Lighting designer Frank M. Kasch attaches importance to the fact that the lighting design does not develop any direct momentum, but instead acts to support scenes and images and reflects the internal attitude of the participants. As structuring elements, Kasch employs side and backlighting, deep cross-lighting and only a small amount of front lighting.
In total, Kasch deploys just 70 moving lights, 25 four-cell background borderlights and 30 profile spotlights (of which 18 are ETC Source Fours) in order to light up the scenery and the scenes just as Hundertwasser would have painted them - with intense colours and without straight lines. For the lighting control an Avab Pronto! console was used, because of its flexibility and ease in programming both classical theatre lighting and moving lights. In addition, Kasch appreciates being able to pre-program the entire musical in WYSIWYG.
Bi-directional Ethernet communication between the lighting control console and Vista (a special version of WYSIWYG that interfaces with the console) makes it possible to transfer changes made in the 3D representation directly into the consoles and vice versa. In visualization, spotlights that must be changed are simply clicked on with the mouse, and the corresponding channels will be automatically activated at the console. Similarly, it is easy to set the numerous parameters of moving lights, like colour, focus, position, or intensity. With the 'Auto-Patch' function the complete patch from Vista will be transferred or updated on the Pronto! console with only one click of the mouse. With drag-and-drop, all channels on the consoles can be patched in Vista.
The time factor on Hundertwasser is critical. The world premiere takes place on 30 July in the northern German city of Uelzen - site of the artist's last architectural project, created during Expo 2000: the Hundertwasser railway station.
(Lee Baldock)
