Rewiring the Black Box
In my last update on the renovation, I explained how we have expanded the size of the Black Box auditorium. Now we’re almost finished, we’re going to guess that when patrons come back, they’re not really going to notice anything different—but the performers will.
And so will the techs.
Because the lighting booth not only had to be rebuilt, but it had to be rewired.
Remember that when we first constructed the Black Box, it was all one level. The seating platforms were originally movable, just as the seating was, but it was not stable and it was not ideal. So back in late 2017 we refurbished and built in the risers for the seating.
This meant that we had to raise the level of the lighting booth. Now a lighting booth is wired specifically for the tasks it has to meet, which is, well, theatre lighting. That involves wiring up theatre lights to a dimmer rack which originally had been installed about halfway up the wall. This was when the lighting booth was raised above the level of the floor by little more than a foot. When we built in the risers, this required raising it some more, so over the last seven or eight years, the dimmer rack has been at floor level—and the switches that control the lights in the theatre have been below the Black Box floor. One had to reach through an opening in the floor to turn them on, as they had been placed low on the wall when we first installed the booth.
Clearly, this wasn’t going to work, now that we were raising the lighting booth still higher, and moving it further back as well. When we measured, the dimmer rack was going to end up being in the audience. Clearly not desirable. So we had to think about rewiring the lighting booth altogether.
At the same time, we also needed to think about rewiring the backstage as well. One of the things that modern theatres (modern buildings in general) now have to think about is having enough plugs. People are forever wandering around, looking for plugs, because they have to charge their phones and other devices. People have been known to come into the black box, unplug something they don’t know the purpose of, and plug in their phones. Meanwhile, in the theatre, we’re losing control of the lights (they’ve unplugged the internet hub that allows us to run them) or something equally unwanted.
So we decided we needed to add some more plugs backstage.
Here are images of that process!
