Blog the Garden- backstage fun (part 3)

By Pearl Rea

Saturday June 20th! Finally we get the big pay-off of a year of planning and a big 12 hour day setting up the staging/sound and lighting…it’s the day of the show and its going to be a long one! Some of the EMP overhire is just on the load in of the headliner. Others come [...]

Saturday June 20th!

Finally we get the big pay-off of a year of planning and a big 12 hour day setting up the staging/sound and lighting…it’s the day of the show and its going to be a long one! Some of the EMP overhire is just on the load in of the headliner. Others come back after the show to tear it all down. Then there is the core group of EMP staff and our trusty lackeys cadre of dedicated overhire (one of whom has flown in from NYC to work for us) that are there on Saturday for the long haul: 7am-3am.

Unloading The Decemberists 53 foot semi- 8am on Saturday

Its a glorious start to the day of the show. The weather is going to be sunny and clear, we are ahead of schedule…so we were totally ready for The Decemberists 53′ semi trailer (everyone, say hey! to Ron The Decemberists truck driver!) to arrive and start unloading a massive amount of stuff: costumes, loads of guitars, extra lighting equipment, audio snakes, control boards, sets, drops, motors and truss.

Calexico, Yeasayer, and Solid Gold are using lighting and sound from our staging vendor. But The Decemberists travel with all their own gear, so we work most of the morning to get them set up in time for an 11am sound check with the band. Until then, the crew is testing mics, firing up the audio gear for the first time (amplified sound permit with the City of Mpls starts on Saturday morning), unpacking the headliner’s gear, setting up The Decemberists lighting, unloading the backline (the instruments and amps the band will be playing during the show), and generally racing around getting things done. Being sure to swing by the crew/band tent backstage for a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll as often as they can (wait, maybe that was just me…)

Guitar-world for The Decemberists- 10am on Saturday

Meanwhile, other areas of the event are springing into action. There is a whole other part of the EMP crew getting all the vendors powered up, inspected by the City of Mpls electrical inspector (for our permit with the City) and all the cable covered with cable ramps so ticket holders don’t trip and spill their beers!

And another part of the crew is working with MPR’s The Current to get them set up with power, ISDN lines for the live feed from onsite and working with their audio engineer to get tied into the audio snake so they can record the show for playing back over the radio later.

All of this happens while the staging crew starts sound checking bands one after the other in reverse order…the goal is to finish checking Solid Gold last so we are already set up for the top of the show.

Backline crew or U2 album cover? 1pm on Saturday

Another part of our department’s crew is assigned to backline/staging. They basically work with the bands to figure out what goes where, and how it plugs in…every band has a different configuration with different instruments and a variety of needs, so the trick to to lay it all out in a way that is logical and makes sense with a good group of people that can trouble shoot quickly while the bands are working and performing.

Incredibly, we are on schedule through all the sound checks! Vendors are up and running! The electrical inspector has given us a valid permit!

(A frantic dance of joy! Complete with jazz hands!)

Ellie, master planner of all things Rock the Garden comes over radio at 3pm and gives the go: Doors are OPEN!

It was pretty cool to watch people stream in from the entry tents. If you have a chance, I encourage you to watch the time-lapse video of the set up and show that Andy, intrepid EMP videographer, took on Fri-Saturday. It cracks me up everytime. One minute: bare expanse of green lawn. The next minute: people pour onto the hill (Bleah….)

I guess it would be totally uncool to sit here and unload some saucy gossip about any of the bands shenanigans that may or may not have happened backstage. But I WILL tell you that my favorite photograph I took on Saturday is the one I like to call “How many technicians does it take to fix a golf cart hotwired by Solid Gold?”

Crew vs. golf cart- Saturday @ 7pm

Blog the Garden- backstage (part 2)

By Pearl Rea

The biggest worry with loading in an outdoor show or a site specific work is RAIN! Last year, almost every single show or event we did in the Minneapolis Scultpure Garden was plagued by rain! This year, the weather was kind enough to hold off until after we had the crucial gear in place, tarped, [...]

The biggest worry with loading in an outdoor show or a site specific work is RAIN!

Friday night @ 8pm

Last year, almost every single show or event we did in the Minneapolis Scultpure Garden was plagued by rain!

This year, the weather was kind enough to hold off until after we had the crucial gear in place, tarped, and covered! I guess the elaborate interpretive rain dance I did last week totally helped!

