PIONEER THEATRE AND COMMUNITY CENTRE
THE HILLS SHIRE COUNCIL, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
The Hills Shire Council Community Centre is a mixed used community facility located in Sydney’s Hills Shire. The facility comprises the 500-seat Pioneer Theatre, back of house support areas, food & beverage prepartion areas including a commercial kitchen, foyer spaces, box office and administration. The requirement of this upgrade project was to enable The Hills Shire Council to attract a more diverse market of productions, and increase the capabilities and flexibility of the Pioneer Theatre.
The Saber team was engaged to provide architectural services for the foyers, administration, Pioneer Theatre and Dressing Rooms, technology design for the Pioneer Theatre including stage engineering, retractable seating bank, AV and Procuction Lighting, and FF&E for the foyer spaces. Saber worked closely with the Council’s production and technical teams to understand their requirements and turned around detailed design and construction documents in a very compact timeline.
Key components of this project included the design of 6 free-standing portal frames to enable the safe and increased-load rigging of equipment over stage and audience areas. This new grid disperses the weight loaded onto the protal frames todispersion plates on the concrete floor, greatly increasing this weight-loading capacity.
A retractable seating bank was designed to enable the venue to be turned around from theatrical to banquet, cabaret of function mode.
New turnkey technical infrastructure including control system for performance states, lighting dimmers and sound systems were designed that cater for the room’s many users from technical to non-technical users. Intuitive controls enable any type of user to easily interface with the system. In Non-Technical Mode for example, a 3rd part venue hirer is easily able to connect a device and select Background Music in the control system. Changing over to Technical User mode enables more advanced users of this system to access the audio and video matrixes, and lighting control system to enact more complicated routing.
Saber also provided contractor compliance monitoring and comprehensive testing & commissioning services.
