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Painting the Dancefloor With Robe
Robe lighting fixtures are working their magic each week for the live SABC2 TV broadcast of the South African version of “Strictly Come Dancing”.
The show is staged at the iconic Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg. The 119 metre high building with its distinct bell-bottomed base has been mothballed since 1997. Once a week, its deserted but still highly atmospheric ballroom is reinvented beyond its former glory days – the shattered chandeliers are resuscitated, the space is bathed in ambient stage and effects lighting and danced and strutted upon by the kings and queens of the ballroom.
The essential lighting requirement for the series was to make the dancefloor into “an ocean of gobos”. Working with original LD Hugh Turner, rental company Gearhouse SA once again pulled this off … for the first time with a little Robe power – buying the fixtures off Robe SA’s distributor DWR Distribution for the show.
Production company Rapid Blue have required the same spec for the last three seasons explains Lighting director Sean Rosig from Gearhouse SA, who programs and runs each episode: “They want to duplicate the BBC production of SCD as closely as possible … and Season Three has been the best so far. We have achieved exactly what the client has envisioned, an easy task with the help of our new Robe 700 fixtures.”
This was a real overall challenge as the available resources and budget were considerably less than that of the UK show.
The Robes – 24 ColorSpot 700E ATs and 24 ColorWash 700E ATs are rigged on a ground support structure positioned over the stage and band area, and on trussing over the dancefloor that is dead hung from specially drilled rigging points in the roof. The units are driven hard for each episode and during programming.
The show is programmed the day before it airs each week, and the Robes are run in constant 15-hour cycles without any glitches. So far, there’s never been a need to reset any of the units reports Rosig, suitably impressed.
Rosig loves many things about the Robes – particularly the variety of different beam angles available from both Spot and Wash units. “Robe is a perfect moving light for this show,” he says. “I particularly like the speed of all the attributes within the fixtures; and the fact that you can go from a real ‘bump’ to a slow and incredibly smooth fade – just like that.”
He runs the show from a GrandMA console. For him, the opportunity of working on SCD has been a unique experience that is totally different to corporate shows, with the added adrenalin buzz of meeting top international live broadcast standards.
It’s not just the Carlton Hotel ballroom floor that has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis during the series – which has also seen the transformation of celebrities with two left feet into accomplished dancers now able to cha cha cha, tango, Charleston, salsa and otherwise sashay their way fluidly and effortlessly across the dancefloor.
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