks plans and an in-the-round design, two things that I was excited to get to work with. The venue had been mostly stripped back to its bones following CPP3, with the seating bank being shoved back to the wall and all overhead LX fixtures shoved back on their meat racks leaving us with a blank canvas to work from. The second year CPP students had their piece devised with them by a director, who wanted to create a club vibe for their hour-long dance piece – their field trip to Sub Club acting as a catalyst for the piece’s development. In light of this Stephen, our LD, wanted a truss square to be flown in the centre of the room, something that Fee, Daryl and I set around assembling as our first priority.

I was given the job of putting in the points from the catwalks, using a strop choked around the poles with a shackle on the end, and gaffa tapping burlap to the LX rust bars to minimise the strain on the point. What concerned me, however, was the fact that we had started to return to our old CPP3 habits very quickly, the truss changing size because it didn’t look right in the space, meaning every point was changed and new load calculations had to be done at the last minute. Yes, I understand the need to be able to adapt when something doesn’t look right, but understanding the hassle we had had in the weeks prior with last minute changes to plans, to see it happening again so early on in this new process raised red flags to me, and left me wondering whether anyone else had learned from our previous mistakes. However, by the end of the morning session the truss was in the air, and Fee and I setting about looming motor control so I could plug up on the catwalks in a tidy fashion, so as to facilitate a clean and quick strike.

We then moved onto assisting LX, hanging the eight overhead generics before assisting in plugging up the truss structure. Once this was done and flying it became apparent how lacking in things to do we had become, and how this show was actually a lot smaller than it had appeared from the outset. Then the director arrived. Will had shown himself in previous sharings to be very fond of ‘feeling things in the space’ before making decisions, and this showed itself, notably, when it came to the issue of seating. He wanted steel deck stacked bleacher style, a concept which – as Steve explained to him – would defy the laws of physics to achieve with the resources we had. It was interesting to watch a lecturer have this conversation, as I learnt a lot about how I should endeavour to deal with creatives when their ideas are just not feasible, always being able to present them with an option close to what they want but with the added practicality of actually being achievable. With a plan in mind, Fee pulled deck legs from the store whilst myself and some other team members navigated the pit lift – which had decided it just didn’t want to work for us – to bring deck to the venue. Upon our installation of the first legs, however, it became apparent that someone had made a very big mistake. For some reason, the 600mm legs in the dock had become mixed with a selection of 530mm legs – 75 of them to be accurate – throwing off our deck by enough that, if someone were to sit on it, there was a good chance they’d roll head first into the red pillars behind. This reaffirmed for me the importance of being thorough in checking when pulling kit – and also when returning it – as the appropriate labelling and categorisation had clearly not been in place when these were made. It’s little annoyances like these that can really slow down a process, and cause a team to get annoyed with each other.

When Your DJ Table is 200mm Too Short

As the deck was sitting on top of each other, we had to work out a way of preventing it sliding off and falling to the floor. I had a rough idea of creating plates for the sides of the lower level to wedge the top layer on, but I gave this job to Callum and Adlai to complete, as Callum had come up with the concept of creating blocks with a drilled 60mm hole to act as pucks that could be screwed down and prevent slipping. Whilst they prepared these, I set about returning all of our CPP3 kit and giving the venue a general tidy and clean, with the idea that if we kept our workspace clean as we went, pre show work would be a lot easier to manage and we would all have a safer and happier environment to work in. With the pucks created and the venue tidy, that was it – CPP2 was up. There were no in show cues for the Stage team so our call times stretched to the strike day with nothing in between. Having these days free was very beneficial, and allowed me to plow through some reading and course work. However, I would have preferred if the promised rig plan meetings that I was supposed to have with my HOD had not been cancelled last minute, as I was fearful that we would end up in the same situation in the eventual CPP 1/4 shows as we did with the CPP3s – albeit over a shorter turnaround time.

So in conclusion, CPP2 was less thrilling than we had anticipated it may have been. It proved to be an exercise in how to cope with slow shows, finding ways of entertaining ourselves by doing the little jobs after blitzing through a rig with professional attitudes and work speeds. Following on from this, I would have liked to have used this time to forward plan for the shows coming up, as we were aware how tricky they would be with the one session turnaround times that we had. However, it was nice to get to work in the round with truss, as it reminded me of all the quirks that motors bring to a performance – shadowy thoughts I thought I’d left behind in the EFT.

