Rolling the Drops
The drops were loosely rolled to transport down the winding staircase to the first floor in Fort Scott. There, they would need to be unrolled and rolled again onto cardboard tubes for shipping. Prior to any final rolling, however, they we carefully matched up all of the scenes. Entire scenes were not lowered simultaneously; we slowly worked from upstage to downstage in succession for safety reasons.
A year earlier, I had completed this same task with Paul Sannerud and was absolutely dreading it. For the Winona scenery, we carefully flattened each scene on the floor and rolled each drop onto 6” tubes of PVC. This was an option due to the shorter length of twenty feet – the height of each scene. For Fort Scott we needed longer tubes -twenty-five feet, hence the cardboard tubes from North Carolina.
(2014 in Winona, MN)
I had found a company that manufactured shipping tubes to order. Unfortunately, due to the initial contractual delays, the tubes were very late in arriving – so we had to alter my anticipated process. Instead of “lower, take downstairs, roll and stack” it became “lower, take downstairs, place somewhere, and wait to roll.” This meant that I had to divide each scene on the first floor and remember where all of the scenes were once we started rolling – as there would be a specific placement in order to unload into the collection into the storage unit.
The difficulty of this task is always trying to roll a piece of fabric that is not flat. When a drop hangs for decades, the shape becomes altered overtime and it is no longer a perfect rectangle. People fail to understand that the fabric continues to stretch from a variety of factors. Primarily, uneven pick points allow the weight of the batten at the bottom of the drop to reshape the rectangle into a trapezoid – often undetectable from the auditorium. Then there is the hourglass shape with curling edges on each side of the drop – very identifiable from the audience.
Furthermore, the air currents bellow out the center. Think of it as the center of the drop moving forward and backward, gradually stretching the fabric, resulting in a central sagging. These alterations are almost imperceivable, until you lay the fabric on the floor. Some areas will form bubbles, like when you played in gym class “parachute.” Remember how all of the edges could be brought to the floor and the center puffed up? A similar thing happens to the drop when all of the fabric settles to the ground, there are still irregularities in the center.
Another way to understand the difficulty of this task is to think of rolling linoleum on a tube. The rigidity allows it to roll perfectly. This is not what happens with old fabric and wrinkles appear. When wrinkles appear during rolling, the fabric subsequently creases and the paint it cracks off, thus forming an irreparable line.
Even after restoration, wrinkles often occur during rolling. That is the reason why I am so adamant about only restoring scenery on site. You might have a restored a drop and it looks perfect on the floor, but the rolling and transport will damage all of your work during transport. Therefore, you would need to do additional work once it arrived at the space; work that would be extra and drive up the overall expense. This was another point of contention with the CEO. He refused to believe that the drops couldn’t be restored off site and transported without harm.
There was not a single space on the first floor where were could fully layout the drop which added an additional layer of complexity to the process. Prior to rolling, we had to accordion pleat about two-thirds of the scene.
I had always rolled up the drops on the floor, but Brandon invented a rolling machine to save our backs and knees! He called his invention the “rigger – mo’ – roll!”
He picked up saw horses and casters from Kansas City to create a fabric roller. It took a while to assemble, but I was amazed. Not perfect, but the weight of the fabric would keep the rolls taut and minimize the wrinkles. In the end, each drop would weigh 100 pounds. and take four men to safely transport.
To be continued…
