After a fantastic year of cinema events, the Underground Cinema have left a memorable impression on Melbourne – since their first premiere preview screening of Bunny & The Bull with special guest Richard Fulcher in April, to a backstage pass to DIG and Kingswood rocking the Meat Market in June, through to a WW2 Good German tribute to film noir in August. Plus, The Wackness in March and The Crow for Halloween.

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Images from Underground Cinema’s Speakeasy Prohibition Party
Photos by Dan Murphy

MONA FOMA (MOFO), is Hobart’s cutting edge Festival of Music and Art. Currently in it’s third year, the festival is once again presenting another ground-breaking and frontier-pushing program for 2011.
From January 14-20, curator Brian Ritchie of Violent Femmes and now The Break fame will present an incredible array of massive and amazing music, dance, theatre, visual art, performance, new media – and some art. It’s a mix of first-time appearances, festival favourites and exclusive one-off performances and it’s mostly free.

The MONA FOMA 2011 Festival line up includes:

Philip Glass and Wendy Sutter [USA]
Grinderman [Australia/UK/USA]
Botborg [Australia/Germany]
Speak Percussion [Melbourne]
Chiharu Shiota [Japan/Berlin]
Brook Andrew [Sydney]
Amanda Palmer [USA]
Neil Gaiman, FourPlay Sting Quarter &Eddie Campbell [USA/Australia/UK]
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion [USA]
BalletLab [Melbourne]
Wire [UK]
Groupe F [France]
Roman Signer [Switzerland]
Gelitin [Austria]
Ana Prvacki [Serbia/Singapore]
Health [USA]
Monanism – the Exhibition

Philip Glass and Wendy Sutter [USA]

Philip Glass [legendary composer/pianist]. Considered one of the most influential composers of late 20th Century. Widely acknowledged as the composer who brought art music to the public. Wendy Sutter [cello virtuoso]. Internationally acclaimed soloist, muse and partner of Philip.

MOFO 2011: The duo will present an intimate evening of Glass compositions. Solo piano, a cello suite ‘Songs and Poems’ and duets each include discussions by the composer. A unique relationship: Glass and his muse Sutter.

Grinderman [Australia/UK/USA]

Australian rock and roll royalty. Formed 2006 as a follow-on from post-punk group Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Nick Cave [vocals. electric guitar. keyboards]. Warren Ellis [electric bouzouki. mandocastor. violin]. Martyn P. Casey [bass]. Jim Sclavunos [drums].

MOFO 2011: These stalwarts guarantee to make Prince’s Wharf 1 throb with noise and poetry.

Amanda Palmer [USA]

Amanda Palmer: [composer/pianist/performer/ukulele basher]. Came to prominence with the American cabaret/rockband Dresden Dolls. Has moved on to a highly successful and diverse solo career ranging from music>film>theatre>dance. Her confrontational and unorthodox relationship with the audience breaks down the usual performer/crowd barriers and leads to all kinds of interactions.

MOFO 2011: Will appear solo and in collaboration with several other artists.

BalletLab [Melbourne]

Formed 1999. Confrontational dance troupe present a trilogy of MONA commissioned new work. Regular MOFO performers, their piece in the inaugural MOFO was SO intense it had to be moved indoors after witnesses to the sound check/rehearsal got anxious and started to cry. One of the most inventive choreographic visionary companies working in Australia. Strikingly contemporary in nature and physically idiosyncratic.

BalletLab’s work pushes performance boundaries and invents movement vocabularies that reference contemporary culture: a transforming often provocative and polarising experience for the audience, the art form and the performer.
Blending, juxtaposing and twisting classical, romantic, baroque and contemporary dance forms, the visual impact of the movement and the provocative conceptual based imagery and design play equal parts within BalletLab’s unique choreography.

Find out more about MONA FOMA

“It can’t rain all the time…”

During a weekend where Melbourne experienced a significant amount of rain, it seemed somewhat appropriate to attend the spooky Underground Cinema event for Halloween. Especially as the mystery film was revealed to be the 90s goth/crime cult classic: The Crow.

