Umbrella's equipment program leverages the skills of our Managing Director, Lee Hollaar, to provide technical advice and support to performing arts organizations, primarily small theater companies and venues. We do this in a number of ways:
We loan equipment, including equipment owned by others but managed by us, to performing arts organizations, generally at no cost. Although we primarily have stage lighting equipment, we also have systems for sound mixing and playback. Currently, Umbrella has lighting equipment to handle two "found space" productions, consisting of eight Tetra 12 RGBA LED wash lights, 40 watt warm-white LED (with 19, 26, or 36 degree lens tubes) or 60 watt color ellipsoid fixtures, and lighting stands and cable. We also have a variety of other fixtures, such as Source Four ellipsoids and PARs, strip lights, and follow spots.
We help the arts organization select
the equipment that best fits their needs and is within their capabilities to
operate.
This ideally involves
talking with them very early in their production cycle about their needs,
visiting their performance space to understand how to place and connect the
equipment, including determining how to supply its electrical requirements. At
the early stages, we may be able to suggest staging alternatives that will
simplify the production.
Of particular importance is the selection of a lighting (and possibly sound)
control system that can do what is needed but doesn't required an inordinate
time to become proficient using it or is difficult for a production's non-techie
crew to run. We have a range of consoles, from a simple six-fader to ETC
SmartFades and ColorSources to an ETC Ion (whose manual is about 600 pages) and
PCs and DMX adapters that can run ETC Nomad or Obsidian Onyx (formerly Martin
M/PC). If there are extensive sound or video cues in a production, we have
experience controlling lighting along with them using QLab. We have developed
simplified guides to our consoles and can help program things so that all you
need to do is run the show.
We also have experience using LED strips to integrate lighting with a set. We
have controllers for analog and pixel-addressable digital strips, and Lee
designed and programmed the wireless LED controller used by Pioneer Theatre in
many of their productions and which we used in our production of
Rent.
We provide consulting and technical assistance to venues that wish to improve their lighting capabilities, sometimes providing equipment on long-term loan. Lee designed the lighting systems for the Alliance Theater in Trolley Square, first a truss-based approach and then custom lighting pipes for their main area and for their new black-box theater. We also supplied lighting equipment to Lightree Studio and retrieved Wasatch Theatre's equipment when they moved out of The Box and used it to set up their new Salt Lake City Theatre Co-op. In each of these, we continue to support the equipment, help users in the space, and augment it with loaned equipment when necessary.
We have a "lighting fixture rescue" program, accepting donations of fixtures which we recondition and loan to other theater companies. We are primarily interested in quality equipment that can be using in our loan programs, although sometimes we can find good homes for other equipment. If you have equipment taking up space in your garage or basement, and want a tax deduction or are a non-profit who needs to transfer it to another non-profit to keep the IRS happy, we can help you!
For more information, contact us at ManagingDirector@UmbrellaTheater.org.