The Rothschild Performing Arts Center, due to open in February 2018, is designed to present a wide variety of wonderful shows to a comfortable audience, and there are a thousand elements, literally behind the scenes, that will enhance that experience. Here is a look at a few of the bigger elements that will make this center an outstanding performance venue for the Harker community for decades to come.
Architects for both the performing arts and athletic centers are Studio Bondy Architecture and Kevin Hart Architecture, which joined forces to design the gym and the theater, including the interiors and the site development, said Kevin Hart.
“As with any project of similar size, there is a large team of in-house architects and designers, consultants and sub-consultants,” he said, “in addition to the general contractor and subcontractors, who have important roles in the design and execution.” Of these many critical subcontractors, two play key roles in the development of the theater technology.
“The theater experts, The Shalleck Collaborative, worked as consultants to the architects to inform the design of the auditorium itself, the stage, rigging, theatrical lighting, orchestra pit, movable orchestra shell, control room, dressing rooms, and many other details,” noted Hart. “They also provided design of A/V systems, including the LED wall in the lobby.
“The acoustical experts, Charles M. Salter Associates, worked as consultants to the architects to design the acoustical qualities of the auditorium, which is adjustable for different uses. They also provided guidance for the acoustics in the rehearsal rooms and designed many of the wall and ceiling assemblies to prevent noise intrusion from outside and improve sound control between rooms.”
Display Wall
The most noticeable item attendees will see is the 34.5-foot-wide, 15-foot-high color LED display wall in the lobby. The display will showcase professional and student work. Once inside the building, the magic of technical theater won’t be as visible, but will provide for a remarkable audience experience.
Orchestra Pit Lift
One of the biggest and coolest pieces of equipment in the new facility is the custom-made, electromechanical orchestra pit lift. The lift is capable of raising and lowering the 48-foot-wide by 10-foot-deep elliptical segment of floor, 332 square feet in all, fully loaded. The segment can be used as a stage extension, for additional seating or as an orchestra pit.
Hart noted the lift platform is a steel superstructure with two interconnected heavy-duty motors which raise the platform on four “Spiralift” columns, Model #ND9, by Gala Systems.
These columns, fascinating pieces of machinery, are created anew each time the lift is used. Motors turn the column bases and a vertical steel band is locked into a spiraling horizontal steel band (picture a giant, high tech slinky) so the column “grows” as it goes up and is disassembled as it comes down, eliminating the need for a deep pit beneath the lift to house the column when in the down position.
Gala Systems noted the system is highly stable vertically and laterally, very quiet, nearly lubricant-free to eliminate any smell and should last the life of the facility with very little maintenance. The system is used in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and 55 countries around the world. Check out this video on how the system works: http://bit.ly/2yrGTEF. The lift will also be used to move the Bosendorfer concert grand piano from its stage-level closet to underneath the stage if needed. More about this wonderful piano in a future article!
Professional Fly Tower
Another of the major components is the fly tower, containing 35 counterweighted rigging battens for moving scenery, lighting and special effects, and the top of the movable concert orchestra shell. Each batten can be used to raise an item, or they can be used together to raise larger items.
There are three battens for moving the top of the orchestra shell (the back and side pieces roll into place), five battens dedicated to stage lighting and 27 scenery battens, said Jedd de Lucia, a principal at The Shalleck Collaborative. The eight battens that control the orchestra shell and the lighting racks are motorized and can lift up to 2,800 pounds each, while the remaining 27 battens, capable of lifting 1,500 pounds each, are controlled by hand – the counterweights make it possible to move the relatively lightweight scenery up and down by hand. The rigging and lighting equipment is accessed via a series of perforated metal catwalks that run the width of the fly.
Sound and Acoustic Tuning
The main audio control console will be a Yamaha QL5 mixing board, said deLucia. This state-of-the-art soundboard was chosen for its versatility, ease of use and compact size. These soundboards are in use in many venues worldwide.
“The speaker system has a left and a right line array for the main PA speakers as well as supplemental ‘fill’ speakers at the front row as well as below and above the balcony,” noted de Lucia. The system uses the ARCS series of speakers from L’Acoustics, a French manufacturer of loudspeakers, amplifiers and signal processing devices, include ARCS-Series Wide and Focus speakers for main left and right speakers; SB18i subwoofers; X8 balcony fill speakers and 5Xt speakers for under-balcony and front fill speakers. The system is driven via 4-channel LA4X amplifiers. Full specifications can be found at http://www.l-acoustics.com/products-catalog-75.html
The center will have a custom-built, moveable orchestra shell enclosure to create a fuller, more directed sound, said Hart. “The shell consists of overhead ceiling reflectors and rolling wall towers, which will provide an excellent acoustic environment for music performances,” he said. “The theater will also have an audio-visual system to support amplified music and musical theater as well as a projection system for media presentations, including movies.
