Under the name of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Alvin Ailey's mission and vision of American dance has been thriving for more than 46 years. The AAADT brings a wide variety of Ailey's 79 ballets and more than 190 works by more than 71 choreographers to audiences across America and around the world. Under the ubiquitous title of "Sound Engineer," Paul Allshouse is master of all things audio for AAADT. While he believes deeply in the values and goals of the company and each performance, at the end of the day, he has a job to do, and doing that job means battling some very familiar demons. Having started with the company in September of 2003, Allshouse tells us a little about audio design on the fly, life on the road and abroad, and the oldest battle in the book–fiscal responsibility while delivering the best show possible. As the sound engineer for the AAADT, what are your responsibilities?
Paul Allshouse:What does this season's schedule have in store for you?
There are five weeks at City Center in December and January. That's preceded by two weeks of prep. Then we usually have another two weeks in New York prepping for the domestic tour, for a total of about nine or 10 weeks in the city. The domestic tour runs from January to the end of May or June and then we're back in New York for another week or so. After all that we head off, usually to Europe, but this year we're going to Seoul, South Korea and Tokyo, Japan. Then we come back in July and build new ballets. Every year there are three or so new works that are created from the ground up. They hire choreographers, or sometimes our artistic director, Judith Jamison, choreographs a new work. When they hire choreographers, we work with the best. We've worked with Robert Battle, Renee Harris, Alonzo King, you name it. David Parsons did a ballet last year.
Is all the music pre-recorded or is there a live orchestra?
Usually we work with pre-recorded music. There are occasions, for example, at City Center, where we do live music. We do Revelations live for the first week we're at City Center and they pick one additional ballet to do live. This year it was Shining Star, which was choreographed by David Parsons to Earth Wind & Fire music. This was arranged with a full 15-piece band in the pit and those were some pretty spectacular performances. My background is more with live work, so for me it's a real treat to be able to do that with this company. Everything else on tour is pre-recorded and we have that on CD.
What system do you use for playback?
We have two Denon C635 CD players where we have "Y-ed" the remote to trigger both units at the same time. This way we're running a real-time back-up all the time during performances. From the CD players, to the cabling, all the way into the board everything is totally independent for each player so that if a cable were to fail, or a drive motor were to fail, the system is just a push of a button from jumping to the second CD player, which is always in time with the dancers. The dancers have all been trained so if anything happens to the music, they should keep their count in their head and just keep going and not stop unless stage management tells them to. This way, if they keep going, and I have to flip to the back-up–which happens in an instant–it should be right in time with the dance.
Has this ever happened?
Yes! Not frequently, by any means, but yes. Usually it's a skip in the CD. Once we had a skip in one of the CDs when we were overseas and we were able to jump into the back-up, and it worked fine. I had another one where there was a component failure with the CD player and it stopped reading the track IDs, so instead of stopping at the end of a track it would keep playing, but only fragments of the track. Again, I was able to flip to the back-up, which was still in the correct position and time for the dancers.
When you get to other countries, what equipment do you travel with?
I always tour with at least my Front of House package, which is a Yamaha DM1000, and that's new as of a year ago. Before that we were using a Yamaha 03D. I am very adamant that we stay with digital, and I think that's the correct way to go.
Not long after I started, we got new processing gear and the new board. I've had a lot of experience on the DM2000, but it was a little hard to justify that many inputs on a playback show, so we went with the DM1000.
What's the difference between a DM1000 and a DM2000?
Basically, its number of channels. The 2000 is a 24-channel control surface and the 1000 is a 16-channel. Basically they run off the same software, but the 2000, being the larger control surface, has more function keys and more keys readily available. With the 1000, most of the functions are still there, you just have to go find them or assign them to user defined keys–the DM1000 is about half the size of the 2000.
What about processing?
The old processing was BSS Varicurve, which was switched over to the Klark Teknik Helix system, which gives me more functions, more flexibility and fewer rack spaces so it's easier and lighter-weight for touring. With everything programmed into the DM1000 it makes it easier to deal with the fact that we change performances every night; each ballet is already pre-programmed with level settings and EQ. A lot of the music is quite old. Some of the really old stuff was recorded in the '20s. We're doing a new piece this year called Burlesque, which is all old Louis Armstrong music. It's a really beautiful piece, but a lot of the music was originally recorded in the '20s. I can store all of the EQ and compression settings for each specific section of music in the DM1000 and recall it instantly during the run of the show.
Is there any kind of back-up for the DM1000?