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My experience on the Contemporary Performance Practice Collaboration festival was one of highs, lows, tears, smiles, very good days and very bad ones. However, reflecting back on it, it was the best allocation I could have hoped to finish first year with.

After I left opera, I spent a week doing ‘prep work’ with Fee, the TSM. Due to the nature of the shows, this meant doing not very much for a long period of time – the most notable exception to this being trailing around Glasgow for a day trying to locate as many pink paint swatches as possible, so that the third CPP3 group could decide on what shade of pink they would like to turn the Chandler. As it was just her and I on the team I was given the more mundane tasks, something that I fully expected and went about promptly; making signs for our TSM cases and pulling equipment from the cage. However, what I had not expected to encounter was a certain communication barrier that had appeared. It seemed like every time I would enquire about why we were doing something a certain way – coming from a place of personal curiosity, with the intention of learning something new – it was seen as a challenge to my superior, and I was shrugged off with a ‘just do it please’. Having spent time with an HOD – in Ben – who had appeared to trust me, certainly more than my current one, this felt unpleasant, though I forced myself to adjust to this new way of working and get on with it, growing to understand what was meant through the vague emails and call times.

So the prep week came and went, the tiny workload allowing me to rest up and drink some Lemsips before what I knew would be a hectic set of weeks to come. Little did I know how true this would be. The first set of groups that we had in the space were the CPP3s. These were three groups of third year students who had developed their own pieces collaboratively between them, without a director to guide the process. The first group wanted the Chandler to go white, something that we achieved by using the sacrificial floor from Opera one, which had been stored in the dock, and hanging one of the Ath cycs on the back wall. This first get in was when I began to remember all the quirks of the Chandler – namely the fact that nothing is at right angles to each other and, depending on what effect you’re trying to achieve, you have the choice of about four different centre and settings lines. Once we’d selected where we wanted to lay the floor, it went down in about fifteen minutes, using the techniques that I’d learnt in the two weeks prior on Opera to ensure the first four boards were perfect, allowing everything else to go down quickly. After some shuffling of what turned out to be different sized boards the floor was down and, following a gaff line around the edge and the tying of the cyc to the back curtain rail, the venue was ready.

Our Beautiful White Box

Then followed tech where, to my confusion and mild horror, I was left to manage the space by myself as the representative of the Stage team, as the TSM had too much work to be getting on with. This was understandable, due to the ever changing nature of the shows coming up, but despite my continued requests I had been left without a plan of things she had wanted to achieve in the venue from day to day, or any prep work that I could be getting along with. This is when the silver lining begins to appear, as it was the first instance of me being forced to think on my feet as a Head of Department, coming up with my own day to day venue plan and working out ways of combating the problems that arose during the tech period, even to the point of writing my own risk assessments to allow me to safely complete some in-show cues. When questions came up of how to safely execute things like our snow drops, I was able to answer using my knowledge from Christmas at the Conservatoire, and I was able to work with the other departments in a way that tested my own ability to think on my feet and come up with my own plans. This was facilitated by Malcy Rogan – our external SM and Stage tutor/guidance counsellor – who was incredibly helpful and supportive any time I would go to him with an idea of how I’d want to do something. To be able to approach someone with years of experience with my own ideas and for them to approve them and then act as my crew to rig them was amazing, and an experience that I feel everyone should have a chance to work through.

The transition from Group A to Group B was where the short fallings of the festival structure became apparent. Due to the entire team coming from long running show allocations, walking into a festival style environment and the differences this brought challenged all of us, with our work ethic and pace not holding up to where it should have been. We had a day and a half to rip up a sacrificial floor, take down a cyc and install four pieces of steel deck. By six o’clock in the evening, with half of this work still incomplete, Malcy and Jazz sat us down for a talk. This was one of the first in a line of what I came to deem ‘hang yourself’ conversations. To have our two industry professionals tell us that our work ethic was ‘shit’, really beat us down – but was also so necessary in making us better and stronger as a team. Our work speed improved, along with the willingness of everyone to work cross discipline and not just stick to what the allocation sheet had said – something that I think is a failing of departmentalising this festival from the outset. What had also prevented the fast movement of the day was the lack of a TSM plan, with my HOD telling me to ‘give the platform rails’ without telling me if we had any preprepared or whether it’d a staff and key clamp affair – as it ended up – or to ‘go brace that’ without measurements or giving me keys to the kit I needed. There was a point at which my gratefulness for being challenged with everything I did ran out, and it just left me feeling unsupported by both my HOD and the rest of the first year crew – with the notable exceptions of Adlai and Callum, who were amazing helps throughout, and made the experience undeniably easier than the disaster it could have been.

