Gisborne’s War Memorial Theatre Becomes Medical Facility

As New Zealand went into COVID-19 induced stage four lockdown, all entertainment venues were shuttered. At the same time, front-line medical professionals prepared staff and facilities to treat any suspected respiratory illness as the novel virus, and keep suspected patients away from the already sick and vulnerable. The local hospital contacted council looking for suitable spaces to build new testing and treatment facilities, and The War Memorial Theatre was the top of the list.

Tim McAneney of Creative Lighting Design Ltd contracts his company’s services to the theatre, looking after the tech of every show that comes through. “We had the Menopause The Musical touring show scheduled to come in on Wednesday 18 March,” relates Tim.

“That was just before the gathering ban was announced, and they were still on the road. We did the pre-rig for them on the Tuesday. They turned up, the show was cancelled, and they turned around and went home.”

Now faced with a turnaround of a different kind, Tim found himself dealing with a local construction company who built the stand-alone kiosk modules for the testing centre, then helped assembled them on-stage.

“One of our techs works for them, too,” elaborates Tim. “It was good to get our crew onto doing this kind of building work.”

The next step for Tim was designing one of the most unconventional lighting specs for a theatre install.

“The criteria was they didn’t want too much heat, partially because of running costs, but most importantly because air conditioning would move airborne virus particles around.”

So how do you design a lighting rig for a medical testing facility in a theatre? Tim used an all LED rig comprising 15 Strand PLCYC1 MKII cyc fixtures in a warm white, and eight Theatrelight TL-F1000 LED Fresnels, and even pre-visualised it in Capture!

“I had to eliminate the lighting desk or anything complicated from the system, so I set everything to stand-alone mode and ran it off hot power,” states Tim.

“Any staff member can just flick two switches to turn it all on.”

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NEWS – CX Magazine – May 2020   

LIGHTING  |  AUDIO  |  VIDEO  |  STAGING  |  INTEGRATION

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