2010, Australia, Halloween, Melbourne, UGC, Photography – Dan Murphy

Approaching the secret location characters from the film came to life to interact with you. Whilst waiting in line, small excerpts from the film were re-enacted by the characters standing by: skatebaording past or clutching to a faux grave stone. With so much happening around you, it cannot be helped but to become swept up in the energy and excitement. The Underground Cinema creates an environment where guests are encouraged to be invloved in the scene they create: rather than just a viewer.

2010, Australia, Halloween, Melbourne, UGC, Photography – Dan Murphy

Be quick to get tickets to the Underground Cinema’s final event for 2010 – tickets can be purchased here

Just a couple of our favourite acts were…

Tomorrow, In A Year

Tomorrow, In a Year, Photography by Claudi Thyrrestrup

The beauty of Hotel Pro Forma’s striking visuals accompanied by Scandinavian electro-pop masters The Knife’s extravagent soundtrack provided a modern exploration of what opera can be pushed to be. The use of lasers, smoke machines and video all added to the exciting and unique atmosphere of which consumed the audience throughout the performance.
Directed by Ralf Richardt Strøbech and Kirsten Dehlholm, the performance creates an experience of Charles Darwin’s travels, inspired by his perception of nature and time. We are shown “our image of the world as a place of incredible variation, similarity and unity is re-discovered in this revolutionary electronic feast for the senses”.

John Cale – Noises in My Head

To spend an evening with John Cale to hear him speak about his musical career in a youth orchestra in Wales; writing his first composition in primary school; developing a penchant for avantgarde at a London art college; being guided to New York by the hand of Aaron Copland and John Cage; honing in his signature drone palate at the feet of LaMonte Young and then begin his underground noise bending attack on rock and roll from The Velvet Underground to his current genre-bending music: we felt more than privileged. Of course, by the end we wished there was much more time sit and listen to the man who has created some of the most beautiful chaos in music.

Boredoms – BOARDRUM

Boredoms (Japan), have become known for their “noice, chaos, tribal experimentation, remixing, trance-inducing feats of rythmic intensity, line-up changes, collaborations, and doing whatever they want regardless of trends and fashion”. Since 2007, Boredoms have performed their BOARDRUM set annualy. On the 7/7/2007 they had 77 drummers play together, on the 8/8/2008 it was 88 and last year on the 9/9/2009 it was 9. Boredoms featured 10 drummers for the 10/10/10 show, plus a guitarist and Bordeoms’ ringleader EYE playing two seven-necked guitar mutations.

More information on the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2010 here

Sinead O’Connor, John Cale, Robert Lepage, Jack Charles, Hotel Pro Forma, Michael Clark Company, Thomas Adès, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Akram Khan Company, The Black Arm Band & Beck’s Festival Bar

The 25th Melbourne Festival, and the second under the artistic direction of Brett Sheehy, announces a dynamic and emotive program of work from some of the finest creative minds of our times. Over 16 days, from 8 to 23 October, the Festival presents an unparalleled feast of music, dance, theatre, opera, visual arts, multimedia and outdoor events from renowned and upcoming Australian and international companies and artists.

Festival highlights this year include free outdoor aerial spectacular K@osmos; Hotel Pro Forma’s awe inspiring, large-scale operatic spectacle, Tomorrow, in a year, featuring the groundbreaking music of electro-pop masters The Knife; world renowned recording artists Sinead O’Connor (in her exclusive Australian performance), John Cale and Meshell Ndegeocello; one of Australia’s most highly regarded performers in his one-man show, Jack Charles V The Crown; the residency of British composer, Thomas Adès, the most inventive contemporary composer of his generation. As part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival: Beck’s Festival Bar at the Forum Theatre, will be featuring some intriguing acts: Boredoms (Japan), Low (USA), Ponzu Island (Australia), The Drones (Australia), Dead Meadow (USA) and more.

Boredoms

Ponzu Island

The Festival features two Australian premieres. come, been and gone, the bold new dance work from the world renowned Michael Clark Company featuring the music of the legendary David Bowie with Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Brian Eno and internationally revered director, film maker and actor Robert Lepage’s  magical journey to modern China with The Blue Dragon, a heart-wrenching love story told with Lepage’s trademark striking theatrical vision.

