A new home for the MTC

After a marathon 15 years of planning a much-anticipated new venue, described as ‘a work of art for the performing arts’, opened in May this year on Southbank Boulevard, the heart of Melbourne's arts precinct. The new performing home for Melbourne Theatre Company, Australia's longest established professional theatre company, it houses two performance spaces: the Sumner Theatre, a state-of-the-art 500+ seat venue, and the flexible Lawler Studio for small-scale and fringe work.

The stage, fly and wing configurations and the forward planning that went into the backstage and front-of-house design makes the MTC Theatre one of the best drama facilities in the world. The new $55 million venue is the result of collaboration between the University of Melbourne and the Victoria Government, through Major Projects Victoria. The MTC Theatre is part of The Yarra Arts Project, which also incorporates The Melbourne Recital Centre, an acoustically tailored venue primarily intended for concerts and chamber music.

The exterior of the building is an illusion of three-dimensional white cubes and rectangles set against a black background that appears to shift as the viewer moves around the building. At night, lit by specially focused floodlights, the building bursts into life in a glowing display.

A Stage Technologies power flying system was chosen by Jands, the sole contractor for technical theatre equipment for the project. The Nomad-driven control system operates 64 power-flying axes - 60 across-stage lines on 200mm centres (the winches for these lines are in acoustically discrete prompt and OP winch rooms) and 4 panorama lines (the winches for these lines sit within the fly tower).

“Each line set is capable of carrying 500 kilos evenly distributed at speeds of up to 1.5 metres per second,” said Craig Gamble, Theatre Development Manager, “and they do so incredibly quietly.”