The space was unable to give me any idea of what, if anything, of their lighting inventory I could use until about an hour before the performance. I did know I couldn't use anything that wasn't theirs on their rig, could not redirect their power, and couldn't re-program any component of their light board. I had a copy of their inventory that was about 4 years out of date, but no inkling of what was in the air or already in use.
I also had no idea until a few minutes before the final run-through of where in the space the show would be, the shape or size of the playing space, or what the set (if anything) would look like.
The one-act, one-man show was staged on the back wall of...well, they call it an art gallery, but let's be honest. It's a nightclub, complete with stage. The stage, pre-set for bands that evening, had dozens of profiles focused on it that I was forbidden from touching. It also had some fun colour-changeable LED par cans that I couldn't use, LED strips I wouldn't have used if I could, and one of those spinny ball trash lights that gave me The Fear. It was no more and no less than a good setup for a dance club. It was in no way intended for theatre use.
The space also had 5 mini movable lights and 2 mirror scanners, as well as 4 par 56s trained on a metre-wide disco ball in the centre of the room. The pars were ready-coloured with half-amber, half-rust tone gels (i.e. two gels taped together on each fixture) which actually did throw a fairly attractive colour over the entire room if you put them on at full. (The dance club never had them on brightly, but rather kept them at about 40% and got the ball spinning to suggest warmth and movement in all dim corners of the room.)
The control room contained an Avolites Azure Shadow lighting desk, a contraption and interface I had never before laid eyes on. After about ten minutes of poking at it I finally figured out how to isolate instruments and get them to stop spinning around and flashing patterns, and after twenty I had every light I could find steady on the playing space. The mini movables quickly proved useless--at their whitest, brightest, biggest, and furthest out of focus they threw a beam about half a metre across--perfect for crazy shapes on the dance floor, difficult at best for an actor's face to be in at the right time, and mine had twenty minutes. Also, of the five available, 2 worked okay, one could tilt but not pan, one was permanently half-shuttered and lurid red, and one was trapped pointing at the ceiling, never to come down again. Two LED pattern flashers were available, but after five minutes of poking them I couldn't get them to be anything but green. I guess that's what happens to club lx when such rock-out acts as "Whiny and the Synthesizers" and "White Middle Class Rebellion" reach a climax.
So. To say the least, I did what I could. I reined in the mirror scanners, much to their chagrin, and kept them white, big, and stationary. They were helpfully on opposite ends of the other side of the room, so when I roughly centred their beams it looked almost intentional. I kept the mirror ball from spinning and turned up the ambiance lights on it all the way for seating, and when the audience was mostly settled, faded out the rear-most two to suggest the house lights were now off. The front two stayed on so the actor could see the audience's faces, and provided some depth. I faded them down a bit when it seemed appropriate, brought the green LEDs up a trice for fill, and occasionally crossed between the white scanners and the amber room wash to suggest a scene change, but that was about it.
What makes this even more fun was the fact that I was working in program mode. Unable to save anything, and with the board already filled with flashy-trash cues and subs for the lighting-illiterate sound guy to run at random, I worked with the CLEAR button flashing at me constantly, just begging me to bump it and reset everything to default (read: flashy trash). I controlled fades, not just manually, but by selecting the fixtures in the computer and spinning the movable lighting programming wheel in 'dimmer' mode, or punching dim 19 @ full for snaps. Was there a better way? I have no idea. If I never come across an Azure Shadow again it will be too soon.
The audience accepted it, I guess--nothing exploded and they could always see. At least nobody looked particularly surprised or annoyed at how shit the lighting was. I could have done a lot worse with five dimmers (three of which, remember, were on a disco ball) and an hour to learn an entirely alien console. I doubt it would have been possible for me to do much better. At least I didn't push the scanners past 50% on the dimmer--at 51 they start flashing, and at 90 they strobe. That would have been...bad.
