Their facilities include a fully equipped 492 seat proscenium arch theatre and a 200 seat performing arts space. For many years the lighting department had been using an old Strand 520 console and recently it was retired from service.
"It was getting a bit long in the tooth especially when it came to moving lights," said Jayson Bowles, technical coordinator at the centre. "Out of the current crop of consoles on the market we found that the ETC Ion 1500 covered our needs. It's similar in operation to the Strand console so our guys picked it up fairly quickly and of course, the moving light side of things is a huge improvement over the old Strand! We looked at the current Strand offerings particularly the Palette, but we didn't like them. They looked like you'd need to be a computer programmer to get your head around them! The Ion was much simpler to navigate."
Although the Ion 1500 is used primarily in the Arts Centre's main theatre its portability means it can easily be taken to the performing arts space if required.
Bowles reports that his guys find their new Ion 1500 to be very intuitive and easy to programme.
"The off-line editing is handy and the moving light palette that allows all the functions of your moving light to appear is great," he said. "It means that you can select any fixture and immediately control any attribute with the graphic on the screen. It's also still a great theatre desk - you have a designer ask you to add three seconds to Cue 2 and it's very easy to do so. Its versatility is very good."
(Jim Evans)
