Back to Back stages, removable walls

[Bryson]

The new Taipei Performing Arts Centre has back to back stages, with a removable wall, to make the mother of all Alley theatre layouts.  Does anyone know of another building that has a similar layout and facility?

The Lowry in Salford is close, but I think it has an intermediate room/wide corridor between the two, not a straight through.

Acoustics would be a major challenge, of course...  Just trying to find other precedents for this kind of layout.

 

[ImagineerTom]

Curve Leicester has a single mainstage house with iron on both sides so that it can be used for either the main auditorium or the smaller studio space….

 

that said like all “innovative” theatre buildings the feature is never actually used because shows are created to work in the widest number of traditional venues rather than for a single cities weird venue. 

[Ynot]

Actually I worked on the getin for a show at Curve a few years back that did in fact have the rear wall raised, and we used the motorised bars from the studio as extra back lighting positions. 

That said, I can't recall what the show was, although I do believe it was in fact two different shows in on the same performance schedule, so there were different kit used for each.

I think.

It's been several years, so memory may have deserted me.... 🙂 🙂 🙂

[Ynot]

As for the acoustic issues, I know that whilst the separating walls are pretty solid, there's not much of an acoustic barrier above them, so it's really not an isolated space ether side.

 

[ImagineerTom]

Curves original design used “acoustic curtains” (a magical, mythical product that architects seem to think are an actual thing) to deal with sound bleed so that both auditoriums could use the same stage house…. Very quickly they switched to the studio just being used as a studio with the iron firmly shut and the stage house being used almost exclusively in a traditional way with the main auditorium. 
 

secondary issues also cropped up, what is SL & SR when you have two mirror image auditoria for example, one shared space accessed by multiple auditoriums (and thus control systems) resulted in many technical problems that you can probably guess. I believe that now the two rigs are effectively physically separated to keep things simple and only spliced back together on the rare occasion they are to be used as a single space. 

[sandall]

9 hours ago, ImagineerTom said:

like all “innovative” theatre buildings the feature is never actually used because shows are created to work in the widest number of traditional venues

Also, the amazingly "adaptable" (at enormous expense) theatre spaces will end up only being used in the layout that has the maximum possible number of seats. 

[James Remo]

The Ibirapuera Auditorium in São Paulo has an 18m wide door to the rear of the stage, so it can be used as an outdoor venue to the rear. We played a show there a couple of months ago as part of the C6 music festival.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibirapuera_Auditorium

[J Pearce]

3 hours ago, ImagineerTom said:

what is SL & SR when you have two mirror image auditoria for example

While I agree with much of what you say, venues with auditoria in the round come up with solutions for SL/SR on infrastructure labelling (N/S/E/W being the obvious, but there are other solutions).

[ImagineerTom]

As someone who’s engineered many in the round performance spaces I know that. But the difference here is that because the space is shared in an ever changing rota of shows that convention doesn’t work. Sometimes this side is stage left, other times it’s stage right, sometimes it’s both if the house is split 50:50 we could call it east but then every single visiting actor / crew / creative would have to be retrained to understand the completely non-standard layout terminology and even with the best training in the world there’s still huge scope for errors and mistakes to be made. 
 

Everyone overlooks how important “standardisation” is to the modern theatre and concert industry - you could innovate the greatest new technical solution or venue in the history of theatre but if it doesn’t seamlessly slip into existing work flows and technology it simply won’t get adopted and a lot of money will have been wasted. 

[Dave m]

A long time ago a girlfriend worked at Warwick Arts centre and I have a feeling there was something similar between the Studio and Theatre? But we are talking 40 years ago so my memory may be wrong. 

[Ynot]

11 hours ago, ImagineerTom said:

secondary issues also cropped up, what is SL & SR when you have two mirror image auditoria for example, 

Really?

Curve in particular has no specific left and right in the studio as it's just that - a studio black box that can be formatted however it's needed for each production.

I'd guess the same would apply to similar venues, so that's not really an issue, is it???

 

[sunray]

12 hours ago, ImagineerTom said:

Curves original design used “acoustic curtains” (a magical, mythical product that architects seem to think are an actual thing) to deal with sound bleed so that both auditoriums could use the same stage house…. Very quickly they switched to the studio just being used as a studio with the iron firmly shut and the stage house being used almost exclusively in a traditional way with the main auditorium. 
 

secondary issues also cropped up, what is SL & SR when you have two mirror image auditoria for example, one shared space accessed by multiple auditoriums (and thus control systems) resulted in many technical problems that you can probably guess. I believe that now the two rigs are effectively physically separated to keep things simple and only spliced back together on the rare occasion they are to be used as a single space. 

We had an issue with a school hall space with 2 stages, one of which could be worked on 2 (OR both simultaneously) sides, something like this:

The space could be used in a number of combinations, their Passion Play used it all with a mobile audience.

Designating SL & SR wasn't a massive problem but bearing in mind this was for a school, making switching the quantity of speakers foolproof caused some head scratching.

[sunray]

Our local theatre stage originally faced the other way as part of the Corn Exchange, when the theatre was built it had 2 irons. When we hired the exchange for an event in 70's and went in in the morning to do some decorating, the exchange iron was out and some of the exchange space being used while preparing for a show theatre side. I understand it doesn't get raised these days due to the way changes have been made on the theatre side. Whether it can still rise I don't know.

Edited August 5, 2023 by sunray

[ImagineerTom]

12 hours ago, Ynot said:

Really?

Curve in particular has no specific left and right in the studio as it's just that - a studio black box that can be formatted however it's needed for each production.

I'd guess the same would apply to similar venues, so that's not really an issue, is it???

 

The studio has a fixed (telescopic) grandstand at ground level and upper level balcony on three sides- whilst it can in theory be used in any orientation there is very much a clearly defined orientation and SL/SR that any tech who walks into the space would understand immediately.  

The original design intention was that the iron would be lifted and it use the stage house (which could be allocated wholly or partially to either auditorium) thus creating a stage house where SL & SR were different as I previously described. 
 

As I also mentioned these grand architect’s ideas quickly failed in the real world because (for example) no one was making shows that played to a 300 capacity audience that also needed a 20m wide stage with full automated flying.  Outside of a couple of short, in house productions designed specifically to highlight the quirky design of Curve the whole concept of 2 auditoria sharing a single stage house has been completely abandoned because the technology didn’t actually exist, the practicalities of running the space were too complicated and there’s no touring product being created for such a configuration. Curve runs now as a reasonably successful 2 auditoria venue but it is doing so along entirely traditional configuration and operational models, not the magical new model that the original architect envisioned. 

Edited August 6, 2023 by ImagineerTom

[TomHoward]

Hayworth Theatre at Woolverstone Hall (now Ipswich High School) has a large removable wall behind the cyc, conventional tiered room seats about 350 and the sports hall behind serves as a bigger venue using the same stage for speech days etc or the stage can be extended backwards into hall for large truck storage.. I believe this one is regularly used in both config.