< PreviousPlaces for Performance: New DirectionsLondon 3-5 JuneSUNDAYRiverside Room | Main Registration | Tea & CoffeeRiverside Room | Main Registration | Tea & CoffeeWelcome: Louise Jeffreys & David StaplesKeynote Presentation: Francine HoubenKeynote Presentation: Paul GriffithsKeynote Questions & AnswersNew Cities, Countries & OpportunitiesTheatre on the MoveKeynote Presentation: Mark RylanceKeynote Questions & AnswersOpening the DoorsThe Bridge Theatre ToursThe Bridge Theatre: A New Theatre for LondonTAIT PresentationRiverside Room & Haslett Room | Tea & Coffee BreakRiverside Room | LunchThe Bridge Theatre | Opening Day Drinks ReceptionRiverside Room & Haslett Room | Tea & Coffee Break | followed by travel to the Bridge TheatreStage Engineering: out with the old, inwith the newAcoustics, Amplification & Theatre DesignIs it Real? The Use of Digital Technologiesto Enhance PerformanceDigital Interaction in Analogue SpacesRole of Theatre Architecture inCreating MeaningMONDAYRiverside Room & Haslett Room | Tea & Coffee BreakRiverside Room | LunchCloseRiverside Room & Haslett Room | Tea & Coffee BreakThe Move to Automation Product and the Connected TheatreNew Theatres ShowcaseThe Artistic Directors’ PerspectiveBodies in SpaceVirtual Reality ‘Petting Zoo’Virtual Reality ‘Petting Zoo’08.15 - 09.0009.00 - 10.0010.10 - 11.1011.10 - 11.3011.30 - 12.4512.45 - 14.0014.00 - 14.4014.45 - 15.3015.30 - 15.4516.30 - 18.2518.25 - 20.3008.15 - 09.0009.00 - 09.5010.00 - 11.1011.10 - 11.3011.30 - 12.4512.45 - 14.0014.00 - 15.3014.45 - 15.3015.30 - 15.5015.50 - 16.4517.00Keynote Session: Chair, Sir Nicholas KenyonKeynote Presentation: TBAKeynote Presentation: Ascan MergenthalerKeynote Questions & AnswersConcert Hall Design & AcousticsVirtual Reality & Augmented Reality in the Design ProcessLessons from the 20th CenturyHistoric Theatres: Can We Make Them Fit forPurpose in the 21st C?Conference SchedulePlaces for Performance: New DirectionsLondon 3-5 JuneLearned, stimulating, provocative and inspiringThe leading international gathering for those involved in the planning, design, construction, specification or operation of places of entertainment.Once every four years: the next edition will be the most effective yet at exploring the needs of the producers and managers, the makers and creators.Founder Sponsorwww.abtt.org.ukTUESDAYKeynote SessionKeynote Presentation: Graham VickKeynote Presentation: TBAKeynote Questions & AnswersAre Theatres an Opportunity or a Burden?Mid-Century MasterpiecesAuditoria Floors: flip it or tip it?Core Values in Theatre ArchitectureNew Directions into the 21st CenturyConference CloseRiverside Room | Main Registration | Tea & CoffeeRiverside Room & Haslett Room | Tea & Coffee BreakRiverside Room | LunchRiverside Room & Johnson Roof Terrace | London Skyline Party [ticket holders only]Riverside Room & Haslett Room | Tea & Coffee BreakHeavy Lifting: Stage Engineering, is it worth it?Bursting the Bubble: LED, Regulation and the Future of LightingTheatre by CandlelightNew Technologies in TheatreHow ‘circular’ can the Theatre Industry be?Raising the StandardNoise in the Orchestra Pit08.15 - 09.0009.00 - 09.5010.00 - 11.1011.10 - 11.3011.30 - 12.4512.45 - 14.0014.00 - 14.45 14.45 - 15.3015.30 - 15.5015.50 - 17.0017.00 - 17.3017.3012 Sightline Summer 2018 The ABTT Theatre Show is an exhibition where between 100 and 150 suppliers relating to live performance technology engage with those responsible for delivery in the world of theatre, events, festivals, sport, film and TV. A range of peripheral activities are presented to support the exhibition, which is a well established annual networking opportunity for the technical community. This is a fair description of where we are today. The Theatre Show began its life as The ABTT Trade Show at The Donmar Warehouse in Central London in 1978, since when it has been staged in a variety of venues including The Round House, The Riverside Studios, The Royal Horticultural Halls and The Truman Brewery. In 2015 the Theatre Show moved to The West Hall at Alexandra Palace in North London, a venue which has become the new permanent home for the event.Roger Fox was one of the original organising team and in recent years has overseen the significant growth of The Theatre Show as Show Director: “We live in interesting times when technology seems to be so dominant. In our industry though, there is no future in using technology for technology’s sake. Everything needs to be put into context. Investment in technology can only make sense if it offers a valid contribution in sustainable and creative production values.” Hence the quote: “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” James Baldwin. “40 years on, one could produce a retrospective display of memories or artefacts, but this would most probably end up being an exercise in self indulgence with limited purpose. We have turned the situation on its head to start with a purpose.” Roger continues. The purpose is to promote the understanding of what has been; to promote the value of experience and to harness all of this with the intention of supporting the new generation entering the industry. The objective is to create a contemporary resource which evolves through collaborative contributions. Starting with a simple website, we will be canvassing for information which helps to illustrate the sequencing of developments in the various disciplines in our industry. Initially, we are starting with four threads: Lighting, Audio, Stage and People/practices. The threads might evolve and by June, the general idea is to produce a physical graphic display in The Londesborough Room at Alexandra Palace during the ABTT Theatre Show to replicate the web pages. Taking this one step further, the opportunity might exist to produce these timelines as information sheets. The 40 year timeline website is http://abtt40.co.uk.Meanwhile in the Londesborough Room, we will be presenting a range of technical demonstrations under the banner ‘TODAY’. Audio Today is already lined up and the detail will be announced soon. Other exhibitors at the Theatre Show will be coming on board to illustrate the capabilities of the latest technologies along with their practical application in our industry. Cutting edge technology is all very well, but the entertainment industry is about people and performance. The ABTT Theatre Show is well known as an annual networking event and the amount of experience present at the event is massive. There is an unquestioned recognition of the importance of enabling new talent to join the industry and those who have been working in the industry are always keen to impart knowledge and experience to the next generation. Passing the baton on the 40th, we will be starting our new mentoring sessions during the Theatre Show. These sessions are aimed at those interested in technical theatre, teachers of GCSE or A level creative subjects, GCSE students and beyond, further education students on a specialist drama or technical course and those starting out and looking for opportunities. Those wishing to take part in the mentoring programme are asked to complete the form on http://www.abtttheatreshow.co.uk/mentoring.html. We will then source mentors to meet the needs of our visitors.Just as we did in 2017, we expect to welcome in the region of 2,000 visitors. If you haven’t been to the ABTT Theatre Show before, you will find that it well worth a visit. Registration is now open and is free of charge. The show is on June 6th & 7th at Alexandra Palace.…now in its 40th year…The ABTT Theatre ShowSightline Summer 2018 13 REGISTRATIONNOW OPENTHEATRE SHOW 2018JUNE 6 AND 7ALEXANDRA PALACE, LONDONABTTwww.abtttheatreshow.co.uk14 Sightline Summer 2018 Whenever we argue about what makes the perfect theatre, we can usually agree that its primary purpose is to conjure the best possible relationship between actors and audience. What makes some better than others in conducting energy and generating atmosphere is more debatable, but I would argue that irrespective of scale or style, chief amongst the essential qualities for a great theatre is density: that is, the number of closely packed human faces that an actor can absorb from the stage and with whom an audience member can feel complicit in the room. For any given audience size, actors know that a more compressed, encompassing crowd will mean that they will need to energise a smaller volume of space with their voices and gestures, and if the audience is physically closer to the performers it will be far easier for them to become properly involved with each other. Density is the key, without which comfort, good sightlines, technical sophistication or even great acoustics – important thought they are – can never entirely camouflage a room that feels too diffuse and therefore theatrically inert. Density was a commercial imperative for Are we being dense?Designing the Bridge auditoriumSteve Tompkins is Director and Co-founder of Haworth Tompkins Architectshistoric theatres, but expectations of comfort and unimpeded views, expanded human frame sizes and the welcome advances in fire safety and accessibility have made it harder for designers to aspire to the intensity of those (originally) more cramped and incendiary playhouses. The problem becomes more acute as the scale of the audience expands and the natural limits of human contact become strained. With this conundrum in mind, and without a commission, in the autumn of 2014 Roger Watts and I set out to explore what an ‘ideal’ larger scale 21st century auditorium might look like. We discussed a room that could aspire to the density of an Elizabethan playhouse or a deep-galleried West End theatre and yet could match the adaptability and democracy of the best contemporary spaces.As a benchmark we settled on the physical footprint of our personal favourite auditorium, Frank Dunlop and Bill Howell’s 1970 Young Vic. The manually adaptable, chamfered seating space of 16m x 16m, surrounded by shallow seating galleries on four sides but with the fourth side removable, has proved All photography: Philip Vile16 Sightline Summer 2018 itself capable of an almost limitless series of different formats, and yet it remains a room in which everyone feels connected to one other, and so are encouraged to behave like active participants rather than passive consumers. Keeping the 16m gallery to gallery width of the (normally) 420 seat Young Vic, we experimented with a more vertical, three-tiered system of perimeter seating galleries to target a capacity nearer the Lyttelton’s 890.To get anywhere near this capacity with decent sightline angles would mean compressing the height between each gallery as far as possible so that the audience would be vertically closer to each other and to the stage. We designed three-row deep galleries made of laser cut steel to reduce weight and structural depth, minimising the need for columns by means of torsion