Ballet Hispánico
Ballet Hispánico is the largest Latinx/Latine/Hispanic cultural organization in the United States and one of America's Cultural Treasures.
From 2019-2021 I had the honor of being their Lighting Director, recreating beautiful repertoire, designing a few of my own pieces and adapting to each theatre as we toured the country introducing the beauty of dance and culture.
Tour
Ballet Hispánico spent about 32 weeks on tour we traveled everywhere from small towns to big cities in the US and countries like Colombia and Israel.
We preformed in tiny public school stages and large performing arts centers. But no matter the size the Rehearsal Director and technical team worked to provide an equal experience for every audience.
I would collaborate with the venue’s rep plot and adapt it for our own.
We would arrive at 8am to focus, lay the marley and set up booms.
Dancers would arrive in the afternoon for tech to start at 2pm.
We’d have the show at 7 or 8 and then pack up and head to the next town!
Often the dancers would do outreach in each city, teaching classes to kids and adults. And we would also sometimes do a kids performance, which was interactive and would show parts of pieces instead of full pieces.
During the shows I would turn into more of an ASM role, moving the dancers forward backstage, making gel changes between pieces on the booms and anything else props wise that needed to happen.
Paperwork / History
In 2019-2021 we worked to move from paper records to backing everything up online. I was able to create a system that helped standardized how we kept the lighting information for each piece in their repertoire.
When I arrived everything was kept in binders/card board boxes. When we would pull a piece from the repertoire that hadn’t been touched in 20years you’d often find the original hand drafted plot and that was it. We worked with the artistic director and archive videos to then create a cue list, specials and adaptions of the rep plot currently touring.
I created “Piece Sheets” for each piece that we brought back to life or created while I was there. These piece sheets were for all of us and gave a big picture needs look at each piece that we were touring.
We also worked on new solutions that allowed us to tour more diverse works within the same plot by pulling in new lighting technology. Tiburones was the first piece to consistently use moving lights.
