 |
|
Exterior View of Refurbished Qatar National Theatre | Second Time Around
The Qatar National Theatre originally opened its doors to the public, of the Gulf state of Qatar, in 1982. The original design works were undertaken in the late 1970s by the then young team at Theatre Projects, including Richard Pilbrow, Chris Baldwin, John Coffey and John Wittaker. The lighting installation was managed by an equally young Malcolm White working, at the time, for Rank Strand.
Our report details the involvement of UK-based LSI Projects who undertook the complete refurbishment of the theatre's lighting, sound, communications and stage engineering systems.
In early 2000 the Government of Qatar issued a tender for consultancy support for the re-design of the technical facilities. Many consultants bid, but the tender award did not take place until mid 2002, with the contract finally awarded to ACT Consultants of Cambridge, coincidentally to Messrs Chris Baldwin and
|
|
|
Malcolm White | John Coffey. No doubt, they dusted off their notebooks and tried to think what had happened the first time round!
LSI tendered the project in November 2002 and was awarded a contract in April 2004. The theatre had been widely used to stage a variety of theatrical events and unusually had a permanent local crew and management team who continued to use equipment with specifications dating from the late 1970s without any upgrades. The ACT design was restricted to leaving the structure of building intact but to upgrade all of the technical facilities. United Construction acting as the main contractor were given the responsibility of repairing the concrete shell, upgrading the cooling systems and generally carrying out a complete refurbishment with new seating and interior finishes throughout. Here the second co-incidence occurred with LSI appointing Malcolm White to be the site Project Manager for the duration of the project. Second time around, Malcolm promised he would get it right!
|
 |
 |
|
Foyer Being During Hand Over in 1982 |
Completed Foyer in 2005 (photo: ACT Consultants) |
|
|
The original architectural design was themed around the local culture and dated very much from the 1970s. The theme of the foyer this time was based on contemporary Italian design with considerable amounts of marble and specially designed furniture to achieve an almost hotel foyer contemporary style. The auditorium had previously contained large amounts of wood and was felt to lack atmosphere, the use of new fabrics, colours, finishes and seats produced a modern auditorium with excellent acoustics. Support for the acoustic design was provided by Adrian James of Adrian James Acoustics working in conjunction with ACT on the final system design.
The stage engineering system, as originally delivered, comprised of manual counterweighted sets, a stage revolve, safety curtain, a 2 part orchestra pit elevator, flown film screen and related curtains and drapes. For many years, LSI Project have worked with Dave Johnson of MRL Systems. Together numerous stage engineering projects have been completed such as Keble College Oxford, Millennium Forum Derry, Heritage Theatre Abu Dhabi, JRTV Jordan and the Malaysian National Theatre. Due to new client requirements the stage elevators were replaced with one new single Serapid driven elevator fabricated and installed by MRL. The original revolve hydraulic drive was replaced with a variable speed friction drive system complete with encoding allowing position memories to be stored.
After discussions the decision was taken to refurbish most of the counterweight
|
 |
|
The Refurbished Over-grid pulleys | sets with new ropes, pulleys, counterweights and to bring the system up to current safety codes. 8 of the sets were replaced with power flying using pile winding winch sets controlled locally and via the LSI ARC control system. The safety curtain drive motor, safety systems and counterweights were all replaced or refurbished. To cope with a new video projection system, a new projection screen and masking were added to one of the power flying sets. The remainder of the powered sets were used for 4 lighting bars and stage curtains.
Again the flown bars are controlled locally and via the ARC control system. All curtains were replaced with a new proscenium curtain, mid stage traveller, cyclorama and wing curtains all provided by a British fabric weaver. A new electrically operated main proscenium curtain track with memorised opening positions was fabricated by MRL and suspended from one of the new power flying sets.
 |
|
ADB Phoenix 10 in Lighting Control Room | One of the major design considerations ACT had to make related to the choice of the lighting and sound equipment. Unusually in the Gulf the National Theatre has a permanent technical crew. With no formal theatre training or education available locally, any chosen systems had to be of the highest reliability and be easy to operate and maintain. Accordingly for the lighting system the whole of the original system was removed and
discarded. New ADB Eurodim 3 modular dimmers with 192 x 3kW, 18 x 5kW and 36 x 3kW Non Dim channels were selected due to their high reliability. An easy to use ADB Phoenix 10 control desk is provided for both generic and motorised equipment. The luminaire compliment includes 8 Vari*lite VL1000 motorised profiles, 80 cool SL zoom profiles, 6 x ADB 2kW profiles, 20 each of ADB F101 and C103, 12 ADB ACP1004 cyc lights, 20 Thomas Par Cans and 2 Robert Juliat Korrigan 1.2kW MSR followspots.
A tubular ripple, 2 Starlette 2.5kW effects projectors with White Light disks and DMX drivers and a strobe were provided. For Chris Baldwin some blue fuzz lights and a mirror ball were added, just to remind him of the 1970s.
|
 |
|
Another LSI Delivery to Site! | The entire electrical system feeding the lighting system was removed, new containment and cabling installed together with purpose fabricated socket boxes. The installation team comprised of UK based LSI personnel and a team of local workers trained by Malcolm. During the peak installation period, LSI site staff numbered 126 personnel! Working 10 to 12 hour days in order to complete the installation with the very short timeline allowed by the client. With daytime temperatures in excess of 40 degrees and no air conditioning Malcolm's idea of providing water dispensers for LSI staff was soon taken up by other contractors. Maintaining site safety was extremely difficult as other contractors were not used to enforced Health and Safety. As the picture shows all LSI staff were equipped with safety equipment and soon learnt to wear them whilst on site!
