Mission control, ready for launch
Published in the LEO Weekly July 2006
•Jason Czaja,
audio supervisor, Actors Theatre of Louisville
Jason Czaja, 30, has one of those jobs so interesting, challenging and multi-faceted that a brief write-up can’t do it justice. That said, I did recently talk to him about his official job description — “audio supervisor” for Actors Theatre of Louisville. That means he works with any and all aspects of sound and music as it pertains to live theater.
Jason Czaja
Actors produces about 20 plays per season (six to eight during The Humana Festival of New Plays), and each is totally different. The theater sound systems of 2006 are largely computer-based and incredibly complex, and require a mystical dual mindset, he says, of “total-mathy-technician” and “intuitive-understanding-artist,” an awareness of the subtleties of the music and sound design as they score scenes onstage.
Add managing a staff … heading up film and video projects … wrangling the archives of decades of previous shows ... recording sessions for new music and voice elements in plays … handling all those cool headsets and other things the technical staff planted all around the stage uses to communicate (snippets like “fly the tombstones for Act Three of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in and get Dracula’s blood pack ready!”) … and you start to get an idea.
Czaja has headed the sound department for the last five years, and I’ve been lucky to watch him and his amazing crew at work. If you can picture a S.W.A.T. team dedicated to fixing audio problems, hanging from rafters on ropes, flashlights in their teeth and soldering irons and tools ready for any issue that arises (but they all have, like, TOOL T-shirts on), well, that’s sort of close. —Jason Noble
No comments:
Post a Comment