Scattered musicians and performers meant video monitors throughout the space for both the conductor and the performers.

When I walked into the Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, a cavernous military hall-cum-gallery and performance space that once served as the headquarters for the New York State Militia's Seventh Regiment, I was confronted by a wall of pipe and stairs. This was, in fact, the back of the rostrum, a 974-seat moving audience riser that sat on railroad tracks the length of the block-long building. I walked around to the front of the riser and climbed the stairs to my seat for the Lincoln Center Festival presentation of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten. Directed by David Poutney and conducted by Steven Sloane, this production premiered at Germany's RuhrTriennale in the Jahrhunderthall in Bochum on October 4, 2006 and was designed by Robert Innes Hopkins, with lighting by Wolfgang Goebbel, costumes by Marie-Jeanne Lecca, and sound by Holger Schwark.

Considered with Berg's Lulu and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron to be the third most important 12-tone opera composition, Die Soldaten is an immense work with a 120-member symphony. Originally conceived to be performed on 12 separate stages with a surrounding audience, intense soundscape, and multimedia elements, the production premiered in 1965 but had never before been presented in a form so close to Zimmermann's original vision.

This production took place on a 9'-wide stage that ran the entire length of the building, bisecting the rostrum. The idea of this, according to set designer Hopkins, was to not transform the space. “We sat straight down the middle of the space and let it be the environment,” he says. The audience moved throughout the piece, tracking all the way upstage to the far end in the course of the overture and then back along the platform throughout the first act. The movement of the riser along the stage was timed with the music, almost imperceptibly supporting the emotion of the piece. The floor treatment changed along the length of the deck, communicating location to the audience.

The challenges of mounting a production of this scale in a limited time are nearly unimaginable, especially in such a non-traditional performance space. In 2000, the World Monuments Fund named the Armory one of the 100 most endangered sites in the world, the only New York venue on the list. Michael Sapsis of Sapsis Rigging Inc., who led the rigging team, notes that the space has very specific load requirements, including “where and how you can hang equipment and the types of forces you can apply to their building. We spent a lot of time making sure we were within their parameters.”

Sapsis and his team used 3,000' of black 20" truss, 100' of black 12" truss (a mix from Tomcat and James Thomas Engineering), and 156 CM Lodestar chain motors. They also hung thousands of feet of Black Encore Velour drapery, provided by Rose Brand, in sizes up to 40' high, to mask and create the necessary production spaces. The Armory had no support spaces when the production arrived. The production team had to create everything from backstage to dressing rooms, including putting up tents inside the old National Guard armament storage bunkers.

The translation of this production to the Park Avenue Armory was a masterpiece in planning, preparation, and problem solving. The Armory is 100' shorter than Germany's Jahrhunderthall. As Paul King, production manager for the Lincoln Center Festival, notes, “They couldn't just lop off 100' of walking surface. It would have been aesthetically unacceptable.” It also would have made the timing of the staging and audience movement extremely different. Instead, the collaborative teams from Germany and New York conceived a T-shaped playing space, putting the missing 100' along the east, or Lexington Avenue, end of the Armory. After the first three scenes played on the top of the T, the action began to move down the center playing space.

The Armory also lacks a definitive feature of the Jahrhunderthall: a huge window at the far end of the space through which light had been shot to fully backlight the stage and, at times, blind the audience. Lighting designer Goebbel's ideas from the beginning involved “big HMI lanterns blinding the audience, [so that] the audience should feel the pain in the rape scene. They should feel the brutality of it.” When confronted with the new space in New York, Goebbel says, “My first thought was that there was no big window, but then I thought, ‘Build one.’ It was much smaller but very effective.” Daedalus Design and Production fabricated the scenic window piece for the New York production. Goebbel carried the audience blinder idea into the Armory, hanging three LTM 6kW Cinepars over the performance space, with two 4kW Arri HMI Compact Theatre Fresnels backlighting the scenic window for that punch that everyone missed from Germany.

The Cinepars represented the largest single change in the lighting equipment translation between Germany and New York. In Bochum, the Cinepars had been 12kW with custom-built Robert Juliat dimming shutters borrowed from the Bregenz Festival. Chris Daly of PRG, who provided the lighting equipment for the festival, was unable to find a suitable substitute for those shutters in the United States. Every brand that he tried melted within minutes in front of the Cinepars. And the original shutters at Bregenz were already in use for the summer. Stan Pressner, lighting coordinator for the Lincoln Center Festival, and Goebbel worked together to come up with an adequate substitution, arriving at the three 6kW Cinepars with dimming shutters. The shutters they ended up using with the 6kW Fresnels were much slower than the Juliats, so Goebbel added some high-powered strobes for the storm scene.

There were other complications in the Armory. Large windows near the ceiling lit the space for much of the daytime tech rehearsals. Scheduling precluded rehearsing at night, and covering the windows just for rehearsals was not a realistic possibility. In spite of the challenges of the space, Goebbel and Pressner are both extremely happy with the results. The lighting design involved extensive use of moving lights, mainly Vari-Lite VL1000 Spots and Martin Professional MAC 2000 Washes, and the rig was run on an MA Lighting grandMA console. The extensive lighting team included lighting associate Ben Hagen, production electrician Neal McShane, and electrician-on-site Paul Koltoff.

The supertitles were also shown on large flat-screen monitors, suspended with the central speaker cluster from a James Thomas Engineering Supermegatruss 73' clear span that traveled with the rostrum. The original idea for the supertitles involved an LED sign hanging underneath the main speaker cluster, but when Pressner saw the system, he was unhappy with its reliability. “We took it down and called Jack Young at New City Video [for a new system], and it was all there that afternoon,” says Pressner, adding this ended up being “a much better supertitle system,” consisting of two 70" plasma screens mounted to the truss and two 50" plasma screens below, with the titles run via two Apple MacBook Pros.