mood: scared
music: Peter Gabriel – Down to Earth
So on my current tour as lighting designer for Big Daddy Weave, I’ve run into an interesting conundrum. Our front lighting truss flies from the same Genie towers that hold the front of house line arrays.
These line arrays normally fly at a trim height of about twenty feet (six meters for those playing the European game) and the five Source4 ellipsoidals that we use to light the singers are focused when the truss is at trim height. And not with a ladder. We don’t carry a twenty-foot ladder. The only way to focus is to crawl across the truss and hand-focus the lights.
Heights have always given me a touch of unease. Sometimes, I can get used to it (The scissor lift I used at POG, climbing truss towers to change a lamp, climbing a wire rope over a platform suspended sixty feet in the air) but this particular arrangement causes me a great deal of stress. One of things is that it just lays on the tines of the Genie towers. Granted, the extremely heavy PA is there to keep things stable but there is still a considerable amount of sway. And the sensation of being high up is so much more visceral in this situation. Not only is there ground beneath you clearly visible through the twelve-inch truss, the truss sways as you’re on it. This provides a rich sensory experience that was enough to scare the living daylights out of me as I sat perched on a Genie lift, twenty feet off the ground with ten people from the church staring up at me.
I chickened out.
Luckily, that day, we had a ladder and the time to use it. But the day is coming when we won’t, and I’ll have no choice but to go out on the truss. I am not looking forward to that.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks