Preparations at Underground are well underway for next month’s Fringe. As ever, we will be based at our adopted subterranean home beneath the historic Old Hall Hotel in the centre of Buxton, but this year – for the first time – we will also be running Fringe performances in the newly-refurbished Pavilion Arts Centre. This means that Underground acts are able to perform in the only purpose-built theatres in town besides the Opera House: the Hotel’s Pauper’s Pit, and the Arts Centre’s Studio Theatre and Auditorium. Add to this our atmospheric comedy and music space The Barrel Room, and Underground’s venues are the some of the most unique and well-equipped on the Fringe. But the venue is only as good as the staff behind it, so in this blog post we’ll introduce you to the Underground Tech Team and take you behind the scenes of this year’s Fringe.
I’m Percy (aka James Percival), the Technical Manager for the venues, and have worked with Underground since 2008. As well as running the sound and lights for shows in the Barrel Room, I plan the schedule for the venues (except for the actual programming of shows), oversee the movement of equipment (and staff!) and act as a first point of call for visiting companies and performers planning the practical aspects of their performance. This year, I’m delighted that joining the Tech Team are professionally-trained Chris Marsh-Hilfiker and Jenny Roche, specialist lighting designer and stage manager respectively. Chris and Jenny will oversee Underground’s two studio theatres, supporting the work of visiting companies’ designers and technicians and helping those who don’t have their own specialist technical staff. Augmenting the team will be experienced sound engineer Jake Mottram, who will be making sure our music acts sound as good as possible.
Before the (proverbial) curtain goes up on each Fringe show, there is a lot of preparation work that happens in a very short space of time. Like any professional theatre, our venues are fitted with state-of-the art sound and light equipment, but unlike big-budget theatre and opera productions, each company has two hours or less of preparation time in their venue – and it’s always busy. Companies will come in having polished their show, and so their Technical Rehearsal, which takes place just before the first performance, is about setting up spotlights, practising sound cues, rigging the set and props, and getting a feel for the space in which they’ll be playing. Our technicians are always on hand to help, and they’re already prepared with knowledge about the company and the show, as well as a guru-like understanding of the venue.
Performances in our three spaces are back-to-back throughout the day, and in order to fit in as many shows as possible, the gap between each show is half an hour or less. This sounds (and is) quick, but it is in fact much longer than the changeovers for most Edinburgh Fringe venues. In the space of 30 minutes, the audience must leave, the outgoing show has to clear the stage, and the incoming show has to get-in and set their props, lights, sounds, and projection. We then squeeze the audience into the right seats and make the front-of-house announcements before the figurative fabric is raised. Over the years this has become a finely choreographed routine, and we’re grateful to you, our valued audience, for bearing with us on the rare occasions when it goes awry!
Whilst the Arts Studio and Pauper’s Pit are ready-made theatres that we fill with performers and audience, our Barrel Room, perhaps the most unique venue on the Fringe, is for 11 months of the year the empty vaults of the Old Hall. Of course, the hotel’s 15th-century architects never envisaged that stand-up comedians would play to a packed cellar, or that 13-piece funk band would one day squeeze into one end of the long room, and so the space is transformed by Underground for just three weeks’ intense during the Fringe.
So there: everything you wanted to know about Fringe ‘tech’ but were afraid to ask!