PARTS was founded in 1994 by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, one of the world's most prominent choreographers in contemporary dance, and Bernard Foccroulle, director of the Belgian national opera De Munt/ La Monnaie. It is closely allied to De Keersmaeker's dance company Rosa's and increasing dissatisfaction at the quality of the audio systems in two of the PARTS studios led to a better solution being sought.
"As well as teaching, we regularly hold performances in the studios and the existing system was not coping with the demands," says Steven Peeters, house technician at the school. "What we needed was a system that could cope equally well with playing a wide range of different types of music, delivering exceptionally pure reproduction whether the music is very loud or very quiet."
Having demonstrated a number of brands and not been satisfied, Peeters was introduced to Coda loudspeakers via the installation at the STUK arts centre in Leuven. "The staff at STUK were really pleased with their Coda system, so we asked distributor Apex Audio for a demo. It immediately proved that Coda met our expectations," he says.
Working closely with Apex, the PARTS technical team tried a number of combinations of loudspeakers, settling on a versatile two-way G 512-96 system and active PW15a-pro 15" subs.
"The sound is very clear at every level and the subs ensure that performers can feel the music, which is very important in a dance school," says Peeters. "Students are really happy that they can now play jazz, classic or hip-hop, all with the same sound-quality, and teachers are saying that it's less tiring to be in the room for two hours with the music playing, thanks to the audio quality. We are very happy with the choice and can only advise others to follow our example."
(Jim Evans)