We did have to break for a few minutes to hand out rain gear and ponchos (soon to hit the runways of Paris in 2010!) so the crew could keep plugging along with unloading cases, setting up mic cable and sliding up and down a wet metal ramp to the stage.

Our goal before leaving at the end of our call on Friday: get the staging in place, audio PA ready for The Decemberists 53 foot semi truck and their crew to arrive first thing on Saturday morning and to begin to place all the backstage elements…

Band trailers for The Decemberists, Calexico, Yeasayer and Solid Gold

Like BAND TRAILERS!

One of the other challenges of an outdoor event is space backstage for the bands. No dressing rooms, no permanent bathrooms, no rehearsal space, no green room for the 8oz bag of beef jerky and the brown M&Ms!

So depending on who the bands are (their backstage requirements) and where they are coming from, we will create a backstage area for them to hang out in. For instance, The Decemberists usually travel with a bus for the musicians and a bus for the crew, but for Rock the Garden they were flying in straight from Bonnaroo, so wouldn’t have their buses with them. I headed out to Shakopee (which appears to be the RV capital of MN) to a rental place just across the street from Valleyfair with several of the crew to pick up trailers for the bands and drive them back to the Walker.

Since The Decemberists had so many members, we ended up getting them a bigger (and incidentally, fancier!) RV that I have nicknamed “Big Mama”. EMP crew member David was pretty excited about driving “Big Mama” and is proud to report that she corners like crazy.

In fact, the number 1 question I got asked on Saturday was “How much would it cost me to rent The Decemberists trailer?” I struck a deal for the Walker (yes, my soul is for sale…), so you will have to call and find out for yourself!

You try to not jinx it by saying anything out loud, but we were ahead of schedule on Friday when we left!

NEXT UP: SATURDAY (“It’s the day of the show, ya’ll…”)

Blog the Garden- the backstage perspective (part 1)

By Pearl Rea

Any discussion of setting up the staging elements for Rock the Garden has to start with a shout out to Tony D. Although the EMP staff worked hard into the night to get the stage up and down in 36 hours, Tony gets my personal “Rock Star of the Day” award. Tony, on a “normal” [...]

tony-bobcat Tony, on a “normal” day at the Walker, is a building engineer in the Building Operations department. Over this last weekend at Rock the Garden, he went above and beyond the call of duty working with us to set up the gigantic power puzzle for the vendors, staging, sound, lighting, MPR, VIP areas and spent a lot of Friday moving big boxes of cable and cable ramps in the Bobcat he brought up to the Walker (from his house!).

It’s a good thing we had Tony’s Bobcat on site on Saturday. We discovered right at the end of the show (when our department was starting to strike the stage) that the forklift we had rented had a leak in the propane line! So when our forklift operator started it up to start moving cable ramps and crates, the forklift did a drastic sputter and DIED!

Tony D. to the rescue!

Less than an hour later, our forklift had a new propane tank procured from Golden Valley and was up and running, but because Tony was there with his Bobcat we were able to keep striking with barely a hiccup.

fri-roof-up We had a lot to accomplish before doors opened on Saturday at 3pm. The side of the street closest to the Walker closed at 1pm on Friday for us to put together truss, build the roof and construct the staging.

Approximately 30 Walker technicians along with the staging vendor’s 25 or so technicians worked together on creating the performance area. By 5pm, we had the roof together and ready to go up! Our main goal was to get this up before it started to rain.

SUCCESS!!

Blog the Garden- Quick posthow update

By Pearl Rea

Until I have a chance to sort through the hundreds of photos (sleep first, then pictures!), I thought I would drop in and give you the before and after:

BEFORE

AFTER

Blog the Garden- Load in!

By Pearl Rea

After a year of planning, the big day has finally arrived! For our department, today is the bigger, tougher day…one that all of our planning, hiring, budgeting, and set up has hopefully prepared us for. Right now the skies look pretty clear, and the weather service has downgraded the rain forecast to 30% chance between [...]

In more important Rock the Garden news…Yesterday at “Rock the Garden Labs”(tm) we tested a water balloon launcher ($25.00 at Dicks Sporting Goods!) in place of the ubiquitous sporting event T-Shirt Cannon.

Facts discovered:

1) Our Chief of Operations can really catch a t-shirt!

Important Rock the Garden testing!