Further Eurodim dimmers and contactors were used for the ARC controlled working light and house lighting systems. All lighting bars over the stage were replaced with new internally wired units fed via multicore cables to allow for rapid re-lighting.
The sound system was again completely discarded as much of the original equipment should have long since passed to a museum. Being given such an opportunity allowed the designers and the contractor to reminisce about the days gone by of the reel to reel tape machine, valve amplifiers and names of companies long since passed. The heart of the new sound system is based around L'Acoustics loudspeakers and amplifiers, LA112XT, LA115XT 2 way co-axial and dV Sub loudspeakers were provided all neatly housed within the proscenium wall. Each loudspeaker was fed via separate LA48 and LA24 L'Acoustic amplifier channels. The resulting sound quality matched perfectly the room acoustics producing excellent clarity and coverage for all types of music and drama productions as well as providing full stereo sound for the video projection system.
|
 |
|
Audio/Video Patch and source equipment racks | The production sound mixer was an Allen and Heath GL4000 selected for the provided facilities and ease of use. All of the sound system was located in a total of 8 fixed and one portable rack housed within the large control suite at the rear of the auditorium.
A complete on stage foldback system was provided with 4 Martin Audio F12 and F8 monitor loudspeakers fed from 3 Crest CPX300 power amplifiers linked to an Allen and Heath GL3000 mixer located on stage right. A portable monitor rack is provided complete with the necessary processing and Klark Technik DN410 5 band equalisers.
The Emir's private box at the rear of the auditorium has its own loudspeaker system equipped with 5 L'Acoustic MTD108a and 1 SB15 Sub Bass unit all fed via separate amplification. This allows a complete separate relay of the show and full stereo sound for the when video projection is in progress.
A wide range of processing equipment is provided for the main system including BSS noise gates, compressors, constant graphics and Soundweb for the central processing, other equipment includes a Lexicon MPX1 reverberation unit, a Drawmer MX40 de-esser and a Sabrine FBX-2020 feedback exterminator. Source equipment includes Tascam DAT recorder and dual cassette deck, Sony CD and DVD players and recorders, plus a large quantity of Shure and Sennhesier diversity radio microphones. All of the source equipment was located in central control racks located very close to the sound mixer. Within these bays patching for all the audio and video sources is provided.
|
 |
|
The Auditorium Stripped Before Refurbishment |
A portable video system is provided complete with 3 Sony cameras and vision/audio mixer to enable the theatre staff to record productions and to inject this into the in house video system. The system is completely portable allowing use in other venues in Qatar. A Sanyo XF-35X 6000 ansi-lumen video projector is located in the control room replacing the two 35mm film projectors. Interesting these showed 600 hour operational hours, most of which was as follow-spots! Video inputs are provided around the stage and building complete with computer interfacing allowing the video system to be used for conferences if required. To support this application Brahler simultaneous translation equipment is provided for 6 languages.
A complete outside broadcast system has been installed allowing up to 9 camera positions around the auditorium. OB wall boxes provide camera triax, audio, intercom and video inputs and outputs. This infra-structure can also be used by the semi professional video system used by the theatre staff. An external connection point is provided for Qatar TV to connect to the building infra-structure as required.
The building is also equipped with some central systems such as CCTV allowing cameras in the auditorium to feed data to the stage managers desk and control rooms, further security cameras are provided for the stage door keeper. A large paging and show relay system that covers back stage corridors, dressing rooms, workshop and under-stage, coverage is also provided for the front of house and foyer levels. The system is controlled by the LSI ARC system that also controls work lights, houselights, curtains and stage rigging and provides non dims. Uniquely ARC also provides a monitored emergency stop system for all motorised machinery in accordance with the new BS 7906 - 2005 standard. A central ARC paging matrix is provided that allows the user to set up zones and priorities. These are simply programmed via the central ARC touch screen. The ARC allows the end user to be able to re-programme many parts of the building systems as the theatre requirements evolve over the next 25 years.
For LSI this was a very large project with over 100 personnel on site for the duration of the project. Malcolm White was able to use his knowledge of the original installation to plan the completely new electrical infra-structure that ran throughout the building. The new sound solution necessitated a considerably increased amount of audio, video and communications cabling running around the building. Finding routes for this was often difficult whilst maintaining segregation from lighting cabling.
|
 |
|
Refurbished Flying System |
The final refurbished venue does credit to the original British based Theatre Projects Consultants design team and the sympathetic refurbishment by again British consultants - ACT Consultants from Cambridge. The new solution brings high levels of technology enabling the theatre to stage most events in the 550 seat auditorium and yet maintains and easy to operate bias. The people of Qatar should be proud of their new theatre, as once again this is technically advanced compared to other venues in the region, as it was originally in 1982.
|
 |
|
The 2005 completed Auditorium with new décor and seating (photo: ACT Consultants.) | |