“Further, the acoustics of the hall can be adjusted for different kinds of performances, like acoustic music, amplified media and spoken word. The mechanism for this adjustability is made up of four banks of curtains, located out of sight above the ceiling, which can be pulled open or drawn closed to change the sound of the hall,” Hart noted.
Lighting, Trap and Curtain
The stage’s production lighting system uses LED stage lighting fixtures, without dimmers, on 96 relay-controlled circuits, and is capable of millions of colors at the touch of a button. The system will be run from the Electronic Theater Control Ion Lighting Console with a 2 x 20 fader wing, said de Lucia. Each batten is capable of carrying up to 50 lights, with a light about every foot along the lighting racks.
The trap, mid-stage, “is 12 removable pieces of the stage floor, which opens access to a room below the stage,” said Hart. “There is no elevator or lift; it will be up to the technical directors to build whatever device makes sense for each production. It could be as simple as a stepladder, or something more elaborate, but the main thing is to enable this special, magical capability to emerge from or disappear into the floor.”
The main curtain of the auditorium, with fabric from one supplier, sewn by a second and hung by a third, from is made of red velour, sewn with fullness. Curtains with fullness have extra fabric across the width or height of the drape. This gives the drape a richer look while increasing depth of field, and the heavy curtain provides more light and sound absorption.
That stage curtain is only a few months from swinging open for the first time. Watch for further updates each month as the Rothschild Performing Arts Center nears completion in February.
After a Harker career spanning 40 years, Cindy Ellis, middle school division head, announced that she will retire at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Ellis’ time at Harker included working as a houseparent for the school’s boarding program (which closed in 2002), teaching algebra and pre-algebra at the middle school, and serving as chair to the K-8 math department. She also developed Harker’s math lab program and wrote curricula for elementary grades for educational publishers. In 2000, her extensive work earned her the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching in Middle School, a national honor.
Since 2004, Ellis has been the middle school’s division head, a position she has filled with dedication, vision and kindness. An immensely grateful Harker community looks forward to sharing Ellis’ final year with her, and wishes her all the best in her retirement.
After a Harker career spanning 40 years, Cindy Ellis, middle school division head, announced that she will retire at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Ellis’ time at Harker included working as a houseparent for the school’s boarding program (which closed in 2002), teaching algebra and pre-algebra at the middle school, and serving as chair to the K-8 math department. She also developed Harker’s math lab program and wrote curricula for elementary grades for educational publishers. In 2000, her extensive work earned her the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching in Middle School, a national honor.
Since 2004, Ellis has been the middle school’s division head, a position she has filled with dedication, vision and kindness. An immensely grateful Harker community looks forward to sharing Ellis’ final year with her, and wishes her all the best in her retirement.
After a Harker career spanning 40 years, Cindy Ellis, middle school division head, announced that she will retire at the end of the 2017-18 school year.
Ellis’ time at Harker included working as a houseparent for the school’s boarding program (which closed in 2002), teaching algebra and pre-algebra at the middle school, and serving as chair to the K-8 math department. She also developed Harker’s math lab program and wrote curricula for elementary grades for educational publishers. In 2000, her extensive work earned her the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching in Middle School, a national honor.
Since 2004, Ellis has been the middle school’s division head, a position she has filled with dedication, vision and kindness. An immensely grateful Harker community looks forward to sharing Ellis’ final year with her, and wishes her all the best in her retirement.
Saturday night’s Homecoming celebration brought hundreds of members of the Harker community together to watch the soaring Harker Eagles, who had a 4-0 record going into the game, face off against the Rams of Rio Vista High School. Prior to the game, families socialized and enjoyed a variety of food options at the tailgate area, while performances by the lower school’s junior cheerleaders and the always-popular Eaglets got the crowd amped for the main event.
Rio Vista scored early to go up 7-0, but for the remainder of the half, it was all Eagles, who scored 23 unanswered points.
At halftime, the crowd enjoyed energizing performances by the Harker cheerleaders and the varsity dance troupe, and celebrated the crowning of this year’s Homecoming king and queen, seniors Peter Connors and Eleanor Xiao.
In the second half, Harker extended its lead by 10 points, which remained until Rio Vista responded in the fourth quarter with a last-second touchdown. Harker won with a final score of 33-13.