2) The Master of the Rock the Garden Bands, Associate Curator in Performing Arts, is also the master of the 2 t-shirt shot.

Shooting off wadded up pink Rock the Garden t-shirts from a cheap water balloon launcher is as fun as it sounds! Good luck catching a shirt at the show!

See you back here next week with photos! and hopefully an interesting story or two…

Rapid Expansion: Insiders explain why Twin Cities dance is thriving

By Julie Caniglia

I interviewed John Munger, Karen Sherman, and Carl Flink for a story in the July-August issue of Walker magazine. Their insights about the state of dance both locally and nationally were so astute that we’re publishing them in full here on the blogs. First up is John Munger; we’ll follow with Karen Sherman and Carl [...]

I interviewed John Munger, Karen Sherman, and Carl Flink for a story in the July-August issue of Walker magazine. Their insights about the state of dance both locally and nationally were so astute that we’re publishing them in full here on the blogs.

First up is John Munger; we’ll follow with Karen Sherman and Carl Flink.

Munger is a locally based dancer who has, as he says, “been observing the field for 20 years or more, depending on how you look at my job descriptions.” One of those jobs is to create statistical portraits of dance – performers, companies, venues, performances, genres, etc. – both locally and nationally, in his role as director of research and information for Dance USA, a Washington, D.C.-based service organization. Click here for a full bio.

“When my first wife and I were dancing in Colorado and decided to move to a bigger pond, we looked around the country and thought the Twin Cities had a lot of promise. We moved here in 1978. So I’ve been here 31 years and part of the reason I stayed, aside from quality of life and things like that, is because as I’ve been here, the arts and dance communities have fulfilled that promise we saw when we were kids-it’s fulfilled it richly.

My succinct take on the evolution of the dance community here is: During the 1970s, there was an era of a handful of major companies. From about 1980 to 1995 or 1996, there was an era of enormous growth that was based on the efforts of individual choreographers here at home. And for the last 12 yrs or so, that model has grown into larger companies and greater national presence.

There are clearly two major dance centers in America, New York and San Francisco. After those, depending on whom you talk with, about 6 or 8 other cities are named as being among the four most significant, after those centers-including Chicago, the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Seattle, Los Angeles, and greater Washington, D.C.

These cities are not necessarily in competition with each other; rather, they’re all different from each other — we’ve determined this through research. We can quantify ways in which best practices from one community will not translate to another, because these places are genuinely, uniquely different.

And while the Twin Cities are in that group, quite frankly, the hardest message I’ve had to communicate in my 30 years living here is to tell media and the general public that this is one of the key dance communities in the country. It is the most diverse among those secondary those cities, and compact as well-and that is a unique construction.

For example, Seattle has basically 3 categories of dance companies, including a ballet company of major size. We don’t have a $6-million budget flagship ballet company in the Cities, but we do have about 10 categories of dance among our more than 200 companies. There are about 14 companies with budgets over $100,000 (up to $1 million) — including James Sewell Ballet, Ragamala Dance Theater, Shapiro & Smith Dance, Ballet of the Dolls, Zenon Dance Company. There’s also percussive footwork companies, there’s Indian dance. There’s Ethnic Dance Theater. Eastern European/Western Russian dance, classical and contemporary ballet. All these companies have budgets over $100,000.

Not one other city in the country matches our per-capita distribution of companies that size. Chicago actually has about 17 such companies, but their total population is two-and-a-half times our size. We also have more solidly established mid-sized companies in this city, on a per-capita basis, than anywhere else in the U.S. except New York City, which has about 37 mid-sized companies.

That is part of what makes us compact yet varied. We also have variations in age, with highly visible choreographers in their 20s and 30s, 40s, 50s, and even a few in their 60s. We have companies that have been around for 30, 20, and 10 year, as well as those recently formed. We have major mid-level and small upstart organizations working in ballet, in modern, in culturally specific dance, in percussive forms, experimental forms-all of them. We have over 50 nationalities and cultures represented through dance in these cities, and all of this is compressed into a community of about 3.5 million people. If you know where everybody is, you can go see any of them. Whereas in, say, San Francisco, or Brooklyn, those numbers are overwhelming.

This whole picture in the Twin Cities — ages of choreographers, degrees of experience, sizes and duration of companies, dance genres — all of that is richly represented. And that is what brought me here. I’m still here, delighted to be here, it’s a terribly exciting place to be involved with dance.”

