L’Opéra Bastille in Paris has installed an Ateïs International IP-based communications system to keep stage managers, performers and crew informed of the activities of the opera house. Ateïs France installed the paging and monitoring equipment at the 2,723-seat venue.
The venue was designed by Canadian-Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott and opened on 13th July 1989, the day before the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Updating technical equipment is a continual process at big venues and the Bastille Opera is no exception.
Ateïs finished work on the building-wide paging and stage monitoring system at the end of 2010 and is now upgrading the public address installation. Unusually Ateïs France installed the paging and monitoring equipment itself, rather than just supplying products to a systems integrator. "On this project products didn't exist," explains Jerome Beyls, commercial director of Ateïs France. "So the best way was to deal directly with the Opera so that new products could be developed to match what they needed."
The new paging system covers 14 stages, 233 dressing rooms and 13km of corridors.
Each dressing room has a monitor loudspeaker and a touch screen for selecting to which stage someone wants to listen. The loudspeakers receive messages from the stage manager made on one of 23 stage call stations positioned around the Opera.
Messages can be scheduled and played from the control suite at specific times. This ensures that important messages are given priority and logs each transmission so no one can say they did not receive a call.
Relays of the live performances are processed and distributed through Ateïs’ UAPg2 DSP audio matrix, which is connected to two microphones hanging over the stage. Beyls says the original intention was to use an older generation product, the ES22T, but as the UAPg2 developed it was considered better suited for the opera house.
With productions at the Opera changing on a regular basis the paging/monitoring system has to be re-configured quickly and easily. This is done through the Hyperviseur application. This is used to create settings for each production, different tasks or for expanding the system when parameters are changed or additional paging desks brought in.
Ateïs also developed software specifically for the project and installed networks based on fibre optic switches. Beyls says during the installation the Opera continued to stage shows.