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Yes, as I sit here, there are eight 1K scoops burning on the stage and in the house. I could cook pizzas on them! And they burn all day because of intermittant rehearsals, drama classes, spontaneous tours, and tech work, etc, etc... There are props to trip over backstage and a pit to fall off of, so for safety, I need lights on at all times.
There is no place in this facility to hang standard fluorescent tube fixtures. They cannot be hung on the electrics because they would obstruct the use of 200 lekos, etc., and there are no hard points on the interior walls that are safe for tubes due to flies, scenery, sprinklers, etc, etc... It's a 600 seat traditional proscenium theatre with 25-line, 6-story fly loft. When it was built, there were ZERO worklight fixtures on stage whatsoever. The fly lines are dead-hung on the I-beams, so I have no grid to hang fluorescent works in the loft. The stage floor, including wings, is 100 feet wide by 40 feet deep...with ZERO light switches or works. So I have to use theatrical instruments hung on my electrics and my ETC dimmer system to operate worklights all day. It pretty much sucks.
For the first couple years I used those portable carpenters worklights from Home Depot with 500 watt tubular halogen lamps. It took 14 fixtures to provide minimum worklight on stage and in the house. But all of those fixtures failed due to carbon scoring and heavy rust on the lamp base terminals...plus the internal wiring melted due to 18 hour use over 2 years...a huge waste of money.
Then I went to the LDI convention with the main task of looking for solutions to this. I found some cool-looking compact fluorescent lamps at the Eiko booth. They were about a foot tall spiral and have mogul bases. I got 12 for about $40.00 each as an experiment. But they all melted and failed within 30 minutes to about two weeks time of use due to overheating in the Altman scoops. They are base-down-only lamps, and there was no way to light a stage with scoops with the bases down. I kept the scoops tilted up as high as I could and even drilled ugly vent holes in the tops of the scoops, but all the lamp bases still died from heat....another big waste of money.
Ideally, for daily works in the house and for general rehearsals on stage I should really have some low-energy vapor "clean-up lights" like they use in movie theaters, warehouses and gymasiums. There are also other types of industrial works that use compact fluorescents and new LEDs. But I have to wait for some of my major "wish list" items to get approved by the higher powers...
In the meantime, I am simply looking around for stop-gap ways to retrofit my large stock of "old-school" scoops. In the longrun, I would love to find a "green" solution to my worklight problems that saves money.
Thanks for the input. -Dana
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Mr. Lowell,
Lighting/Set Designer & Tech Director,
for the Linda Sloan Theatre,
in the Davison Center for the Arts,
at Greensboro Day School
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