Top of the (Avant) Pops

By Mark McCloughan

Hello Walker friends, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Mark McCloughan and I’m working as an Intern in Performing Arts forthe Summer. While the summer may seem like a rather quiet time here at the Walker, with only a few events on the calendar(Momentum and Music and Movies in the Park), we’re already [...]

Hello Walker friends,

I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Mark McCloughan and I’m working as an Intern in Performing Arts forthe Summer. While the summer may seem like a rather quiet time here at the Walker, with only a few events on the calendar(Momentum and Music and Movies in the Park), we’re already busily anticipating next season.

One of the events I’m looking forward to next season is Micachu and the Shapes. Playing at the Cedar Cultural Center on September 23, this concert is guaranteed to be fascinating. One of my jobs so far has been to research press for promotional purposes, so I’ve been reading a lot of stories about this band recently. There seem to be a few major trends that music journalists and bloggers are picking up on. The first:

Photo by jystewart

Some bloggers and critics (meaning there’s a mention in every single article you will read about this band) have picked up on the face that one of the tracks on Jewellery, the band’s debut album, prominently features the sound of a dying vacuum cleaner. While my research neither confirms nor denies whether or not this rare and delicate instrument will make an appearance at this show, Micachu’s art-school pedigree means that this show probably won’t feature a traditional guitar-drums-voice setup. This brings us to the second point about the band many critics have picked up on:

Photo by kmeron

Mica Levi (Micachu’s real name) has been called an art school prodigy by some (meaning all) critics. While this isn’t uncommon for an up-and-coming experimental pop musician, Mica’s rather ridiculous list of accomplishments definitely earn her the prodigy label. Born in 1987, at the ripe old age of 22 she has nonetheless managed to do the following:

graduate
release a pair of well-recieved singles
release a critically acclaimed debut album produced by Matthew Herbert, the famous electronic musician whose current project is a record made entirely from sounds sampled during the lifetime of a single pig (more information at This is a Pig, where Herbert will be chronicling the project)
compose an orchestral piece for the London Symphony Orchestra
Tour widely

Levi is remarkably humble about her accomplishments, and in most interviews I’ve read with her she seems to be almost giddy at the fact that she is receiving worldwide acclaim for playing a vacuum cleaner (among other things). Putting aside my extreme jealousy and violent sense of underachievment, I must say that I am happy for her. Really, I am. Aren’t you?

If you only see one avant-pop concert by a band of 22-year-old art school wunderkinds this season, see this one. You can find more information about the show at the Walker’s Calendar.

If you want a taste of what you’ll hear at the show, you can listen to some of the band’s songs at their myspace - Golden Phone is my personal favorite.

Blog the Garden- 10 days and fun with tech riders

By Pearl Rea

The trivia question at Dunn Bros Coffee on Loring Park this morning was so appropriate to my life and an easy 10 cents off my caramel latte machiato: What color M&Ms did the Rolling Stones request be removed from bowls backstage in response to Van Halen? The band Van Halen is legendary in the music [...]

The trivia question at Dunn Bros Coffee on Loring Park this morning was so appropriate to my life and an easy 10 cents off my caramel latte machiato:

What color M&Ms did the Rolling Stones request be removed from bowls backstage in response to Van Halen?

The band Van Halen is legendary in the music industry as pioneering the idea and evolution of the technical rider. A tech rider is comprised of a list of elements the band needs to perform: space size, number of dressing rooms, number of truss motors, brands of audio gear, placement of monitors, styles of mics, instruments the venue needs to provide (not all bands travel with their own), number of crew needed to get the show up and running for an audience, types of food and liquids available to the band backstage…the list goes on! Van Halen famously took this list of required items a step further by requesting a bowl of M&Ms backstage (as part of the band’s catering) with all the brown M&Ms removed. This was their test to see if the venue actually read the contract and was paying attention to all the elements listed in the tech rider. Their theory was if the bowl had brown M&Ms, then there might be other, more important, technical concerns that had not properly been addressed by the venue in preparation for the Van Halen show!