No. There really isn't a back-up to the DM1000. If that happens, we punt. But any kind of failure like that is really unlikely. At the same time, there was last summer when we were on the Asian tour in Shanghai and I got hit with a voltage spike that took out the CD players and the board. I ended up having to punt for four more venues on that tour. I was using whatever console–analog or whatever–that the venues happened to have sitting there. The spike actually happened during our load-in, so the show wasn't affected. Come to think of it, I don't even think the dancers knew it happened. That was very stressful, but those kinds of things happen…
Broadway seems to favor the Cadac console, are you a Cadac fan or does that desk not really work for what you do?
I am a fan. I certainly love the Cadac, the Cadac and the Midas both. But the cost factor, for what we do as a non-profit dance company, is a little high. Compared to the Cadac, we can do similar things, in terms of automation and MIDI firing. The Yamaha is a cost-effective way to get the automation features we need, but in a smaller, more transportable console.
We're not commercial; this is a non-profit organization, so we watch every penny. We do things less expensively, while maintaining our quality. Our artistic director is very quality conscious, and she is always willing to find and spend the money, but only if it means better quality.
How many days do you get to load in and how many people do you have to help?
With sound, a load-in starts at 8 a.m. and we will do a single day load-in with a show the same evening, so it's a pretty quick turnaround. That load-in is usually me, plus two local crew, and by noon I'm doing sound checks. While the rest of the crew breaks for lunch, sound will stay on until 1 p.m. and that hour, from noon, is my sound check time. After lunch we'll take care of clear com, we'll set up paging for stage management and do all of those kind of things. By 3 or 4 o' clock we turn the stage over to the dancers. They'll do space and rehearsal and then we come back for the evening performance.
For the most part, sound set-up is really just setting up Front of House, and tying into the house system. We tour with an EAW FOH reinforcement package that consists of six EAW self-powered 400s on either side and three EAW 180 subs on either side, so there's a lot of power there. That's usually ground stacked right on the proscenium, and we usually tie into the house cluster and house under-balcony delays if they have it.
Before you arrive at a particular house, do you know what their system is?
Yes. We take care of all of that on the advance work. If I determine that their regular reinforcement system is of high enough quality, then we won't necessarily use our EAWs. I find that most of the time I do use a house rig; our artistic director gives me lot of notes on sound quality. The artistic director likes warm tones with very potent bass. Really, this reinforcement system has been with the company for five years now, it's the sound that the artistic director and the company are used to and find familiar.
The system works well for me, but I would also like to make improvements. We're doing some research into new d&b gear, which also comes back to the cost factor, because d&b is much more expensive than what we have now. In talking to our vendor, it's clear that changes like this could really jump our price, but it's something that we're looking into for the future.
Is your show different in New York than when you're on tour?
There's a lot of emphasis put on the fact that the performance, in Kansas City, or L.A., or anywhere is the same show as in New York–the same quality, the same lighting, the same sound. There's a lot of emphasis on the fact that everyone gets the highest caliber of performance possible. We actually use all of our lighting touring rig, our touring dance floor, and I use my touring FOH at City Center.
Tell us a little about your monitoring system…
The dancers are very particular as to what it sounds like on stage. They're used to rehearsing with their headphones on, with everything turned up loud and really feeling the music. So the monitoring system is four EAW 300s, bi-amped, in the lighting towers. And the dancers like it loud. Sometimes it can be as loud or louder on stage than it is in the house. In most venues I don't use front fill for the first few rows because the monitors fill it in. When I use them, I also have to delay the EAW stacks a little to meet with the monitor system.
How do you read a room when you first walk into it?
I usually start by playing music. If we're pondering whether to use the house system, we'll throw in a show CD and we'll play it–if its giving me what I want, we'll use the house rig and if not we'll use ours. During our sound check time, I'll just pick a couple of ballets and play them over and over again adjusting delays, adjusting focus, and EQ until I am listening to what's in my head, to what that ballet should sound like. There's a lot of walking around the house and listening. Of course, a house always changes how it sounds when you get 3,000 bodies in there, so a sound check in a totally empty hall, with a totally empty stage means you always have to tweak a bit anyway. Usually the second performance is just a little bit better sounding than the first one.
How long do you stay in a venue?
Usually it's about a week. Sometimes there are one-nighters where we do load-in, show, load-out, travel overnight and load-in the next morning, but it's usually three to seven days in each venue. Our load-out takes about two hours and usually happens right after the last performance. On those one-nighter days, we load-in at 8 a.m., do an eight o' clock performance and are out at about midnight. Depending on what the schedule is, sometimes you go right to the hotel and travel the next day or in rare cases you get right on a bus and travel overnight with a load-in at 8 a.m. the next morning. This is relatively rare, like once a year, but it does happen. We're planning a trip to Europe in September where we're going to do six weeks all over the U.K. and a couple of those stops will be like that.
