Design Statement

Burbank Blast! is a weekend-long national show choir competition hosted by Burbank High School, featuring a core of schools from southern California along with others traveling from as far away as Alabama to participate. While Friday night is for middle school and lower-ranking high school choirs, the competition gets super-intense on Saturday, when the big-time nationally ranked ensembles take the stage one right after another. What made this event especially challenging for Lena's lighting design team was that they had no advance time to rehearse or program these high-stakes professionally choreographed song and dance numbers. At best, some of the choirs offered sheets or binders outlining the lighting cues they expected. But it was all produced on the fly ("busked”, as we say). And it all looked great.