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The Generating Company at the Birmingham Hippodrome
Lighting designer Mike Robertson was recently involved in an interesting hybrid project with contemporary circus group The Generating Company. Part corporate event and part stage show the stage house and auditorium were both employed for the one night spectacular. With a three-day build period the brief was to deliver an aerial show throughout a sit down meal. The conventions were reversed and the diners occupied the stage house and the show was performed in the auditorium. Robertson takes up the story: “It was an amusing switch which had me forever wondering which was the best way up to view the lighting plan.”
Backdrops and other scenic elements were provided by The Birmingham Royal Ballet and the theatre itself with a cloth from The Nutcracker dominating the upstage view. Standard tables were arranged on the flat on the stage floor with the usual focusing headache says the LD. “Ah, the perennial problem of table focusing, if the tables are there then you can’t access the bars overhead to focus and if they are not then what do you focus it to? The solution as usual is to have one table and a team of highly obliging crew prepared to move it 120 times.”
Also in the stage house a bridge was built across stage and flown to the height of the fly rail. This was used for trapeze and bungee jumping work that brought the proscenium show into the dining space.
In the auditorium a large truss grid was flown from which The Generating Company’s own rigging was hung. “The lighting challenge was to create a show using lighting positions that are effectively back to front. As the acts took place in the auditorium the permanent front of house was literally turned through 180 degrees to as tidily as possible light the chasm that the auditorium provided with as little ugly fallout as possible.” Robertson continues: “In addition to the house positions of box and proscenium booms and circles we added additional floor bars, longer booms, parrot perches and stands to give us the positions that we could have used had we done the show the other way round with the diners in the auditorium. By layering the same focal point with light from multiple directions then the chances of multiple performers shadowing each other was decreased.”
Whilst 300 conventional units were used to light the diners in various traditional event ways a large number of moving heads were used for their ability to quickly spot or wash an area. Robertson continued: “As is custom we kept the dining lighting as high as possible with toplight being the principal angle. Admittedly pipe end focusing would have reduced the number of fixtures but would also have increased the chance of eye glare and blinding. The show however used every traditional theatre angle with a lot of conventional and automated floor based units to punch the range of airspace that aerial performers can unpredictably occupy. Having said that we did try in each scene to keep the light as localised as it was needed so that the pictures were higher in impact and the contrastingly pale plaster of the auditorium didn’t pull focus.”
Stage Electrics provided the conventional fixtures together with the Martin Moving lights including MAC300’s, MAC500’s, MAC600’s and MAC2000 Performances.
12th August 2005
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