PLSN INTERVIEW PHOTOS BY JUDY BARBOSA AND T. CHARLES ERICKSON LD Jamie Burnett on Terra Tractus: The Earth Moves Projects2K Sets Stony Creek Quarry Aglow with Fusion of Art and Science By Gary Fails S ince environmental artist Joy Wulke founded Projects for a New Millenium in 1993, the nonproft organization, now called Projects2K (projects2k.org), has been raising awareness of ecology and the natural world through a fusion of art and science. The group has staged a variety of site-spe-cifc shows, turning to the Stony Creek Quarry near its home base in Branford, CT for a number of productions over the years. They include Visu-alization of Time (1995), Terra Continuum (1999), Terra Lumina (2001), Terra Alchemica (2002) and Terra Mirabila: If Rocks Could Dream (2005). In February, Wulke, 65, died after a sev-en-month struggle with cancer. The group she founded continues, however, and in June, Proj-ects2K returned to Stony Creek Quarry for their production of Terra Tractus: The Earth Moves. The production, with performances on June 19, 20, 22 and 25-29, chronicled tectonic shifts and the emergence of life over millions of years on earth. Climbers performed a series of stunts to tell the story of the earth’s distant past, the frenzied present and the possible future. City Theatrical Inc. (CTI) president Gary Fails interviewed Jamie Burnett, the LD and produc-tion designer for Terra Tractus for CTI’s monthly newsletter. With permission from CTI and Bur-nett, PLSN presents the following excerpts. For the complete interview, and to sign up for CTI’s newsletter, visit citytheatrical.com —ed. Sphere, representing our world and the galaxy, with a hot-lighted center. The sphere passes three times during the show, each time repre-senting the passage of 250 million years, the amount of time it takes for our galaxy to make one full rotation. The frst traverse shows freballs and lava creating and destroying land. Simultaneously, a sea opens and the frst signs of life are seen. Elemental creatures scurry on the ocean foor, and mysterious glowing tentacled creatures zip across and through the water. The second traverse shows frogs and oth-er amphibious creatures looking to the sky in wonderment. During the last traverse, the sphere comes to a grinding stop and all goes dark. This, in efect, stops time to a crawl. The dawn of man is upon the earth. Just a blip in the scope of our geological time. Civilizations spring up, as represented through the climbers [a.k.a. Time Wranglers]... Projections pierce through on the quarry back wall, cave paintings and wall carving appear, communication through art and drawing and symbols. CTI: What are the various artistic elements in the show? JB: The quarry itself. This has been in oper-ation over the past 150 years and is carefully sculpted to remove intact blocks of granite. It’s a precise art. We installed a 60-foot high triangu-lar Textilene scrim, hoisted up by a chain hoist motor. This represented the slow growing of the Himalayas and countless other mountain rang-es over the eons. This was rappelled down on by our Time Wranglers. I installed two 350-foot-long zip lines to give our Time Wranglers anoth-er dimension to represent ancient ocean crea-tures and freballs and lava. The climbers were given four rappel stations as well as a preshow location from the highest wall. There they created a rubbing of the gran-ite live in front of the preshow audience on a 40’ piece of Tyvek. Our dancers took the part of ele-mental creatures, frogs, and the dawn of man… We installed three 12,000 lumen Christie Roadster projectors. These were brought to life by our creative team of Dan Fine and Matthew Ragan. They created all the content and cues from scratch in two weeks, with stop motion animation, flm, and live VJ type interaction to modify looks and cues on the fy. Each night we tightened and tweaked the show for better pacing and excitement. CTI: What are the unique challenges of put-ting on a show in a quarry? JB: It had been nine years since we had done a production in the quarry. Joy was up for another one, and since it had taken me eight years to forget how much work it had been to produce the last one, I was in. We had done these shows so rarely because of the incredible amount of work they take in a very compact amount of time. [For 2014,] we got the creative team together to go over ideas and decided we would like to include moments from past shows that were most epic and efective and could help tell the story. We all take two things for granted in a nor-mal theater: gravity, and a fat surface. There are no fat, clean, surfaces in the quarry. Every-thing takes longer, and there is more lifting and climbing involved. I cut down the number of fx-tures on the high wall because there is no way to get a light there except for three people to climb and carry it there. Thank goodness I was able to hire my climbers two weeks in advance as crew. They were so into it they couldn’t wait to get there every day. This time, the quarry was in full operation — it’s a working mine. Our time there was re-stricted to being there after quarry hours at 3:30 p.m. till dark each night. Once we got the projectors set up, there was no sleep. I stayed up with Dan and Matt for four nights as they focused and tweaked and viewed content on the quarry walls. We would leave as the quarry workers arrived. I waited for the second week for lighting load-in so that we could save money and wear and tear on the equipment and crew. That week until opening gave us the opportunity to spend another four all-nighters. Fortunately, we could work all day on weekends. However the heat of mid-day made us grateful for the night. We set up a 9-by-20-foot tent and installed a foor and tables and chairs for our control booth. This is where we lived for the duration. CTI: Regarding the technical aspects, how was the show laid out? JB: [We had] feeder cable spread out 300 feet in each direction from the generator to distro panels and fnally to multi cable and Edi-son cables to the lights. No incandescent lights were used this time. This kept the power re-quirements way down. I used 26 Elation Elar 108 Pars, 26 Chroma-Q Color Force 12s, 26 High End Systems Tech-noArcs, nine Martin MAC 2000 Performances, fve Martin MAC Quantum LED washes and two Chauvet Rogue R2 LED spots. I divided the rig up into four reasonably sized universes, each one headed up by a SHoW Baby 5 at the beginning of the run. The ffth SHoW Baby 5 was installed on the sphere to control the LED RGB pixel tape around the circumfer-ence of the sphere. I set up a block of fve SHoW Baby 5s at the console and it all just worked. I used four SHoW DMX D4 Neo wireless dimmers for the LED tape on the climbers’ helmets. These worked perfectly as well. We lucked out on the weather. There was no rain on show days, and minimal to no rain on days of. Lots of large garbage bags covered lights when rain did threaten. CTI: How were the lasers and projections sequenced with the rest of the show? JB: We cued the show very interactively; as called by the stage manager and the di-rector, we were able to respond instantly to new timings and even intensities in projection, CTI: How was Terra Tractus conceived? What is the show about, and how is that story told? Jamie Burnett : The subject matter expands the story of the geological history of Stony Creek to include the geological history of the Earth with continental drift. We take up the show approximately 600 million years ago, when the super continent Gondwanaland be-gins to break up. We show that tectonic plates expand and contract again approximately 250 million years later. The audience sees a mysterious orb traverse high above the quarry. This is an Armillary 42 SEPTEMBER 2014 • plsn.com
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