Thern® Stage Equipment: StageFX, a prominent organization specializing in large scale structures and turnkey staging solutions, sought Thern’s expertise for a unique challenge. In November 2022, they approached Thern with a specific request involving the installation of winches within their expansive truss sections. Their objective was to lift these interconnected truss sections from ground level to a desired height, guided by vertical support box trusses.
This was a super cool article to read. Since coming to CMU I have become more and more interested in rigging and how that relates to the other areas of theatre. The different tech and things that are responsible for putting trusses, speakers, lights, and even people high up into the air is super fascinating to me. The system they used to lift this rig had a lot of factors in it. First it had to be incredibly strong to lift and giant truss system as well as being hidden inconspicuously so that they were glaringly obvious to the audience. The combination of these two things is hard to pull of Thern, the company that did the work, was able to pull it off in an efficient and effective manner. I would love to know more about the machines they use, and the problems that they ran into along way and how they solved them.
ReplyDeleteReading about this scale of fabrication and installation involved in this project helps remind me of the scale that we are currently working at in the school of drama and helps to contextualize our work and to a certain extent relax about our capacity to accomplish that work. While there is still a great need for proper planning, communication, and proper technique in execution, our productions typically do not scale to anything near the needs of thai project discussed in this article. This is evident just from the problem of needing to engineer a winch that will be able to do what the project needed, but regardless is still impressive to see the differences involved. Further, it also is exciting to read about because these are likely next steps after the school of drama (at least to be involved in some capacity) and as such also represents where we can aim to achieve.
ReplyDelete