Saint Ann's School

Boasting amongst its many notable alumni Actor Jennifer Connolly, Filmmaker Lena Dunham and Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Saint Ann’s School on Brooklyn’s Pierpoint Street is one of the United States foremost arts schools.

With 70 of its 200+ programmes being in the creative fields, the arts are at the core of both educational and pastoral life at the school. This diverse curriculum, available to its K-12 student body, is aimed to encourage self-expression and a self-driven attitude to study. The theatre programmes are amongst the most experimental with performances being staged across the building in both studio and public spaces. This leads the school to consider what it would take to change the foyer of their main building, a renovated 19th-century men’s athletic club, into an occasional performance space.

Partnering once more with New York’s Marvel Architects, we have been engaged to equip the foyer with new stagelighting infrastructure, motorised lighting hoists and loose equipment which will enable the students to bring experiential theatre into the heart of the school.

We designed a flexible scheme of fixed and motorized rigging positions to serve several possible performance configurations of the space. These new rigging positions contain integrated stagelighting infrastructure and dedicated all-LED stagelighting fixtures, with the ability to also power traditional tungsten fixtures when desired. Stagelighting control infrastructure also allows for control of architectural lighting, installed AV controls, and window shades, making the public space show-ready with a minimum of fuss and additional equipment.