Grand Ambition - grand canal dublin L&SI oct 2010

October 2010

entertainment, presentation, communication

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GRAND AMB The concept of Dublin’s Grand Canal Theatre began in 1992.

It was the brainchild of Mike Adamson - now CEO of LiveNation Ireland, but then CEO of the old ‘The Point’ (now The O2) - in response to the frequent requests from producers of Ballet, Operas, Drama and Musicals to stage their productions in Dublin.

At the time, a number of large-scale theatre productions were being successfully staged at The Point: these included Cats, The Bolshoi Ballet, Miss Saigon, Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, Glyndebourne Opera and Mamma Mia!. However, the demand for theatre productions soon outstripped the weeks available at The Point and this begged the question - did Dublin need a theatre that could host top international touring theatre productions all year round?

The concept became a reality in 2003 during discussions with Peter Coyne (CEO) and Grainne Hollywood (property director) of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA). After successfully winning an international concept competition, the DDDA appointed Daniel Libeskind - together with theatre architects RHWL Arts Team and Dublin based developer Chartered Land - and commenced building in January 2007.

With 2,111 seats, Grand Canal has a significantly larger capacity than any other Dublin or indeed Irish receiving Theatre. It is anticipated that in time it will establish a reputation among top tour producers as the finest receiving house in Europe and, as a result, encourage cultural tourism back to Dublin from Ireland, the UK, Europe and beyond.

Philip Heselton, project manager for the design of the theatre’s technical performance systems for Arup Venue Consulting, elaborates: “This was a fast-track project - the ink was barely dry on the plans before the first concrete was poured! We worked in close association with Martyn Jenkins, Live Nation’s technical manager for the Grand Canal project. We initially drew up overlays of shows that were on the road at the time to ensure they could easily tour into the new venue and designed the theatre auditorium and stage along with the technical systems to specifically service every one. This makes Grand Canal an extremely flexible venue - as suitable for opera as it is for rock.”

In fact, Grand Canal is unusually well equipped for a receiving house, so what was the rationale given that most touring companies carry their own equipment? Michael O’Toole, managing director of Cine Electric, the local company responsible for the installation of the specialist lighting infrastructure and the supply of the loose lighting equipment explains: “It’s a pretty broad specification that Arup provided.

The idea has always been that a company coming to do a one-night show can stage it with relative speed and efficiency.”

So far that has proved to be the case. The auditorium is quite a surprise and almost a direct contrast to Libeskind’s modernist, sharp-angled exterior of glass and steel and bright, open foyers. Although the auditorium still echoes the juxtaposition of the exterior lines and angles it also oozes opulence reminiscent of a 1930s cruise ship in a Victorian-style proscenium arch theatre. Rich, stylish and glamorous, the auditorium offers a warm intimacy and luxurious comfort that feels strangely reassuring.

So far the plan seems to be working. The Grand Canal opened on 18 March 2010 to critical acclaim with a production of Swan Lake by the Russian State Ballet. From that moment on the venue has hit the ground running and has since seen a string of popular and diverse shows in and out of its dock doors, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Fame, Rufus Wainwright and Derren Brown.

The upcoming winter season programme will see Hairspray, Rocky Horror and The Sound of Music tour amongst many others - including Snow White on Ice.

However, the period glamour belies the state-of-the-art technology secreted within. Sophisticated acoustic treatment, digital communications, stage and house lighting, AV and sound systems plus a comprehensive mixture of power and counterweight flying have been designed by Arup. A flexible configuration of orchestra lifts facilitates a variable size pit and there are more tie lines and power supplies than most companies could find a use for.

For Arup Acoustics and Arup Theatre Consultants, tasked with provide the acoustic and technical theatre system designs respectively, along with Arup Consulting Engineers, Dublin, the imperative was to design flexible systems that would blend seamlessly with Libeskind’s angular yet sumptuous interior architecture.

