Christchurch’s Court Theatre reopens with LSC solutions

When Christchurch’s Arts Centre was damaged by an earthquake in 2011, the Court Theatre was forced to relocate to a temporary home – an old grain storehouse in the nearby suburb of Addington, called “The Shed”. Now, the theatre has reopened in the newly developed Performing Arts Precinct, complete with power management and data solutions from LSC Control Systems.

The venue consists of an intimate, courtyard-style 377-seat main house called The Stewart Theatre, a flexible studio theatre space called the Wakefield Family Front Room accommodating 120–150 people and two smaller multipurpose event spaces, the Rātā Foundation Studio and the Ravenscar Lounge. Following a technical specification drawn up by international theatre consultancy Charcoalblue, Auckland-based specialist LS Group was engaged by Hawkins Construction and Court Theatre to supply, install and commission the theatrical lighting and control systems.

The setup consists of four of LSC’s UNITY switching/dimming racks (each with 96 channels) – three serving the Stewart Theatre and one for the Wakefield Family Front Room. “In moving to a new facility, we were faced with a conundrum: would we transition to an LED-only lighting rig or have a mix of LED and incandescent fixtures?” said Giles Tanner, the theatre’s head technician and principal lighting designer. “Because these two options require very different scenarios, this had significant implications in how lighting power would be implemented.”

In addition, the flexible requirements of the Rātā Foundation Studio and the Ravenscar Lounge are served by six GEN-VI units – three for each space. The LSC product range also met various DMX routing requirements. Included were a number of MDR rack-mount DMX/RDM data splitters for the venue’s day-to-day DMX signal routing, and MDR DIN-rail splitters as well as Nexus rack-mount nodes for Ethernet–DMX routing, plus a couple of Nexen DIN-Rail nodes providing power control for the house lighting system.

“We love the UNITY system,” exclaimed Tanner. “We are now equally capable of handling both LED and incandescent fixtures with ease. In practice, we have moved largely to LED fixtures but find that integrating conventional fixtures is both efficient and convenient. There are some situations where LED fixtures just do not give the best results and the option to seamlessly integrate conventional fixtures is fantastic. We are looking forward to discovering all the benefits that the UNITY system offers.”