Come, Been and Gone, Simon Williams, Photography: Jake Walters

The Festival closes with a one-off spectacular finale, Seven Songs to Leave Behind, a unique concert featuring international music legends Sinead O’Connor, John Cale, Meshell Ndegeocello and Rickie Lee Jones, with award winning Indigenous artist Gurrumul Yunupingu and festival favourites Black Arm Band and Orchestra Victoria at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on Oct 23.

For more info see the festival site here

‘I thought, this is a man who could cope with Wagner, who operates with these incredibly long arcs and spans of time … And underneath an apparently static surface, there is a whole subculture of torrents and energies flowing’.
(Esa-Pekka Salonen, musical director, Los Angeles Philarmonic, commenting on the choice of Bill Viola for The Tristan Project)

Bill Viola, 'Fire Woman', courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) composed 13 operas or ‘music dramas’  in his lifetime. His idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total artwork’) presented the classical music world of the times with a new way of thinking about opera. Wagner saw opera as a complex combination of poetry, visuals, music and dramatic arts. Tristan and Isolde, a four and a half hour work, was composed in 1865. It tells the story of a medieval myth, about a pair of doomed lovers. Their love is so intense and profound that it cannot be contained in their material bodies. To realise their love, Tristan and Isolde must ultimately transcend life itself.

The Tristan Project brings together all the elements of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk in an extraordinary partnership of music, theatre, and video artistry, talent and expertise.  Los Angeles Philharmonic music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen and theatre director, Peter Sellars, teamed with video artist Bill Viola to create a spectacular production of this epic story.

‘Wagner was trying to create “the artwork of the future”,’ describes Peter Sellars, ‘an experience that we’re beginning to have the technology to realise’.
The artist chosen to interpret the imagery of this opera for a 21st century audience was Bill Viola, whose has a 30 year career using the medium of video to portray the human condition in its many emotional forms.

In 1998, at the Getty Research Institute, Viola studied the conventions of expression with the objective of choosing how to represent human passions. Viola’s own study of mystical Asian literature and the spiritual traditions Zen Buddhism, lead him to research medieval devotion and the depiction of emotion in the history of art. Viola also explored religious works of the 15th and 16th centuries. He was particularly attracted to the portrayal of emotional extremes in these works, at moments recognized as life milestones – birth, love and death. Tristan and Isolde is about the extremes of love and death, where the act of love triumphs over death. Viola has commented that the sexual act of love between a man and a woman, and the technology we now have to record human emotions, are the only ways humans can defy death.

Bill Viola, 'The Plunge', courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Bill Viola’s art reflects of an ongoing fascination with the relationship between an individual’s inner self and the experience of his body. His own life experiences are central in his work – a near-drowning experience as a child had a dramatic impact on Viola. As a result, many of his works use water dropping slowly, cascading, or submerging his human subjects. But, perhaps the strongest component of Bill Viola’s video artworks, which makes them so compelling, is that they have a sharply contrasting quality to the pace the 21st century;  they ‘stay in the moment’. The use of very slow motion video techniques, presents a place between ‘not still’ or ‘at the movies’. Viola believes that ‘images have life because they are untethered and floating’ – when you keep the camera still, time is unfolding as a continuous process, and passion moves in an emotional wave as it wells up and passes through a person.

Bill Viola, 'Tristan's Ascension', courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales

The Tristan Project  at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is represented by three major videos: Fire Woman (2005), Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (2005), and The Fall into Paradise (2005). These large vertical projection installations with surround sound are powerful works which are capable of sweeping us up on a emotional tidal wave where we can linger, suspended in time.

Anne Paterson

Bill Viola: The Tristan Project
The Fall into Paradise, 2005
Art Gallery of New South Wales
10 April to 27 July 2008

Bill Viola: The Tristan Project
Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall), 2005
at St Saviour’s Church, Redfern
Kaldor Art Project in conjunction with St Saviour’s Church
9 April to 23 May 2008, 6.30pm-10.30pm

Free admission

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Nick Cave, 2007
Photograph by Polly Borland /Original painting by Tony Clark
Commissioned by the Arts Centre in 2007

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Australian songwriter/musician Nick Cave is appearing at the Victorian Arts Centre in an exhibition that shows the many sides of his talents: aural and visual, writing and performing. Being able to view a collection that attempts to delve deep into the inner-workings of this darkly creative mind, Kate McCurdy discovers can be a fascinating experience.

