After 40 years at its previous location, Metro Arts has moved to a new home in West End’s West Village Centre in an arcade behind the heritage-listed Peters Ice Cream Factory.
The new purpose-built precinct features an underground theatre, two galleries, two rehearsal rooms and the Factory Lane outdoor precinct which encompasses the foyer, box office, café and bar. Specialising in the development of new work, Metro Arts champions artists taking risks, creating, developing, experimenting, and presenting ambitious contemporary work.
This new hub in West End’s diverse community is the place in Brisbane to experience the work of contemporary artists with a year-round program of innovative theatre, cabaret, comedy, music and visual art.
The New Benner Theatre is an intimate black box with raked seating, suitable for live performance including theatre, music and cabaret. The theatre was designed by Craig Gamble of Setting Line Theatre Consulting.
What was essentially a concrete bunker has been transformed into a fully functioning theatre by HME Services who opted for a Show Technology package of ShowPRO theatre lighting.
Thirty tech panels enable great versatility so performance and control spaces can be anywhere as can retractable seating.
“There is a bio box at one end up in the air,” added Brad Galgon of HME Services. “They can easily go from a flat floor theatre to a tiered seating venue to a corporate dinner setting – basically whatever they want to do.”
Twelve ShowPRO LED Profile FC were supplied along with 15-30 Degree Lens and 25-50 Degree Lens. These fixtures leverage the power of RGBAL (lime) LEDs to boost the lumen output for white and lighter colours. Added to that were ten ShowPRO LED Fresnel RGBAL DMX Zoom, as well as ten barn doors, that can create various colour temperature whites or vibrant saturated colours.
“They are so bright and punchy!” commented Brad. “We’ve installed quite a few LED Profiles in various venues and they have proved to be very reliable. The CRI and colours are good, and I particularly like the balance points on them. Powercon in and powercon out is pretty good.
“We also provided 18 x ShowPRO LED PAR Quad-12 with barn doors to supply general colour wash especially for concerts held in the venue. They add colour and vibrance rather than pastels from a Fresnel, better for rock’n’roll.”
Four Pluto 350 LED moving head spots were also on the inventory with Brad commenting that they deliver an amazing feature set for their price.
“They’re reliable and simple to operate plus they deliver a good selection of effects,” he said. “They are also fairly quiet which is essential for theatrical work.”
Finally, there’s a sharks tooth scrim lit up by six ShowPRO LED CYC2 RGBAL whose two adjustable ‘heads’ provide considerable wash coverage. Their small size, punchy output and low power consumption make them popular in theatres.
“Show Technology was outstanding, as always,” remarked Brad. “You can’t go past them for service.”
