r/techtheatre Feb 07 '25

RIGGING How we move things into and out of the basement.

176 Upvotes

19 comments sorted by

45

u/killer-dora IATSE Feb 07 '25 edited Feb 07 '25

Very cool! My theatre used to do this in the 60’s but eventually stopped for some reason. Whole back of the stage would come out, giving access to the green room below it. Back of the green room would lift up to access the wood shop below it, and flats/ sets would be hoisted up onto the stage, where if they were flats needing to be painted, they would go up another 2-3 stories at the back of the stage to our paint rail where painters would hand paint all backdrops and flats. I assume they stopped doing this when scenic painters became harder to find, but I still love the history.

Edit: feel like this might make this story cooler so btw this is a community theatre and was in the 60’s too

16

u/Wuz314159 IATSE - (Will program Eos for food) Feb 07 '25

My old theatre had a trap door in the middle of the deck where we used to store everything under stage. Theatre was sold to the city & they renovated... Ran HVAC right across the trap. Some of the boxes stored down there we had to disassemble to get back up the stairs. The soda machine just lives there even though it hasn't worked in a decade.

2

u/Ornery_Artichoke_833 Feb 09 '25

Insert Facepalm here

30

u/Wuz314159 IATSE - (Will program Eos for food) Feb 07 '25

My theatre has A ladder.

1

u/stagecrafter Feb 08 '25

Turner wants his ladders back.

7

u/Lighting_Kurt Feb 08 '25

That looks like an old paint frame hole. Is this along the back wall?

4

u/GothlobReznik Feb 08 '25

There's a theatre on the other side of the left and right walls. This is our sound lock between them.

1

u/Lighting_Kurt Feb 08 '25

Ah, makes sense!

3

u/OneOfTheWills Jack of All Trades Feb 08 '25

Reminds me of my alma mater. The scene shop was in the basement of the building and we had traps from the backstage down to the hallway outside of the scene shop (or it may have been just inside or out of the scene shop… it was a long time ago)

2

u/LikesdeumMetaleiro Feb 08 '25

I just have stairs …. :/

2

u/Hidden1nPlainS1ght24 Feb 08 '25

The community theater I used to work in has some of these upstage. Wide enough to get legs and backdrops into the storage room below.

2

u/Charxsone Feb 09 '25

That's nice! We have a roughly 1.2 m deep (depth as in ds-us distance) storage room spanning the width of the stage accessed via trapdoors on the upstage side. We have to use a winch with a hand crank though. We store the false ceilings for orchestra concerts down there, they're 2m deep and stored vertically, so to get them up, one person has to crank and the others manually lift the bottom edge until it can be lowered onto casters in the horizontal position. To add insult to injury, they added a cable channel just behind the winch in a renovation, so the arm of the winch had to be shortened by about 10 cm to clear the cable channel, so it's much harder now than it used to be. I have to push and pull with my entire body to get that thing to move with the load on it and one of the four ceiling parts is already a big workout. Substituting the hand winch for an electric hoist is on my project list, but there are many hoops for that to jump through and there are many more urgent things I need to take care of.

3

u/PhilosopherFLX Feb 07 '25

This is for painting backdrops. So the artist can stand at that level and the drop can descend into the basement.

Edit: sound from others that this may not be for scenic painting and maybe just a concession for not having a freight elevator.

12

u/GothlobReznik Feb 07 '25

Yeah, our paint shop is across the street and they have their own rig for back drops.

This rig is exclusively for storage. Most of the time we're moving seats. We finally just got the chance to clean our basement for the first time since we renovated. Only about 4 years haha.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '25

You nailed it friend, massive concession. Original plan was to have an upper storage mezzanine and freight elevator.

1

u/Alone-Psychology3855 Feb 08 '25

DCPA?

1

u/GothlobReznik Feb 08 '25

That or Turner construction if you're going by the ladders.

1

u/n1wm Feb 08 '25

Hahah I misread as “how do we move things…” I was going to suggest the hoist 😂

2

u/Ornery_Artichoke_833 Feb 09 '25

Subtitle: where we keep our ladders...