Of course, a state-of-the-art theatre is nothing without a strong and helpful staff. Heading up the team is technical manager Luke Child, who has an extensive touring background: in fact, he can list every receiving theatre in the UK, tell you what’s good, bad or ugly about it and where the helpful and not-so-helpful crews reside.

ITION words & pictures by Sarah Rushton-Read

Dublin’s Grand Canal Theatre is no ordinary receiving house.

It is the first multi-discipline performance venue capable of hosting full-scale touring musicals, opera and ballet in Ireland and it is the first ever theatre design project of worldrenowned architect Daniel Libeskind. It is probably better equipped than most producing houses in the UK and indeed most of the receiving houses of Europe. Sarah Rushton-Read reports for L&SI . . .

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Child therefore understands better than most what a good receiving house should be. Now he has a theatre of his own he has made it his mission to establish it with a reputation as one of the best, most welcoming and helpful receiving houses in Europe. I have no doubt he will succeed.

Childs says: “I’ve toured to every theatre in the UK multiple times.

Grand Canal is definitely better than anything I’ve been in yet. Set-up here is a breeze. It takes 20 minutes to remove and store all the necessary seats to set up the orchestra pit. The pit lift helpfully comes all the way up to stage level, which enables orchestra and sound to load straight in from the stage. This saves a huge amount of time and effort and negates the need to negotiate large musical instruments and bits of kit down flights of stairs and through corridors!”

Child’s first ever job was with Martyn Jenkins - project technical manager for Live Nation. He says: “I have known about this space for a long time - Martyn and Arup have done a fantastic job. From my perspective there are a number of things that make this theatre pleasing to tour into. No one has to worry about rigging for a FOH rig: we have 12 motors up there that can take a ton each. Speaker clusters are easy to hang - we have special pre-made frames that clip onto the motors. There are six motors on rolling beams running up and down stage, so companies can position them anywhere they need over the stage. We also have six beams that are empty so incoming companies can just clip their own motor to them and off they go.”

At the time of my visit, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was fitting up. The previous night they’d been due to finish at 10pm but to their surprise they were finished by 5pm: it was reportedly the fastest fit-up they’ve every done.

This is less of a surprise when you see the easy get-in. Incoming companies simply wheel kit out of the truck and into a huge lift designed to take flightcases, meat-racks and wardrobe pans.

It delivers direct to each of the various department levels. Each level has a substantial storage pocket where cases can be deposited until the touring company staff can distribute them to specific rooms.

Back on stage and in the auditorium and in response to Arup’s design, Unusual Rigging installed a comprehensive combination of counterweight and motorised bars and hoists. These provide a robust and adaptable stage-engineering infrastructure. Mark Priestley, project manager for Unusual, says: “We installed two Spiralift orchestra pit lifts, which enable configurations that can accommodate both the smaller 13- or 14-piece bands associated with musicals or the large-scale, 65- to 90-piece opera orchestras. We also installed 62 sets of counterweight flying and seven motorised bars - five of which are in the standard LX positions. There are also two motorised bars running up and down stage, one each side, plus motorised forestage rigging for lighting, PA and supertitles.”

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Child is delighted to have both counterweight and power flying: “To be honest we don’t really feel the pain of counterweight anyway as we have an over hauler up in the grid which allows us to easily fly any bar up to a ton in weight. We simply connect it to the bar we want to use and it takes care of the rest. It removes a lot of the danger associated with crew hanging off lines and feeding a bar out slowly until the weight’s taken. We’re also very lucky that we have three cradle loading galleries - in some venues a single loading gallery can be problem when touring anything that needs the weight adjusting as it’s flown in or out. Here you can always get to a cradle and that’s a real bonus.”

From top: The opulent auditorium; two views of the stage during the fit-up from Chitty; behind the acoustically transparent ‘sail.’

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As Child mentioned previously, Unusual has fitted a flexible travelling beam system for chain hoist secondary suspension. The entire automated installation can be controlled from an integrated centralised Kinesys control system, which would allow the whole flying system to be upgraded to power flying at any time. The space has been built to accommodate the extra machinery that would be required.