beams and bespoke cantilevered supports. Three layers of fixed galleries would form three sides of the space, surrounding a modular stage and stalls zone that could be manually but quickly transformed to end on, flat floor, apron stage, traverse or thrust stage variations. A fourth, demountable seating gallery would enable in the round configurations. The technical infrastructures of lighting, ventilation, heating and cooling (so often the downfall of new theatre construction and cost planning) would be incorporated into the primary fabric of the structure as a single, coordinated, pre-designed and pre-fabricated object.Production designers have rightly criticised architects for completing too much of the design story around the playing area, so that the auditorium becomes ‘a locked-off camera’.Mindful of this, we designed the upstage edge of the auditorium room as open to a clear playing (or seating) area, so that designers and directors would have the option of a fully end on format and maximum freedom to dovetail the design of each production with the fixed gallery elements. Thus, in end-on configuration, a ‘proscenium’ width of up to 15.5m might be achieved, or stopped down to narrower openings. This would place a greater burden on the show designer to complete the architectural identity of room for any given production, but achieve a different quantum of adaptability for, say, promenade or in the round configurations. As Roger and I were developing these strands of thought in early 2105, we were asked by Nick Hytner and Nick Starr, our former clients at the NT Future and NT Studio projects, to design the first theatre of their new, non-subsidised venture, the London Theatre Company. On seeing the sketches for our experimental modular auditorium, they immediately understood the theatrical possibilities and were happy with the likely capacity, so we agreed to develop the design together as a working prototype. Searching for possible sites, we visited a ground floor and basement plot at No 1 Tower Bridge, set aside by Southwark Council for cultural use as a planning condition for a soon-to-be completed residential building. Even the empty space felt great, and the riverside location onto Potters Field Park was extraordinary. The 10m total headroom was tight, however, by coincidence demanding the sort of compressed structural design that we had already been mapping out for theatrical density. We calculated that our three tier, 900 capacity room would fit, but with only millimetres to spare. On that basis the Nicks negotiated the lease in the summer of 2015 and officially appointed us as architects, with the aim of fully designing, manufacturing, assembling, commissioning and opening the theatre to the public in 2 years.Once the project was real, we knew we would need to collaborate with a specialist fabricator to develop and build the modular auditorium. Nick Starr introduced us to Tait Towers in the USA, a company more used to making theatre machinery and rock staging. Working with design engineer Ewart Richardson, together we developed the basic auditorium design into what was, for us as architects, an extraordinarily detailed 3D digital engineering model that could both be tested for weld joint stresses and interrogated for individual sightlines. With the London Theatre Sightline Summer 2018 17 Company team, we digitally ‘sat’ in every seat in the house, in all formats, to verify the quality of the sightlines and set up the various ticket pricing bands. Likewise we ‘stood’ on every part of every stage configuration in order to experience an actor’s relationship with the audience and identify the points of command to inform the various stage geometry options.Wiring, lighting, sound and emergency systems were all coordinated within the design, including the surrounding steel diaphragm wall which doubled as the air supply plenum, with integrated duct routes and grilles at each level around the seating galleries. Our regular collaborators Skelly and Couch (environmental engineering) and Gillieron Scott (acoustics) worked with Tait and ourselves to design and calibrate the systems, whilst theatre practitioners were enlisted to advise on the infrastructure for sound and light.Gillieron Scott built a detailed digital sound model of the space, enabling the client team to experience and tune the audibility of performers from every seat and in every format. We made a number of bespoke seat prototypes with manufacturer Kirwin and Simpson, which were tested by the client team before we settled on the final design, which can swivel to improve side gallery sightlines in more end on configurations. The hundreds of small adjustments and recalibrations at the design development stage have resulted in a finished space with consistently good sightlines and a lovely natural acoustic for spoken word.Once the base design had been finalised, the digital model was used directly for steel fabrication. As a final testing of the digital design prior to site operations, the team built a full-sized prototype of the three-tier side and corner components in a hanger in Norfolk, 18 Sightline Summer 2018 Auditorium ConfigurationsLeft: Thrust, Bottom left: End-on Bottom Right: In-the-roundallowing us to experience the relationship of actor and audience, tweak the ergonomics of steps, seating and handrails, and to rehearse the site erection methodology. The auditorium was made in lorry-sized modules, bolted together