Nick Cave, the enigmatic frontman of early bands The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, to the ever-evolving Bad Seeds and new project Grinderman, and with a novel and a few screenplays under his belt, is now the subject of his own exhibition in Melbourne. Visitors are taken on a journey into the imaginative world of Nick Cave – his music, writing, artwork and those whose work are inspired by him – at The Arts Centre’s George Adams Gallery. Nick Cave has donated over 800 items to the Arts Centre’s Performing Arts Collection, and the artist himself personally selected many of these items to be featured in the exhibition which has been created and designed by The Arts Centre. His inspirations are arranged in an eclectic manner, together with his own work, in a creative office/studio-like space. The man’s charismatic image adorn the walls of the carefully designed spaces, his amplified voice alternately growls and screams the lyrics to Loverman or recits passages from his novel. Rare video footage of performances and documentary material has been provided by long-time friend, collaborator and fellow Bad Seed, Mick Harvey. The high level of involvement by Cave in the exhibition appears to be motivated by his desire to be identified as an Australian musician, despite being based in Brighton, England and living abroad for much of his life.

The Sculpture
This desire has also been shown by The Sculpture, by British memorial sculptor Corin Johnson, who created the memorial for Princess Di in London, as he wanted to give something back to his home town of Warracknabeal. The shipping to Australia from England, and subsequent U-hauling across the country to its intended destination was to be the subject of a documentary by Cave and longtime collaborator John Hillcoat. However, in the end Cave didn’t want the process to be filmed, as he felt it would defeat the purpose of the act and isn’t certain that his gift would indeed be accepted. He playfully remarks that if they didn’t want it he’d take it and ‘dump it in the desert somewhere’. For a man fascinated by Australian history, his personal library including books on Ned Kelly and the history of bushrangers, and having represented the outback in his film The Proposition, the figure of Nick Cave seated astride a rearing horse against the backdrop of the harsh Australian landscape would perhaps not look entirely out of place.

Artistic influences
Nick Cave gives the impression of a man who lives his art. Evidence of this rests in his astonishing number of notebooks, whose contents range from a dictionary of his favourite words, to lyrics and sketches for album covers, to a weather diary and even shopping lists for black hair dye. As a young man he frequented flea markets in Berlin, amassing an eclectic collection of photographs, old albums and books that were made into visual journals. He is inspired by music, literature, history, cinema and the arts. He lists his favourite painters in no particular order:

‘What painters do I like? Well, let’s see… Piero della Francesca with all that lovely blue… the blood and guts and commonality of Grünewald…Stephan Lochner, very nice… El Greco I love that view of Toledo…eerie Brueghel and nasty Bosch…de Chirico’s brother Savinio (Tony Clark turned me on to him)… Puvis de Chavanne’s ‘Beheading of Saint John the Baptist’ at the National in London…Bellini (of course)… Balthus and his brother Pierre Klossowski’s big, big drawings… Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta…late, late Simeon Solomon (I have one), Louis Wain of course, the Rothko room at the Tate, Dure’s Madonnas, Goya and Velasqeuz, Munch’s Puberty, Leonardo’s spooky vaginas, and so on, I dunno, I”ll tell you some more tomorrow. I’m a big fan of the Doric column…’

The anthropomorphised cats of Louis Wain (works from The Man who Painted Cats on loan from Cave’s personal collection) are of particular significance to Nick Cave. Introduced to him by Australian artist Tony Clark, Cave identifies with the ‘extraordinary spiritual energy that inhabits [the] paintings’ but also help him keep ‘anchored to [his] past in Melbourne.

