The National Arts School’s Cell Block Theatre is a grand historic space hidden behind a wall of hand-hewn sandstone in the heart of Sydney.
Inside, the 10-metre-high sandstone walls create the awed ambience of a cathedral, an ambience intriguingly inflected by its history as the women’s wing of the old Darlinghurst Gaol. The cells that held notorious criminals such as Kate Leigh, the “Queen of the Underworld”, have been removed, and cut away to create a vast space adaptable to any use, but their presence remains visible upon the imposing walls.
Outside, the adjacent courtyards and the Gallery Lawn provide additional open-air entertainment space. The stone wall that makes the grounds an oasis of calm in the city also provides privacy for an event and guests.
Weddings, cocktail and dinner parties, product launches and brand activations, conferences and seminars, photoshoots, filmmaking, concerts and performances – every event held in the venue is enhanced and rendered unforgettable by the setting.
Having done numerous events in this venue over the years, NW Group were approached to consult and specify a completely new technical system for the venue that met internal school requirements, professional external requirements and everything in between.
“NW Group has had a long association with Show Technology and they were an easy go-to for such a large project,” commented Andrew Hasler, Venue Technical Manager, on the lighting. “They have the product range, and expertise and are always on hand to assist.”
The lighting system had to be multi-functional, multi-layered and at the same time, all-encompassing. The need for automation was high so the lighting had to integrate well with the automation system whilst at the same time, it needed to be production-based as well.
“As a result, the automation turns on the house lights and theatre lights through a couple of ELC showSTORE playback units (slaved together) and had to integrate well with the lighting backbone, which is ArtNet, across the MA3 platform, ELC Nodes and Q-SYS control,” added Andrew. “It ended up being quite a complicated interaction between the MA3 compact console, Q-SYS and showSTORE. We’re running six universes across the slaved showSTOREs and fortunately, we had ELC and Showtech’s Jason and Vince to assist!”
The MA Lighting MA3 compact console was an obvious choice being the most widely accepted console in the industry and NW Group owns many MA consoles. It was the ideal size console for the venue, capable of doing all that is required in the space and compact in form for a small FOH area.
For the main profile fixture, it was decided that 21 x Martin ERA400 CLD were perfect for the rig especially as their size was ideal for trusses that are trimmed at eight metres.
“Basically, they matched all the features we required from a profile fixture!” said Andrew. “The colours are amazing with some great saturation plus the gobos are great with some interesting new ones.”
For wash, 30 x Claypaky Mini-B were chosen as they add a little more than a general moving head wash fixture. Andrew particularly likes eye-candy effects, great colour and good price point.
With such beautiful sandstone walls, wall washing lights were an important element of the design.
“The sandstone walls are the main feature of the venue so lighting them up appropriately and accurately, colour rendering-wise, was a big consideration. The Prolights EclCycloramas suit that more technical, architectural lighting and they do a beautiful job of lighting the walls up. We are very impressed with our eight EclCyclorama 50 and 18 x EclCyclorama 100 units.”
Twelve ShowPRO Fusion BAR Q XV were chosen to light up the roof from the trusses.
31x ShowPRO LED House Lights were chosen to provide the base architectural lighting levels for basic scenarios whilst being able to double up as a function/event fixture.
“The RGBAL was a requirement as we needed to be able to do good white light and transfer into a multi-coloured DMX fixture,” commented Andrew. “
Atmosphere is provided by a couple of Look Solutions Unique Hazers that Andrew says deliver even distribution, and are compact and simple to operate.
Photos: Anthony Fretwell
