UK - Assembly is right at the heart of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and an integral part of this celebration of arts and culture.
The 2024 event saw Assembly – one of the largest venue operators at the Fringe – operating 26 venues featuring over 240 diverse shows embracing multiple entertainment genres, with lighting managed by Martin McLachlan, Assembly’s Festival Fringe head of lighting since 2018.
This year, McLachlan specified an abundance of Robe moving lights for several of Assembly’s key venues.
The Assembly Festival Fringe operation involves over 90 technical staff (covering sound and stage management in addition to lighting) over a six-week period, which includes two weeks of build and rehearsal before the three-and-a-half-week festival. McLachlan, together with a small team of four, oversees the house stage lighting and crew across all venues as well as the lighting needs of all incoming productions.
The venues range in size from 60 up to 840 seats, each with a house lighting rig, designed and chosen to deal with all performances in their respective schedule. The larger ones each feature between four and 24 moving lights, many of them Robe, adding up to a total of 72 x Robe LEDBeam 150s, 18 x Robe Paintes and seven Robe T1 Profiles, mostly supplied via rental specialist, Encore.
In addition to these Robe luminaires, Assembly utilises seven Avolites ART2000 dimmers and eight Avolites Powercube PD units.
For McLachlan, the LEDBeam 150 is the right fixture for the house rigs in many of these spaces for its “great colours and zoom, small size and general versatility”. LEDBeam 150s have been on the Assembly spec lists since McLachlan assumed the head of lighting position in 2018.
It is a project entailing around six months of detailed planning, logistics and delivery, the final three months up to and including the event being seriously full-time!
New this year are 18 x Robe Paintes, the smallest fixture in Robe’s current TE range of multipurpose spotlights.
All the incoming companies playing Assembly venues use the house lighting rigs to the max, and in many cases additional specials are hired. “Assembly’s needs are very much driven by flexibility, and smaller sized lights are also an asset,” he commented, saying that they were very excited to have Paintes this year, with 10 in the largest venue space, the 840-capacity Assembly Hall.
“This is another brilliant small fixture,” enthuses McLachlan about the Painte. “It is great for this style of work with its shuttering capabilities and plenty bright enough without being overpowering in some of these rooms.”
The most confined performance area this year to feature Robe moving lights was the 100-capacity Dancebase3 with five LEDBeam 150s.
McLachlan underlines the importance of having reliable fixtures to minimise time consumed with maintenance or repair, and there is little margin for this with some venues having up to 10 back-to-back shows in a day.
The house lighting rig at Assembly’s 500-seat Gordon Aikman Theatre (GAT) this year was augmented with seven Robe T1 Profiles, part of a sponsorship package agreed with Robe UK. The GAT lineup included an animated mix of comedy, dance, theatre and music shows, from Dizney in Drag, to Mythos: Ragnarok, to Murder She Didn’t Write, to Russell Howard’s Wonderbox: Live.
Robe’s show truck was present on site in Edinburgh for two weeks, offering training seminars, demonstrations, and product awareness sessions, all co-ordinated by Chris Purnell, product application specialist from Robe UK. This highlighted the Robe, Avolites and Artistic Licence support of the event, whilst providing invaluable insights for technicians and others interested in the dynamic range of relevant products and solutions.
