Dar Cherait is a cultural tourism complex which contains a unique, private collection that took decades to gather. It includes The Medina, a theme park dedicated to The Tales of the 1001 Nights and 'Dar Zamen', which retraces 3,000 years of Tunisian history. The owner of Dar Cherait, Cherait Jallel, is also responsible for building the new geological and prehistoric theme park named Chak-Wak, on over five hectares of land which celebrates the different steps of the story of man's evolution, via 25 scenes, featuring life-size characters and animals.
M N Chelli, technical director of Backstage Technology - a company created with Jallel back in 2002 to take care of all the Chérait Group's technical requirements, flew in Adamson Systems technical support representative, Benoit Cabot, to give Chelli, Jallel and their crew an intensive three-day technical and practical training session, and to insure that the system was built to the same global standards as those belonging to other Adamson rental partners.
In addition, the system was built to match Adamson Europe DV2's standard for all European systems to guarantee cross-continent compatibility. It is expensive to travel to Africa with a full rig, so most tours opt to rent locally. According to Chelli, there has been a general lack of high-end systems available for such tours and Backstage Technology feels that owning an Adamson rig allows them to fill the void in the North-African market. For the opening of Park Chak-Wak, Backstage Technology put their newly learned skills into action, with Ben Cabot overlooking the set-up.
16 Y10s, Eight Y-10 subs and six 12MX monitors were erected to provide sound reinforcement for the opening ceremonies, set-up in a tent and open-air area for about 500 people. All speakers were powered and processed by Lab.gruppen and XTA technology respectively. "It is so much more demanding setting up shows in the desert - the dolly becomes useless and a lot more manpower is required to move and set-up rigs. In the end though, the sheer excitement of the crew makes it worthwhile, they have never had a chance to work with such a high-calibre system before," commented Cabot. "In fact they were so impressed that they're looking at investing in more 12MXs and a SpekTrix system."
(Lee Baldock)
