Festival Focus: Summerfest 2017

Heavy rain put a damper on the opening day of Summerfest 2017, but Milwaukee’s mammoth “Big Gig,” which turned 50 this year, has shaken off bigger obstacles to success in the past. First-decade challenges included including significant losses for the festival’s second year (1969), six-figure crowds and a near-riot for Sly and the Family Stone (1970), comedian George Carlin’s arrest for profanity (1972) and an actual riot with 300 arrests during Humble Pie’s performance (1973).

It’s 2:30 p.m. on a Friday, a show day at the 750-person capacity concert venue known as Delmar Hall in St. Louis, MO, and the girls and young women are properly dressed in roadie black. It is their last day of a camp that had them run the gauntlet of everything it takes to make a concert happen.

Sound designer and composer Elisheba Ittoop is always working to maintain a good balance between various aspects in her life. She balances her theater design career with other sound design work. She balances her work life and her family life. She balances maintaining professional footholds in multiple American cities. Every designer must find their own balance, and Ittoop works every day to constantly adjust hers, taking advantage of her background and skillsets to craft a life that has the right balance for her and responding to changes in her life to adjust her professional activity.