Philip Heselton elaborates: “A lot of detail went into the specification for stage engineering, as we wanted to ensure that the company we appointed would have the resources to deal with such a fast moving project. We worked very closely with Unusual Rigging and it proved to be an excellent partnership. Mike Philpott was project manager, with Simon Tiernan project leader on site. Chris Johnson headed up the design, John Donovan did all the CAD work and Paul Taylor did some of the electronic design.”

Another major consideration for Arup was that touring sound companies would bring in large analogue desks. However, because of the way the auditorium was designed there was no comfortable way of getting these consoles to a good live mixing position. Heselton says: “We asked Unusual to respond to a design that specified a lift, secured to the back wall of the auditorium on which a touring desk could be loaded from a space below the auditorium and

lifted to stalls level. Unusual designed small seat wagons to allow the venue to shunt the seats onto the lift, drop them down to storage underneath to free space for the FOH mixer position - it works very well.”

Acoustics was also an important consideration, Heselton discusses: “The brief was to design an acoustic that was principally suited to amplified ‘West End’style shows, but that also has a good natural acoustic for opera and other unamplified musical theatre and dance performances. Arup specified a mixture of sound transparent and reflective surfaces that blend effortlessly with the room’s architecture. The acoustic is sufficiently damped to allow for high performance sound systems, yet remains warm and reverberant enough to provide a sympathetic acoustic for opera.”

Acoustically transparent expanded metal mesh sails, suspended above the auditorium, allow sound to pass into the upper heights of the room and back out.

The sound reflecting surfaces, designed to reflect early sound to the audience are hidden by the sails.

Heselton continues: “Zig-zag wall shaping on the side walls redirects sound towards the centre of the room, ensuring clarity and a real

sense of space. Similar scale shaping on the rear wall breaks up large plane surfaces to prevent reflection back to the stage.”

Ribs on the walls feature sound-transparent zones that enable side wall reflections to reach the audience at the back of the room.

The balcony fronts provide sound reflections to seats behind and help prevent unhelpful sound reflections back to the stage.

Architectural motifs sculpted into the balcony fronts also provide high frequency scattering.

Seat undersides feature sound absorbing slots, reducing variations in the room acoustic affected by occupancy. The surface mass of the wall linings were chosen to ensure that natural sound from an orchestra in the pit would be rich and warm.

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Priestley continues: “We designed, manufactured and installed a 16m x 11m safety curtain, motorised house tabs, all the seating wagons and a FOH live mixer elevator, which saves the sound guys carrying large format and cumbersome consoles through the auditorium.”

There is a variable acoustic in the surfaces in the orchestra pit, which can offer absorption and reflection on demand. “This allows the room to be tuned for orchestral or amplified use,” says Heselton. “In sound absorbing mode, it can also control noise build-up and create a better working environment for musicians. In addition, the balustrade between the orchestra and the audience is adjustable, which allows the balance of string instrument brightness to be adjusted.”

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The lighting system offers considerable flexibility via site-wide ACN connections.

In addition to the two advance bars on motorised winches and five motorised bars over the stage there are two front-of-house lighting bridges and excellent concealed pros lighting positions. The venue can just as easily provide an adaptable house rig as it can accommodate any touring rig.

O’Toole’s team installed 425 x 3kW ETC Sensor dimmers, 85 x 3kW ETC Sensor switched non-dim modules and 44 x 5kW ETC Sensor dimmers. These are controlled from an ETC EOS console with wireless rigger’s remote. The working light system is the Award-winning Blues system from Global Design Solutions (GDS). ETC Unison has been installed to control house and work lighting and the system includes touchscreen LCD stations and combined push button/fader panels. The integration of Unison means that non-trained personnel, such as front-of-house staff, performers and cleaners, can adjust the lighting as required to perform their functions, without having to call a production electrician.

The company also supplied an extensive FOH lighting rig, which comprises various beam angle ETC Source Fours and Robert Juliat zoom profiles. There are also two Robert Juliat 2.5kW Cyrano 1015 HMI followspots and space for at least two more.

