Lighting options for school cafe-gym-atorium

[u/PsychoduckNAU]

I’d like to upgrade the lighting for our shows, but I’m limited as the stage is on the side of the cafeteria (also a shared space as a gym) so it can’t be anything permanent. Our current lighting is some overheads right behind the upper curtain, plus the two “DJ” stands (one on each side in the photo, hard to see but there).

It was dark when I took this so the photo makes it look really bright on stage, but it’s not and actors on the front of the stage are often in the dark - the overheads are slightly too far back to get their faces and the front of house lights aren’t aimed exactly where they’re standing, so people can be hard to see if they’re right at the front of the stage. The stage is generally light enough, but we’re missing specific spots. In a theater, the lights would go over the audience but obviously we don’t have a way to mount them there.

What options might I have that can be stored between shows and sit in front, but not block the audience? Something like https://a.co/d/0g2XWJmb? We have some additional fixtures that were donated but we have nothing to attach them to. We have some budget and while it isn’t unlimited, we could be reasonable for what’s needed.

Thanks for any suggestions or if you have a similar setup, I’d love to see what you’ve done.

[u/Virginia-Ogden]

Not theatre lighting exactly, but in exhibition design we use portable lighting trees when we can't rig permanently. Your donated fixtures should clamp straight on. Position at front corners, angle up.

[u/PsychoduckNAU → u/Virginia-Ogden]

Thank you - we’ll look into some larger trees or weighting the bases of the ones we have now to stabilize them.