on site, allowing easy transport and erection with only a mobile tele-handler and a small, skilled site crew. The entire stalls pit and stage area consist of a bespoke, innovative modular staging system developed by Tait to allow quick manual adaptation for different formats.For this first auditorium we chose a simple, warm material palate of deep brown painted steel for the main auditorium structure, natural oak slats for the tier fronts, black recycled rubber flooring and a rich burnt orange woollen cloth and tan leather upholstery for the seats. The semi-transparency of the tier fronts, tested in detail by Gillieron Scott, seeks to balance acoustic feedback with visual continuity of human bodies around the space, reinforcing a perception of the whole audience actively sharing the room together. Final seating capacity varies from 900 to 1075 depending on format.Our collaborative experiment in density has given us unexpected new insights to the detailed technical world of engineering product design, has smudged the usual demarcations between the design and making processes, and all but dissolved the traditional supplier and consumer relationship between consultant team and client. As a model for future experiment and refinement, the Bridge has been well received by actors, audience and critics for its first end-on, and second in-the-round promenade productions (the current, third production is in thrust) but we are actively gathering feedback from the technical team running the venue to inform the next version. London Theatre Company are currently looking at different capacity variations of the modular auditorium with us, which will be visually transformed not only by scale but by different material and colour choices. More widely, we hope this will be the prototype model for a family of dense, adaptable, prefabricated modular auditoria around the world.Sightline Summer 2018 19 The key challenge presented to TAIT by Nick Starr, Steve Tompkins and Roger Watts from Haworth Tompkins was how to minimize the vertical height of the balcony structure, such that 3 balconies could be fitted within the existing found space. This was both a practical requirement – the economics of The Bridge (a commercial theatre) would only work with a 900 seat capacity house, but also to realise the intent to pack the auditorium with a ‘sea of faces’.The traditional way of designing a balcony structure would be to start with the primary steelwork, add secondary supporting steelwork, then allow space for the building services, and sound cladding, before adding the architectural ‘skin’. At The Bridge Steve gave us the challenge of reducing the thickness – in some cases to 20mm – between the statutory headroom for a balcony and the feet of the audience on the balcony above. Clearly a more dynamic approach was required. The key to achieving this has been to pack all these various elements into a single conjoined whole that both acts as the structure, and surfaces, and carries within it the various service routes. Whilst the key component of the balcony – steel – has been available for nearly 4,000 years, there are 3 modern technologies that have enabled this approach at The Bridge. The first is the use of sophisticated 3D mechanical design package CATIA (first developed to allow the design of the Dassault Mirage fighter – and subsequently used by most major aerospace, automotive and shipbuilding manufacturers all over the world). Catia is a tool that facilitates the design of complex structures – structures that importantly combine multiple functions in compact space. Such structures could be (and have been) designed using earlier 2D methodologies but such techniques would, for example, typically involve data transfer to different packages for finite element analysis (FEA), Catia allows a designer to carry out near-constant FEA cycles to prove the design as it develops – all in native Catia file format and usually on the same desktop machine. Catia assists a designer to explore the ‘what’s possible’ – while looking for the design solution – without involving often time-constrained (and potentially costly) third parties. In the case of The Bridge all the steel elements contribute to the structural strength of the balconies. The effect of loads can be analysed using the FEA tool to determine not Engineering the Bridgeonly whether it’s strong enough (there are codes to limit the ‘utilization’ of the material – what percentage of the material’s yield stress we should use) but also what sort of deflection we might see in the structure under such loading conditions.. In the case of The Bridge Theatre, deflection-limiting was more restricting than stress-limiting. We were very much aware that an audience member’s perception of ‘wobble’ in the structure could affect their comfort just as much as their amount of personal space.The screenshot below shows a typical in-process analysis of one of the balcony units. It shows individual loads on each seat base, both vertical and horizontal loads on the front balcony handrail, gravity loads due to self-weight and ‘virtual parts’ mounted onto the balcony front stanchions that allow us to load up the ‘cantilevered’ lighting bars than could be mounted on the front of the balconies:And the same FEA process allows us to see the likely deflections due to those loads:Catia has various ways of sharing information for collaboration during the design process. Ewart Richardson Mark AgerNext >