Last week, Nidhya Shivakumar, grade 7, was named one of the top 300 students nationwide from the 2,499 middle school students nominated for this year’s Broadcom MASTERS science competition. Her project, titled “Halophytes: A Potential Solution for the Remediation of Soil in Saline Wastelands,” was selected by a panel of science and engineering professionals, who evaluated projects based on originality, creativity, analysis of data and other criteria.
If named one the 30 national finalists, Shivakumar will receive an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the final stage of the competition in October, where more than $100,000 in awards will be distributed. Best of luck!
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced today that 46 Harker seniors, about 25 percent of the Class of 2018, were named semifinalists in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program. Of the 1.6 million high school students who entered the program last year by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, about 16,000 – or just 1 percent – became semifinalists.
Congratulations to this year’s semifinalists, who are as follows:
Akhil Arun, Anika Banga, Praveen Batra, Divija Bhimaraju, Megan Cardosi, Emily Chen, Gwyneth Chen, Jerry Chen, Kathleen Cheng, Adrian Chu, Peter Connors, Morgan Douglas, Amy Dunphy, Shaan Gagneja, Swapnil Garg, Anastasiya Grebin, Jacqueline He, Adrian Hernandez, Kaitlin Hsu, Charlotte Huang, Julia Huang, Megan Huynh, Seunghoon Jeong, Amy Jin, Sumer Kohli, Maya Kumar, Matthew Lee, Linus Li, Edgar Lin, Millie Lin, Serena Lu, Rahul Mehta, Alexandra Michael, Jacob Ohana, Vignesh Panchanatham, Neelesh Ramachandran, Andrew Semenza, Anooshree Sengupta, Sahana Srinivasan, Megan Tjandrasuwita, Eric Tran, Alexander Wang, David Wen, Derek Yen, Shaya Zarkesh and Patrick Zhong.
Over Labor Day weekend, chess players Saanvi Bhargava, grade 5, Kyle Chang, grade 7, Mihir Kotbagi, grade 4, and third graders Lucas Lum and Ayden Grover, competed in the 2017 Labor Day Kids Championship in Santa Clara. Their combined victories resulted in Harker taking second place overall as a team, with Bhargava and Chang each winning four of the five games they played. Great work!
Sept. 8 was a special day for Heather Russell’s grade 3 morning language arts students, who became the first at Harker to use virtual reality (VR) technology as a teaching tool in the classroom. Students wore headsets equipped with smartphones that displayed special YouTube videos, giving them a full 360-degree view of the area shown in the videos.
The students used the technology to take a virtual trip to Tokyo’s Shibuya Station, one of Japan’s busiest rail stations. Russell instructed them to be on the lookout for the statue of Hachiko, an Akita dog famous in Japan for waiting at Shibuya Station every day for nearly a decade for his deceased owner to return. Hachiko’s perseverance made him a national symbol of loyalty.
Russell’s students, who had been reading a story about Hachiko, watched two videos with the use of the headsets and wrote out their reactions to each video, describing how they might feel if they had to travel that way to school each day and how they might feel if they were Hachiko himself.
Over the summer, senior Liana Wang and sophomore Mohan Awasthi visited Okayama, Japan (a sister city of San Jose) as Silicon Valley Youth Ambassadors. They and other ambassadors headed to Gakugeikan High School and Kyokuto Junior High to meet with teachers and students and teach English. Wang, a prolific dancer and the designated leader of the ambassadors, gave a special dance performance to the students, while Awasthi gave a speech about what schools are like in the United States. “Overall, the public schools themselves are extremely well run and maintained, and there are many extra-curricular activities for any type of student,” he said.
On a visit to Okayama’s city hall, the group met with the Okayama mayor Maso Omori and received a tour of the building. As the leader of the ambassadors, Wang gave a speech to the mayor on behalf of the City of San Jose. “Also, similar to the school speech, we spoke to the mayor about how we came to keep a good relationship between San Jose and Okayama,” Awasthi noted. “Overall, it was an extremely fun and rare experience.”
During a homestay with the family of a local high school student, Awasthi got a firsthand look into the everyday lives of Okayama citizens. “I got to try more authentic Japanese food, play sports, visit their school, and see many landmarks in Okayama: Kojima Jean street, the Stone Windmills, Okayama Castle, and the Makido stone cave,” he said. Forging bonds with his host family, he added, was one of the most memorable parts of his trip. Wang also visited Okayama Castle with her homestay, as well as the Bikan Chiku area in Okayama’s historic Kurashiki district.
Other highlights of the trip included visiting various famous locales around Tokyo, and taking a trip to Onagawa, a city that experienced massive destruction during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, where they planted trees, and Wang gave a message of support to the disaster victims.