Sections from Clark’s Myriorama, 1997
Tony Clark
Nick Cave Private Collection

From paper, to the screen, to paper again
The creative journey can sometimes be more fascinating than result, and this is shown the way Cave’s songwriting process is documented in the vast array of notebooks on display in the exhibition. However, it is interesting to note that Cave stopped using notebooks and the typewriter (which is also on display) in the late 90s in an attempt to achieve ‘a more refined, simple less chaotic form of songwriting’. This has resulted in what would have been pages of scrawled poetic ideas and verses, instead reduced to a single clean page of computerized text, with no trace of how it came to be. Cave acknowledges himself that ‘the downside [to this way of working] is that the whole journey to the final creation is lost and in so many ways it is this stuff that is the heart and soul of the song’. Fans will be delighted to hear that the new Bad Seeds album was ‘written by hand, on paper, and this album is an absolute haermorrhaging of words as a consequence – no delete button’.

Handwritten dictionary contained in notebook, 1984
Gift of Nick Cave, 2006
the Arts Centre, Performing Arts Collection

How to capture the man
The exhibition contains a mini gallery of a collection of images (most often black and white) of Nick Cave, accompanied by quotations of each photographer’s experience with their subject. There are contradictory accounts: Steve Gulick claims that Cave is ‘easy to photograph, any bad pictures are down to photographic error’, while Penny Borland concedes that although ‘Nick is incredible to look at’, he is in fact ‘hard to photograph well. He is striking and handsome, but not terribly photogenic’, putting this down to Cave not trusting his looks or the process. David Tonge and Anton Corbijn acknowledge that Cave is a man who is undergoing constant development and change. Tonge describes a man whom in different circumstances can be ‘a true professional…a true romantic…a true philosopher’ to being ‘truly scary’. Like his music, the power of Cave’s iconic image reaches far and wide; photographers often return to attempt to capture a constantly evolving man. Corbijn suggests that it is not his skill that allows his images to display more of the human being behind the icon, rather that ‘Nick is becoming more and more himself, and [he enjoys] documenting that process’.

Creative collaboration
As was made very clear in his ‘acceptance’ speech for being inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2007, Nick Cave refuses to take sole credit for his work, insisting that the fellow members of the Bad Seeds be acknowledged for their valuable contributions. In fact, it is impossible to ignore the influence of Cave’s collaborators throughout his career. A few in particular stand out in the exhibition, Tony Clark, John Hillcoat, Warren Ellis and Mick Harvey, especially as they continue to work closely with Cave. When asked to come up with a landscape that reflected the music of the Bad Seeds, Tony Clark painted an ‘extraordinary triptych of six crippled olive trees blasted by a bloody red light’ for the ‘Best of’ album, and his work has also featured on several other album and EP covers for the band. John Hillcoat’s eye for direction seems to be a perfect match for Cave’s work and they have worked together on many film projects including The Proposition, Killing Ma and many music videos for the Bad Seeds and Grinderman. Of course, the members of the Bad Seeds themselves such as Mick Harvey and Warren Ellis have made a resounding impact on Cave’s career, and both continue to work closely on different projects. All of these people and others have contributed to a community of creativity that is inspired by, and in turn inspires, Nick Cave.

A personal journey
The exhibition can be viewed in a number of ways, as one discovers that there are many aspects to Nick Cave. The musician, songwriter, performer, author and artist are all represented here, either by works by the man himself, his own collections of others work, and the inspiration other artists draw from him in photographs and paintings. Nick Cave’s words and voice permeate the exhibition, not only through carefully selected video footage of performances and of the rare film of Cave reciting an abstract from his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Additionally, one can open the doors of boxes to listen to audio recordings as the man himself describes the items on display. This brings a very personal aspect to a very public exhibition of a man’s life. Hearteningly, this isn’t just a collection of nostalgia, but an attempt to understand a man who is in many ways at a new height of his career. Teetering on the brink of the mainstream with his work in the film industry (and a new film on the horizon), his somewhat reluctant induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame and the pending release the highly anticipated new Bad Seeds album titled DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!, such an exhibition seems a not only timely, but well deserved celebration of the career of this Australian icon.

