The new $19 million Goulburn Performing Arts Centre comprises an adaptive reuse of the existing original Town Hall which forms part of the Front of House including a café, offices and foyer. Behind is a new state-of-the-art 420-seat, two-tiered seated performing arts centre complete with a comprehensive Back Of House including Stage, Fly Tower, Control Room, Lighting Bridges, Follow Spot Booth, Change Rooms and Green Room.
Theatre Consultant Richard Stuart worked closely with the architects Brewster Hjorth in designing all things theatre and technical.
“It’s an incredibly tight space and that posed considerable limitations on what we could do,” explained Richard. “The site is only 19 metres wide, exterior wall to exterior wall, and so the theatre is very compact. As we tried to get as many seats as possible in the single tier auditorium, we don’t even have a passage from front of house to back of house without going outside the building!”
HME Services supplied the venue with a complete package of theatre rigging, counterweight fly system, stage lighting bars, stage lighting ladders, stage curtains, stage communications, stage management, paging system, stage lighting, audiovisual and sound gear.
There is a Single Purchase Counterweight Fly System operated on Stage Level with 20 Counterweight Line Sets installed to date. This includes one 300kg Counterweight Line Set for House Curtain, 15 300kg Counterweight Line Set for Scenery and Curtain Battens and four 4 500kg Counterweight Line Sets for Stage Lighting Bars.
A Tab Track for the House Curtain (Motorised French Action) is installed and two Tab Tracks for Mid and Rear Black Tabs (Manual French Action). Along with a full Velour House Curtain there are Black Wool Tabs and Legs as well as a White Cloth Cyclorama.
For lighting there are four Stage Lighting Bars (14m long with 24x 10A SLO), four DMX Outlets, four Stage Lighting Ladders on Track to Fly Gallery PS and four Stage Lighting Ladders on Track to Fly Gallery OP.
Six Rigging Beams are located over the Forestage and Orchestra Pit area between the Proscenium wall and Lighting Bridge 1. Each Forestage Rigging Beam has a 1 Tonne Load Rating.
An all LED lighting rig from Show Technology’s ShowPRO range was chosen along with some Martin ERA 400 Performance CLD fixtures. An ETC ION XE 2K with an EOS Fader Wing is used for control and LSC GEN VI dimmer/relay racks were installed.
Audio included a Turbosound PA, Allen and Heath SQ7 mixer and also a DX168 digital stage box and Sennheiser radio mics and mics.
The AV control system is a Crestron 4 Series Processor with touchscreen control panels. A Roland vision matrix switcher, Epson 15,000 Lumen Laser Projector, ElectriCinema 275-inch motorised projection screen and a lectern complete the package.
“The ability to supply a full package such as this is very appealing to the builder,” said Richard. “I was very happy working with HME Services although it was frustrating for all of us dealing with Covid and supply chain issues. However, at the end of the day, the project has come up very well and all of the equipment is working to the max on the varied programme of performances staged in the first six months of operation.”