Guess The Reason We Didn’t Do a Wet Run

But, in the end, Group B went up, the deck looking as industrial as they had wanted, and the pulley system for the *ahem* sex doll flying installed by Fee and operated by myself. One of the sequences was notably impressive, with eight operators flying dolls and microphones at the same time with me cueing them by waving my arm over a bulkhead due to the lack of a DSM. Though this did not invoke some deep epiphany in me about my continued learning development, it just goes to show the kind of off the wall, wacky stuff that makes CPP the delight that it is. That show was another example of me being in the space and treated like a HOD, with the Stage Manager coming to me to ask what I wanted to do about certain aspects of the performance or pre and post show – occasions for which I had begin to plan, under the assumption I would continue to have to take control. The strike into group C was a lot better, the conversation from earlier in the week compelling everyone to pull their finger out and work together. The electrics team went to build a ground row for the back of the stage to hide their cyc lighting whilst I laid the floor with Malcy – this group using the same sacrificial sheets from Group A, only this time in a lovely shade of baby pink. The cyc went back up and the floor got a paint in less time than it had taken us to assemble one platform of the previous disaster.

Because when your entire floor is wet, why not fly your safety sign?

This group also had a swing. I arrived delayed on the day the swing was installed, back from a hospital appointment at the end of a morning session. By this point, Fee had installed two pulleys as diverts for hemp to ensure the swing could have its height reset between uses, however this meant that every time the performer put his weight on it, all twelve metres of hemp through the pulleys was stretched, making the swing bounce down by about two feet. This was not ok for show conditions and – as my HOD had left the venue – I was left to sort it out. Christoph, our lighting lecturer, had suggested the use of steel drifts to dead hang it, however I questioned this as, due to the fact he was jumping on the swing, this would mean the drifts would have to be shock rated which – to my knowledge – none of the appropriately sized ones we had were. My suggestion was just to remove the pulleys and tie the hemp directly onto the bars above, limiting the twelve metres to about one and a half and drastically minimising the stretch.

Pretty in Pink

So, Malcy and I set about reworking the swing, with myself tying around twelve knots in total – including the Figure of Eight learnt on Opera – to make sure the performer was in no danger of falling. This would have meant that four knots would have had to have failed to bring the swing down and – with Simon acting as a weight test – the swing proved stable and we progressed with tech. Their group also wanted to fly a large inflatable heart in their piece and, by repurposing a spare scaff bar and some pulleys we had lying around from the dolls, I rigged a basic system for making this happen, with a clamp on the catwalk to make sure the piece was hidden pre show. To make this happen, I had to liase with the lighting department about moving some of their lamps, and it was really nice to see them take to me as a HOD, and be willing to change their design because of the way I wanted to rig something. I felt supported and valued as an integral member of the team – something that I had been lacking up to that point.

To conclude my CPP3 experience, though the situation of support from my HOD did not get better in any way, I feel my ability to deal with it did. By being present in the space and by being respected and looked to by other members of the production team, I felt under constant pressure from myself to prove that I knew what I was doing; pressure that – I feel – was beneficial to improving the quality of my work . I managed to work with the teams I was given and the teams I could assemble around me to deal with a multitude of different and difficult circumstances, and achieve the outcome the performers and creatives wanted, whilst devising plans to manage strikes and rigs for the following performances. Looking forward from this, when I next find myself in a management role, I would like to ensure I have proper communication with my team – and notably anyone acting as my deputy. I know how I have enjoyed the freedom I have been given, and would be willing to give that freedom to someone else if they thought they could handle it. But I feel I need to make sure the proper support is in place if there is any point where they feel they can’t cope – support I feel just wasn’t there in my case.