The Arts Centre presents
Nick Cave – the exhibition
10 November, 2007 – 6 April 2008
The Arts Centre, George Adams Gallery, Melbourne
Free

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Lighting Design
Associate Lighting Designer, Richard Pacholski, began his career in lighting at the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust and toured with the Australian Ballet. He then joined Cameron Mackintosh Australia in late eighties and over the next decade toured extensively on their productions of Les Miserables, Rent, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Five Guys Named Moe, and Miss Saigon. Pacholski now operates his own company r2 design + production, and works freelance for productions staged all over the world. He explains to DGDN how he produced the lighting design for the new production of Miss Saigon in Australia after being handed the creative reins by original lighting designer David Hersey.

DGDN: You’ve worked on a number of significant productions in (especially) Australia and South Korea. It must be a huge job to design and organise the lighting for such big shows. What does the process involve and how do you go about beginning such a task?

Pacholski: Most of my work requires me to take the role of associate designer of these shows. The original lighting designer – in Miss Saigon’s case David Hersey from London ¬- does his work on the first few productions and then hands things over to an associate. David would then move on to light other shows while associates carry on with the previous show. This needs to happen as the one show might multiply across the world quickly and he cannot be everywhere.
It is a huge undertaking to design and organise a show like Miss Saigon. A large amount of time is consumed in the pre-production period before we even set foot on stage. Then it’s a long haul once we are in the theatre. 14-hour days are the norm and days off are rare.

The process normally starts with much collaboration between lighting designer, director and set designer and often the producer as well. These meetings will normally give the show its direction in the form of scene structure, a set design, and the beginnings of a lighting design. Following from that, a set design might get signed off on and that then gives the lighting designer a clearer set of constraints to work within. The lighting designer would then draw up a design based on types of lights and their placement in the theatre. Then comes the creation of a cue synopsis, which is a written guide to cue points and “looks” of the lighting. The designer normally builds on this process by observing rehearsals of the production with the director. From the final design, a list of equipment is sourced and into the theatre we go. Once rigged, we then focus each light individually and then start lighting scene by scene. Each scene consists of a series of cues or “looks” which we store in a computerised lighting console. Next, the cast arrive and rehearsals start onstage. We continue to use this time to build on the all the cues. All this continues until 2 minutes before opening night when we all nervously sit and hope all looks good and nothing goes wrong!

DGDN: Of the members in the crew, who would you work most closely with in terms of direction? When does the lighting aspect fit within the whole process?

Pacholski: Well, in terms of direction, the director is the most important person on the team without doubt. You need to converse constantly with him in terms of the style and look of the show. Other people in the crew whom are important to work with are the Technical Director and the Head Electrician, so [that] I can get what I want.

DGDN: For this particular production of Miss Saigon, which is set in both Saigon (Vietnam) and Bangkok (Thailand), what aspects come into play when designing the lighting needs? What sort of effects did you design to convey the different physical and cultural aspects of these cities?

Pacholski: The aspects that come into play with lighting this production are a feel of the location, whether that’s based on landscape, elements of the environment or just that “feel” you get from being somewhere different. Somehow you need to help convey that. That might be through the angle of the lighting, the colors you use, or special lighting effects. The array of lights on the market now is vast and you choose each one based on its features. By using those features you create that feel. For the Bangkok scenes for instance we recreate a sleazy street scene: lots of color, shafts of light, smoke, festoons, [and] lit-up sign boxes. Other times it might be an intimate indoor scene, [with] low light levels, warm skin tones [and] maybe a slow sunrise in the background.

DGDN: As an overall effect, what sorts of features need to be considered in terms of lighting?

Pacholski: The most important effect or feel, is to convey to the audience the emotion of the scene: the combination of actors, set, costumes, music & lighting all add to that. For some scenes the lighting might have the strongest influence on the emotion, at others times it might be another department, but we all combine to take the audience there.

DGDN: What sorts of budgeting requirements need to be considered for a commercial production such as Miss Saigon?

Pacholski: Budget plays a huge role these days in commercial productions like Miss Saigon. It’s an expensive show to stage and it takes a successful tour for it to be become financially viable. The show has a large cast & crew, lots of scenery and costumes and many trucks to move from city to city. Not only do we need to get the lighting equipment on budget, we also need to tour efficiently. That might be in the way we pack the equipment and how quickly we can move and set up in a new city. Any wasted time means wasted money.

