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On tour with ETC’s Congo jr
“For me, light is music,” says Swedish lighting designer Emma Westerberg, who recently finished a three-week North American preview tour with an alternative-rock band from Ireland that played to sold-out big-city club crowds. Even with limited space in the touring truck, Westerberg kept her lighting design standards high. She stowed her compact ETC Congo jr lighting control console with her on the tour bus or, when she flew, checked it through in her luggage.
Westerberg demonstrates how a good basic rig, combined with a powerful compact console can create a sophisticated lighting show. To provide the ideal lighting accompaniment to a varying nightly songlist, Westerberg deployed 12 Studio Beams (six on the flybar, six on the floor as sidelights), a sharkstooth cyc, four six-cell battens, six four-light Moles, three Diversitronic strobes, three half-sphere rotating mirror balls (placed on the floor) and six ETC Source Four fixed focus spotlights with irises, all controlled by Congo jr.
Designing for a performer who likes to change things each night meant that lighting would differ from show to show. New songs would be introduced without warning and the play list would be moved around. Westerberg had to be ready to work on the fly, using Congo jr’s generous hands-on faders to react quickly and improvise whenever an unplanned song arose.
“Congo jr gives me direct access to my sequences,” says Westerberg, “and with no set song list, I really need to be fast. The Congo jr makes it easy for me to work as a lighting designer. I can design as I go along, responding to the mood of the music and the intent of the lyrics. This desk lets me focus on my art, rather than on console commands. I can concentrate on what’s going on onstage instead of having to focus on complicated actions on the console.”
No stranger to moving lights either, Westerberg has been designing for 12 years, serving as assistant lighting designer at the Stockholm Royal Opera and the National Opera Oslo as well as touring with ballet companies and other concerts. This recent tour bore her signature lighting design style – which, she explains, derives from the European or Germanic school of lighting as opposed to what some call an Anglo Saxon or American one: “I paint with big brushes – groups of lights dedicated to certain parts of the stage – rather than choosing to scatter lights individually in a more pointillistic, sieve-like effect.” Westerberg measures out large chunks of space for illumination. “If you take the colour away, it would be very naturalistic – broad swathes of light, such as you might find in a dramatic sunlight effect.”
“I don’t like gobos,” says Westerberg, who prefers playing with deep, contrasting colours – as minimal as two per song – to create optical illusions of depth and dimensionality. For one of the tour’s moodiest alt-rock numbers, she set saturated red light against a bold blue background. The effect was to sculpt the musicians out of space as one continuous form – as though light not only had musicality but mass.
The Congo jr’s ability to apply times to manual changes allowed Westerberg to paint the band and the set as the music demanded. She could assign a time to a palette and change the colours in some but not all of the lights. Climactic moments in the music could be met with equal drama in the lighting and then changed subtly as the music again changed. “The Congo jr is so much easier than any of the other boards I’ve worked with. I like the way this console is built up,” Westerberg continues. “It’s so logical. I can set the times for every parameter and not even think about it.”
Westerberg owns her own personal Congo jr, which she’s taking on the road again as the show goes out for an extended six-week tour, starting mid-February. She’ll be adding more moving lights to the rig and increasing the conventional count as well. With the full functionality of the larger Congo and operating the same powerful software, as well as an optional add-on Master Playback Wing for more than 40 faders and two LCDs for full playback capability and complete control of all masters and Direct Selects, Congo jr exceeds her needs. “The Congo jr can handle any rig,” says Westerberg. “I’ll take it with me wherever I go.”
22nd February 2007
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