Although none of the Rock the Garden bands have that type of hard core technical needs (like a 6 truck Van Halen show), their catering requirements DO get pretty specific! Some of my faves from this year’s 4 bands:

One band requests an 8z bag of beef jerky

Another band requests 4 cans of Red Bull (not a case…but 4 individual cans)

one bottle of Maker’s Mark is pretty popular, but one band specifically requests NO JACK DANIELS (and yes, it is all caps in the tech rider)

In addition to the catering/hospitality set up, the tech rider is our main source of information on what instruments we need to provide the band and how the musicians are configured onstage. Sometimes this is a hand drawing that someone will scan and email. Other bands go to a lot of trouble to draft something out in scale with a lot of detail. My favorite this year even has little people inserted on the drawing representing members of the band…they all appear to be naked and all have incredible 6-pack abs!

6-pack abs!

My picture doesn’t do the level of detail on those abs justice, but you get the idea!

Another band on this year’s line up doesn’t have catering or hospitality on their tech rider (yet)…so they just emailed us to let us know that they are expecting a trampoline! Something tells me that those guys are going to be a blast backstage!

Oh, and if you head into the Dunn Bros coffee over at Loring Park today, the answer to the trivia is “green”. You are welcome…

Blog the Garden- 11 days!

By Pearl Rea

Prairie Bob in the house!!! Events and Media Production at the Walker sets up the staging, focuses the lights and mixes the sound for the bands to create the concert experience for the ticket holders. But one of the big things that my department will do for Rock the Garden (that most people may not [...]

Prairie Bob in the house!!!

Events and Media Production at the Walker sets up the staging, focuses the lights and mixes the sound for the bands to create the concert experience for the ticket holders. But one of the big things that my department will do for Rock the Garden (that most people may not realize) is coordinate the power needs for the staging (truss motors to put a roof over the bands’ heads, powering the audio gear, the lighting gear), the band trailers (where we stock the green M&M’s for the musicians!) and the food vendors!

Since the event is bigger this year (more space on the hill=more ticket holders!) we will have more food and beer on site! So we work with Ziegler/CAT to secure the necessary generators, cable and connectors to tie in all those food vendor tents, corndog deep fryers, lemonade machines and beer taps. And our electrical vendor sends out our good friend Prairie Bob (along with several of the Events and Media Production crew) to pound grounding rods into the soil, lay out cable and set up distribution panels throughout the event to get all the food vendors and beer trucks plugged in.

Today Ziegler/CAT, Bob, and several of the key Walker personnel walked out on site with the Rock the Garden site map (version 51 with layouts of vendors, cable runs and cable ramps) and lists of all the vendors (5 pages!!) and their power needs so we can determine the most efficient way to power everything up for this big event without breaking the bank!

And our vendor visit gave me the opportunity to snap a couple of BEFORE shots of the hill and the staging area. So calm, green and serene right now! Not so much in 11 more days!

: Looking at the stage, the audio team will mix the show from here…

: Decemberists lead singer will be standing about…here…

Rock the Garden haiku:

food vendors galore

the Rock the Garden corndog

my personal fave

Building Momentum: behind the scenes at the photo shoot

By Julie Caniglia

Each summer the Walker teams up with the Southern Theater to showcase four fresh voices in Twin Cities dance with Momentum: New Dance Works. Photographing the selected choreographers, along with their performers, is a favorite project for the Walker’s performing arts program manager Michèle Steinwald and staff photographer Cameron Wittig. Last year, the pair collaborated [...]

This year they set themselves the challenge of finding one streamlined concept that would still show the divergent visions of Sally Rousse, Megan Mayer, Vanessa Voskuil, and Sachiko Nishiuchi (all of whose work was still very much in-progress at the time of the shoot). It involved calling on a sizable group of Walker performing arts fans/volunteers to come to the McGuire Theater for a four-hour shoot one evening; more than a dozen obliged, bringing along their own wardrobe items to boot. The assembled group walked through the each shot, creating a blur of human action as a backdrop to the dancers, who struck stock-still poses.

Volunteers await their cue at one of the stage. For Sachiko Nishiuchi's image they were asked to dress in colorful garb; for other images they changed into gray.

Volunteers await their cue at one end of the stage. For Sachiko Nishiuchi's image they were asked to dress in colorful garb; for other images they changed into gray.

Here are outtakes from Nishiuchi’s shoot, taken by by performing arts assistant Emily Taylor. You can see Wittig’s final shots with all four choreographers in the July/August issue of Walker magazine, which will land in members’ mailboxes in mid-June (otherwise, pick up a copy at the Walker or at sites all around the Cities).