The Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, which provides a creative learning environment for students that includes the School of Theater and Dance, recently upgraded its production communications capabilities with the Clear-Com Arcadia Central Station IP intercom platform.
The new Arcadia system integrates with the school’s existing Clear-Com FreeSpeak II digital wireless and HelixNet digital wired party line intercom user stations in meeting the required functionality of constantm clear communications.
“With three venues, including our Porthouse Theatre outdoor stage, we’re producing ten theatre, dance, and musical productions a year, all student-designed and produced,” says Jeff Polunas, assistant professor of Sound & Projection Design. “With such a busy production schedule, we were looking to get our shows up and running more efficiently and boost our educational value for the students. I knew that a dependable and coordinated communications infrastructure and workflow was imperative for our and our students’ success. Our entire production communication system is now Clear-Com, so everything is interconnected and seamless.”
With the need to be used between the three theatres at Kent State, the team looked for a portable and racked intercom approach that didn’t require any additional hardware and offered minimal configuration changes. Having the Arcadia, FreeSpeak II, and HelixNet products in-house also evolved the Sound Design curriculum at Kent State, providing students with hands-on professional AV communications experience.
Polunas states that the students “are learning critical on-the-job skills while they set-up and install, test, and recalibrate the comms systems, and then take it all apart again after each show. From pre-production to the actual performance, it’s an intensive practicum for our students and gives us the portable and flexible production capabilities that we needed. It’s helped to boost the educational experience for our students.
“Aside from the general drastic improvement of our production communications, both our Kent students and I have found the browser-based Clear-Com Core Configuration Manager particularly useful when it comes to configuring and editing our communications infrastructure,” he continues. “It’s so intuitive, providing us with a visual of all our system components, including monitoring of the interfaces, and offers our students a quick and simple way to set up for each performance.”
