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Black Light Illuminates Festival Fringe
One of the Fringe’s major characteristics is the way that a wide range of spaces is transformed into performance venues. From Portacabins housing audiences of a couple of dozen up to sports halls seating hundreds, it offers a major challenge, which is increased by many of the venues being in use by shows from 9:00am until 5:00am the next day, throughout the Fringe’s four-week duration.
The variety of productions means that the lighting equipment also has to be extremely versatile. Changeovers between shows with wildly different requirements are usually no more than 20 minutes, meaning any re-patching and running repairs have to be done extremely quickly. Because of the intensive use, equipment is regularly pushed well in excess of its design limits. It has to be ultra-reliable, with black light providing instantly-available, round-the-clock technical backup.
“Turning everyday buildings into spaces capable of providing professional-quality theatre is a major challenge,” confirms Black Light managing director Gavin Stewart. “The sheer quantity of equipment and the fact that it’s used way beyond what it was designed for means that things inevitably fail occasionally. So we have to resolve any problem instantly.
“Black Light has always prided itself in being in the heart and mind of the Festival Fringe,” he continues. “Being based in Edinburgh means we can react immediately when problems occur. We will always try to help, often being called in to help companies that have brought their own equipment. We keep a pool of back-up kit and operate a swap-out policy to help cope with the terrifyingly short turn-arounds in the venues.
“When a fault occurs we take out the faulty unit, put in a new one and our maintenance department fixes the faulty one ready for the next call. We must always remember that what to us is only one of thousands of channels may be 10% of a show’s entire lighting rig.”
The amount of equipment supplied by Black Light is huge, this year including: 500+ Selecon Acclaim Fresnels, Floods and Profiles, 200 Par Cans, 198 CCT Starlette Fresnels, 173 ETC Source Fours, 72 ETC Source Four Juniors, 46 SGM Giotto moving heads, 247 six channel dimmers (Zero88 Betapack and ID12),
35 Zero88 lighting consoles (including 8 Illusion 500s, 6 Fat Frogs, 5 Level 6s, 4 Level 12s, 4 Alcoras, 1 Bullfrog and 1 Level 18), two ETC Express lighting consoles, one Strand 520 lighting console, 130 sections of 8x4ft Steeldeck staging, 30 sections of 6x4ft Steeldeck staging, 10 sections of 4x4ft Steeldeck staging, five Studio Due CityColors and two Space Flowers.
In addition, the company has supplied a vast amount of additional emergency lighting (163 maintained bulkheads) and power distribution equipment, stands, staging, trussing and literally miles of cabling. One of the most eye-catching features at night is the use of two Space Flowers, mounted on the roofs of the Pleasance 1 and Pleasance Dome venues. These visually link the two complexes, ensuring visitors literally have a guiding light between them.
The company is investing year on year in new equipment to ensure that the Fringe’s ever-increasing technical demands are always met: “This year we invested in eight Zero88 Illusion 500 consoles, which have been put straight to work on the Fringe and then will be added to our hire stock,” says hire and project manager Alan Jackson. “I don’t think Illusions have been used so intensely for such a variety of shows before, but they're performing very well. They are a remarkably powerful and easy to use board for such complex shows.”
Further pieces of equipment making their debut were the SGM Giotto intelligent luminaires, brought in to resolve the perennial problem of gel strings burning out during four weeks of intensive use.
One of the main venues being supplied by Black Light is Pleasance Grand, the Fringe’s second biggest performance space. One of Edinburgh University's sports halls converted into a 700-seat theatre; it’s used for performances of the sexually explicit Spanish production XXX La Fura Dels Baus. In contrast, one of the smallest is Pleasance Beside, a tiny space fashioned from four catering units placed side by side. Here one and two-handed shows are lit with a range of 12 volt fixtures, the audience all-but part of the performance itself.
In the true spirit of “the show must go on”, torrential rain at the beginning of this year’s Fringe failed to dampen the spirits of either equipment or crews. While the Pleasance Cavern venue had to be bailed out one evening, the lighting equipment remained resolutely unaffected.
“Our main work is in the three weeks prior to the Festival starting, as we prepare the equipment, kit out the venues and ensure they pass their building and electrical inspections,” continues Gavin Stewart. “Once we’ve done that, the hire department can relax. If you haven’t got any kit left to hire, you just can’t hire it out!
“Ironically, we’re busiest at the end of the festival. All the equipment that went out over the three week build-up comes back in a mere 48 hours. It then has to be checked in, tested and put away, while sub-hired equipment also has to be returned to its rightful owner.
“Then it’s back to serving the wide array of live productions and installations throughout Scotland and the north of England that are our regular business.”
2nd September 2004
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