The light fantastic

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04 February 2008

(part two)

With sets of such proportions, especially those for touring productions, maintenance can be a big job. 'Within the lighting rig itself we tour a minimal amount of spares,' Reveals Nick. 'We spend a lot of time on preparation, and a lot of time on maintenance. The Shakespeare Suite back wall, we got out last week. It's made up of ten separate panels, which are all controlled from a computer to run the shutters in and out, and unfortunately one of the modules has decided for some reason not to come to life. But by doing all this beforehand we can fix it, so even before we go on stage, we know everything is in good working order.'

'Things we know are going to be problematic - things we've had fail before - we get spares for, but it's matter of how far do you go, how far do you back things up? At the outset of a production we try and invest in decent quality because of the longevity of repertory. Swan Lake is a 1981 production, and for Checkmate there's bits of set and costume from the 1970s, so to actually invest in decent quality at the outset is worthwhile.'

So with all of these lighting effects behind the dancers, what stops them becoming silhouetted? 'One of the key lighting positions for ballet is the side lighting,' explains Nick. The filament in the lights glows white hot to illuminate the dancers, but when you fade or dim the lights it cools and the filament starts turning yellow and reddening, so there's a gel over the top to whiten the light it produces and make it more like natural daylight. Another one then adds a touch of lavender to make it slightly crisper.

'A lot of classical ballets use the front-of-house lights, which give a very flat lighting effect. Normally you'd only use them to bring out the expressions on the dancers faces so they can tell the story. The side lights are then used just to add some depth to the dancers and the stage. But there's no front-of-house lighting in Orpheus... or Shakespeare Suite, it's all done with side-lights and overheads. The first picks the dancers out, and the latter adds the richness of colour.'

Using the lights in this way can cause problems for the dancers however. 'If they're having to exit stage quickly they're having to run into the beams of these strong side lights,' Nick says, 'but invariably you can fend them off with strategically placed members of stage management. The bigger problem is that if they're doing a lot of spinning with no lights in front, it can become very disorientating for them. The front edge of the stage can just be a black void out over the orchestra pit as well, so we're looking now at putting a thin line of blue LEDs [tiny light emitters] just to give them a reference as they're spinning round.'

Without the development of LEDs, productions like The Orpheus Suite would not have been possible. 'It's snowballing now,' says Nick. 'There were LED Christmas tree lights in DIY stores this Christmas. I can't think of another product that gives you such great colour mixing. We use red, blue and green LEDs in strips inside the sliding panels, and they combine to make all the colours of the spectrum, in the same way that dots of yellow, blue, pink and black ink can make all the colours in a newspaper. The wall panels are only about 200mm thick, and the LEDs fill that entire space vertically.'

But with all this technology, many things are reassuringly simple. 'The panels themselves move like a huge set of sliding doors so that the dancers can appear from between them,' reveals Nick, before joking that 'they're manual, or 'handraulic'. 'They go out on computerised motors at curtain up, and for key transitions it's pre-programmed, but during the majority of the show we move them ourselves.' Doing it this way suits the team perfectly. 'We could automate them for the entire length of the ballet,' he concedes, 'but you'd overcomplicate things unnecessarily. It's important to keep a balance between what you can do and what you need to do!'

ENDS

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(part two)