DGDN: How does Miss Saigon compare to other productions you have worked on in terms of difficulty?

Pacholski: This one is complicated as the mood and location shifts many times during the whole show. We need a large mixed amount of lighting tools to deal with it. We have vast array of quite different fixtures in the lighting rig. The workhorses of the rig are the automated lights and each type we use has quite different features. This helps give us a large array of ways to light a scene: it may be the look of the beam of light, what we can do with that beam, the saturation of the color in the beam, and the effect we can introduce to the beam. All the different types combine to create the lighting for a scene.

Sound Design
Peter Grubb is one of a select few of sound designers internationally who are commissioned to provide sound designs for productions with the Cameron Mackintosh Organisation, the most recent of which is the Australian production of Miss Saigon. He joined System Sound as an operator in 1981, and now as Sound Supervisor for the company his credits include We Will Rock You, Mamma Mia!, Cats, Les Miserables, Rent, and the original Sydney production of Miss Saigon in 1995. In 2001 Grubb received the Victorian Green Room Association’s Award for Technical Achievement. He tells DGDN how he meets the challenges of designing sound for a touring production such as Miss Saigon.

DGDN: You have designed the sound for touring productions around the USA, as well as productions in Japan, South Africa, Beirut, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, New Zealand and Australia. What does sound design entail and how does the process begin?

Grubb: To me, the first and most important area of a sound design for musical theatre is to make the vocal quality as natural as possible so that the audience does not notice the sound system. I want them to feel that all voice is coming from the performer; with the amount of “live” voice heard, the equalisation and balance of the speakers must be spot on! In a venue of over two thousand seats with speakers placed at least 6 metres from centre stage this can be quite a juggle.

Next I will look at how best to place speakers to enable an even coverage of the entire theatre. This must be in conjunction with the set designers to ensure the required “look” of the show is maintained.

With most productions I will attend meetings with the Director, Musical Director, Producers and at times Writers to discuss aspects of the piece that will include cast size, orchestra size, sound effects and style of the piece. This will enable me to provide a system with enough power and coverage for the job.

DGDN: What does ‘sound’ incorporate, and when is ‘sound’ taken into account in the overall scheme of putting on a production?

Grubb: Very early on in the design process I will spend time with the set designers to try and incorporate the main speaker and effects speaker systems into the Proscenium design elements. This enables us to “hide” speakers, [which is] something I will always attempt. I personally prefer not to have the speakers in view for the audience; I like the idea of them looking at the set and the performers, not a bunch of speakers and lights!

DGDN: What is involved in the process of designing sound for a production such as Miss Saigon? What sorts of factors need to be taken into consideration?

Grubb: The main difference for Miss Saigon is that there is a huge percussion set-up with lots of very loud Asian cymbals and gongs. Because these instruments need to be played hard to get their full sound they can be deafening to [the players] themselves, other orchestra members and the audience. For this reason we have placed them under the stage and carefully placed microphones on each instrument. The players [even] wear protective headphones!

We also spend a lot of time placing sound effects speakers in the auditorium for Miss Saigon’s famous helicopter scene. These speakers must be placed and programmed to give the audience the feel of a Huey flying in low over their heads. Actually one of the helicopter sound effects opens the show.

DGDN: How are you affected by budgeting requirements for a production of this kind?

Grubb: With any large scale production you could really go over the top with the sound system, but alas there are always budget constraints. Too big a system also means that it can be too slow to set up and pack down. One big issue with budgets is the number and quality of performer radio microphone system we use. As we are always attempting [to have] perfect sound and every line as clear as possible we often use over a quarter of the budget on these items.

DGDN: Are there different sound requirements for different venues? How is this considered when undertaking a touring production such as Miss Saigon?

Grubb: With the different size venues we will perform in during the Saigon tour consideration must be given to the number of speakers used and their placement, which at times can lead to hot debate between the sound, lighting and set departments for the best positions. Luckily the team we have on Miss Saigon are all good friends.

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Miss Saigon Australia

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