AV Technology - February/March 2009 - (Page 56) yourworld education created the School of Visual and Performing Arts that year, comprised of the departments of Art, Music, and Theatre/Dance. They also formed a partnership with the City of Cape Girardeau to provide public and private funding for the new facility. The University preserved and re-used the historical structures and built a new facility with two theaters, a dance studio, art museum, classrooms, practice rooms, labs, and offices. The seminary’s chapel would be gutted and rebuilt as a recital hall. Ground was broken in May 2003 on what would be a $160 million project. THE NEED FOR DIGITAL SOUND Working with plans developed by Arup Acoustics and Sound Design of Los Angeles, Conference Technologies completed the engineering and installation of sound systems in four major venues in the new River Campus, together with an HD video system in a theater in the Rosemary Berkel and Harry L. Crisp II Museum of Fine Art. The 950-seat Donald C. Bedell Performance Hall is the center’s largest theatrical space. Its first year of operation saw touring productions of The Producers, the Moscow Ballet performing The Nutcracker, the St. Petersburg Ballet, Ring of Fire, Shaolin Warriors, Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight, and visits from the St. Louis Symphony, as well as the Southeast Missouri Symphony Orchestra and a number of student productions. “What you need for a touring musical is completely different than for a ballet,” says Lovett. “The challenge of building this sound system was that we are so versatile — there is no one type of system perfect for us.” “[The musical production] Stomp played here in October,” he explains. The producers of that show require a stage-mounted ground stack system, so the dancers can actually feel the vibrations of the music as well as hear them. “But our system is flexible enough that, instead of giving them full ground stacks, we were able to add some small stacks to give them the feel they want. Our job here is to take each unique event and figure out how to make it work without bringing in a lot of rental gear.” The distributed sound design uses RenkusHeinz STX6/64 loudspeakers for left, right, and center mains, two Community SBS45 subwoofers, Renkus-Heinz TRX121/9 loudspeakers for the sides and three balcony satellite fill positions, Renkus-Heinz TRX61 speakers for six front of stage lip fills, and 30 Tannoy CMS60-TDCs as under-balcony and under-mezzanine fills — all www.avtechnologyonline.com The 205-seat Robert F. and Gertrude L. Shuck Recital Hall was originally a 150year-old campus chapel. Photo courtesy Michael Kessell, CTI. AV for the Performing Arts AT SOUTHEAST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY’S SCHOOL OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS, FINISHED SOUND SYSTEMS BLEND OLD AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES. By Don Kreski anagers of performing arts building projects have a tough job. Witness the design and construction of the Earl and Margie Holland School of Visual and Performing Arts at Southeast Missouri State University. “Timelines on large projects like this one can be very long,” says Dave Lahey, director of engineering at St. Louis-based sound and AV contractor Conference Technologies, Inc. (CTI). The original designs for this brand-new campus and its four performance venues were completed nine years before the opening. They had to be if architectural drawings, fundraising, and construction were to be finished on time. This particular nine years, however, saw a revolutionary change in high-end audio systems — a shift from mainly analog to completely digital technology. “If this project were designed today, it would be very different,” Lahey explains. Yet because the sound systems were so integral to the design and construction of the facilities, much of it was literally “cast in concrete” — significant change was not an option. M Perhaps for that reason, by the end of the summer of 2007, it became obvious that the original sound contractor would not have the systems ready for the grand opening in October, and that there were issues in their design that had not been addressed. At that point Jeff Lovett, technical director for the Holland School, brought in Conference Technologies to replace the original contractor. “Our job,” says Lahey, “became one of bringing the initial designs up to date, making sure that the digital components added later worked smoothly with the [pre-existing] wiring and conduit that could not be changed.” A NEW PERFORMING ARTS CAMPUS The overall goal of this project was extremely ambitious: to create a top-tier college of performing arts and, with it, a state-of-the-art cultural arts center. The development began in 1998 with the purchase of the buildings and grounds of St. Vincent’s College and Seminary on the banks of the Mississippi, which had been closed in the 1980s. Southeast Missouri State University 56 | AV TECHNOLOGY | february | march 2009 http://www.avtechnologyonline.com
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