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Robe is Good Medicine for Die Arzte
Maverick three-piece German punk band Die Arzte (The Physicians) have completed their latest European tour, using up to 76 moving lights on their 40-date itinerary that included playing arenas, clubs and headline festival slots of anything up to 50,000 people.
Lighting designer Lui Helmig has worked with Die Arzte almost since they began in 1982 - quite an achievement in the crazy world of rock ‘n' roll, along with the fact that the band are still producing frequent number one hits.
He's been using Robe moving lights for the last four years and again wanted to utilise a substantial moving light rig on this latest sold out tour. He likes the reliability and functionality of Robe, plus its colour range and zoom options. He also comments that Robe represents good value for money in rental terms.
His main creative task was to create a show that could compress and expand into A, B and C rigs to fit the different venues and stages they encountered throughout the tour. He also needed to produce a varied and constantly evolving show encompassing up to 35 songs and lasting up to three-and-a-half hours!
One of his Die Arzte trademark aesthetics is monochrome looks and scenes, so he needed a rig offering plenty of variety and contrast within those parameters. The Robe fixtures were a mix of ColorSpot and ColorWash 1200E ATs and ColorWash 700E ATs - which are Helmig's favourites, all supplied by lighting rental company Satis & Fy.
The rig was based on a 16 metre curved front truss made from JTE SuperTruss, four 10 metre finger trusses running upstage/downstage, hinged at 6 metres. There was a 14 metre by 2.5 metre pre-rigged box truss below, from which was sub-hung the upstage corners of the four fingers, and also used to support a matrix of white-lights used for light box effects and text messaging. For drapes, there was a curved 22-metre rear curtain truss and a front kabuki.
Eight Robe ColorSpot 1200E ATs were rigged on the front truss, with another eight deployed on the floor at the front downstage edges, to provide powerful cross stage lighting. Twenty-four Robe ColorWash 700E ATs were split into eight on the front truss, eight on the fingers and eight on the floor used for general purpose lighting on the band, and 12 ColorSpot 1200s were hung on the pre-rigged trussing box at the back for back beam effects.
For festivals and the largest stages, a further 24 ColorSpot 1200s were added, dotted around the floor area, in front of the PA wings and side stage camera tracks.
Despite the epic length and nature of the show, Helmig used the Robes subtly and sparingly - for the creation of large high-impact, beautiful, ‘anthemic' images and highly distinctive looks. Much of the time, they were used in white - or in different white colour temperatures - and often movements were imperceptible to the audience - offering a refreshingly different style of operation.
The rig also contained large quantities of strobes, LED PARs and battens and ACLs. The upstage white-light matrix allowed text effects, and there were also several customised frames of Philips SSL iColor Flex SLX LED balls, fed from two Catalyst digital media servers.
The show was all run from two Road Hog Full Boar consoles and three Wings. The moving lights and PARs were operated by Helmig working with two assistants who ran the matrix lights and called the three FOH spots. Elements of the trussing were on a 16-way Cyberhoist automation system run by Tobias Büdenbender, and the Catalysts were looked after by Martin Heuser.
27th October 2008
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