In addition, the venue holds a number of stock luminaires from Selecon, ETC and Robert Juliat plus numerous TW1 moving heads from Martin Professional.

Theatre technician Kate Bermingham has designed a conventional standard rig for visiting companies and says she uses the ETC online forums to ensure she can troubleshoot and get the very best out of the system, particularly for the one nighters.

Left: Philip Heselton of Arup and Michael O’Toole of Cine Electric.

Right: Luke Child.

Also state-of-the-art is the sound and communications systems. The auditorium has a built-in d&b Audio Qi series loudspeaker system, which is concealed in openings in the proscenium with substantial subs at stage level. In addition there are d&b E3 delay speakers, which cover the boxes and balcony overhangs. The FOH console is a Midas Verona 40, with the usual array of outboard. Analogue was chosen primarily because most touring companies bring in their own consoles and it was felt the one-nighters were unlikely to bring in sound engineers with extensive experience on digital consoles.

The stage management system comprises a GDS flexible stage manager’s desk with touch screen and an integrated GDS Cue Light System. Childs is delighted with the system: “I’m very impressed with the GDS Blues system; the back stage looks fantastic in show mode! You get a real sense of the scale of the place in the dark.

The other great thing is that we have individual zone control of the Blues so if we don’t want the galleries lit we can turn them off from the SM desk. Exit signs are also dimmable through a DALI interface through the ETC Unison system. They can be completely faded out for black-outs and although the local fire officer took a bit of convincing to persuade him of the benefits, he came though in the end. MD monitors can also be programmed to black out from the stage manager’s desk.”

Credits: Architect of Record: McCauley Daye O’Connell, Architects Quantity Surveyor: Davis Langdon PKS Joint Venture Partner: Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG Executive Architects (Commercial): MCauley Daye O’Connell Architects Project Management: Lafferty Project Management Structural Engineer and M&E Engineer: ARUP Consulting Engineers, Dublin Acoustic Consultant: ARUP Acoustics, Winchester Venue Consultants: ARUP Theatre Consultants, Winchester Theatre Planner: Arts Team (part of RHWL Architects) Architectural lighting designer: Pritchard Themis Specialist lighting installers: Cine Electric Ltd Stage Engineering: Unusual Rigging Sound & PA supply and installation: LSI Projects UK Operator: LiveNation / Harry Crosbie

Venue Staff: General manager: Stephen Faloon Deputy general manager: Isobel Rigby Assistant manager: Joy Russell

Since opening, Child has spent his time constantly gauging and reacting to the response of the incoming companies.

“So far everyone has been hugely impressed. My desire is that Grand Canal quickly earns itself a world-class reputation for its excellent technical facilities and the quality and skill level of the staff we provide.

There are always going to be people I know coming through the door - touring theatre is a small world. I want them all to have the best experience possible.”

Sarah Rushton-Read

Technical manager: Luke Child Theatre technicians: Kate Bermingham, Liam Fitzgerald, Greg Fairfield Press & marketing manager: Kathy Doyle Circle Club & hospitality manager: Denise Leahy Group bookings manager: Roxane Keeney Beverage & retail manager: Christine Shine

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Cine is also Ireland’s main agent for ETC, Martin Professional and Avolites products, amongst others. O’Toole continues: “We had considerable help from Jeremy Roberts and the team at ETC. Between us we put together a package that won us the contract. The help and support we got from Arup, ETC and the builder was fantastic.

This is the first time we’ve installed a complete integrated ETC lighting control system into a venue.”

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Cine Electric installed sophisticated production lighting infrastructure; this is one of the biggest projects the company has done. Michael O’Toole, managing director of the company, says: “Up until last year we mainly did smallish installations of ETC kit into TV studios and small venues. However, when the Grand Canal Theatre was being planned, we made a decision to have a go at getting some of the work, it was a big risk for a small, family-run business like us.”

Facilities manager: Shay Bowden

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