Day 3

Stage crew does a final sweep on a completely empty deck in preparation for laying down a full-stage, wood-painted floor covering.

For those unfamiliar with the weather of the southwest, it can get cold here at night. It creeps up on you at 3 a.m. and says "Hey, remember when you went to bed and it was 70 degrees? Just kidding. It's 40 degrees now!" You go to bed with as little as possible, only to wake up, put on more clothes, pull that blanket back up that you kicked to the ground earlier, and assume the fetal position to try and retain your body heat. Exciting.

I woke up to no WiFi at the apartment, which isn't a huge deal except when you're two time zones away from home, by yourself. The first few weeks are rough because you don't know anybody, and can't go anywhere outside of walking distance. The small city of Santa Fe gets even bigger when you can only walk so far. In contrast, your world gets much smaller. The stores nearby get old after a while, you can only go to Trader Joe's and CVS so many times.

We show up to the Opera a little before 9am, and mill about before the model presentation at 9:30am. It can be a little frustrating to come into work and not know what needs to be done that day. I would love to have a To-Do list saying "Here's what needs to be done before rehearsal begins next week." It gives me something to shoot for, and also lets us know if we're ahead or behind. So far, it's been work, then hang around until we figure out the next task.

The model presentation was interesting for me. I enjoy production meetings, it gets everyone on the same page. When I came in to the Opera for the first time I had no idea what shows were going on or what they looked like. After the meeting, I now know what props and scenic elements being built go to what show, and I can follow the progress better. Afterwards, we struck the screen and projector (set up yesterday) and moved on to setting up some on-stage video monitors.

These video monitors work with more monitors in the spotlight booth to give the performers on-stage a consistent view of the conductor to stay on tempo. The TVs were hung fairly quickly, but getting a video signal to them was another story. In an ideal situation, all of the video connections throughout the theatre would run to a single room. From there, signals can be combined and split and re-run to other points in the theatre from that room. However, over the years, the existing infrastructure needed expansion, and the single lines run to stage right wing, for instance, needed to be split and expanded within the wing. However, very little (to none) of this was documented, so we spent the next two hours becoming intimately familiar with the video infrastructure of the stage right wing. Those two hours also included brainstorming some creative suggestions to improve the future usability of the space.

After working with the video, we line-tested the microphone connections throughout the space. This gives us an idea of what mic jacks work in the space. This included testing microphone snakes (extensions) run to the back of the house. Unfortunately, one of the snakes wasn't labeled, but the patch panel in the control room WAS labeled, saving us from more hunting. I feel like these systems which seem to be so critical for the opera season would be documented and labeled a little better.

On to tomorrow!