Robe - LEADERBOARD - Feb 2025
PLASA Show 2025 - Banner - June-Aug 2025

Lighting

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UK - The new Edinburgh Lighting and Sound School will be based at Granton and is being run in association with Black Light, leading specialists in professional lighting, staging, sound and audio visual equipment. Black Light have been supplying products and services to theatres, exhibitions, conferences, tradeshows, heritage centres and many more organisations for over 25 years.

The school will offer a One Year intensive course based at the heart of the industry. The course will include specialist teaching from industry professionals and a series of placements in Theatres, Conference Centres, Lighting, Sound and Events Companies. Fifteen students will be recruited to the course.

As patron of the school, Francis Reid, veteran lighting designer, author of 15 books on theatre technology, and lecturer of lighting across six continents, says: "The staging of plays, musicals, c

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UK - City Theatrical has announced that it has expanded its premises in London and is now providing additional business services for its European customers.

As of 15 May, 2010, City Theatrical is holding catalogue inventory and shipping to customers from its London location. Customers will now have fast access to City Theatrical's broad catalogue of lighting accessories without having to import them themselves and without having to bear the cost of transatlantic shipping, customs, and duty charges.

City Theatrical's European sales manager, Alex Cowan, has added Lauren Drinkwater to his staff as office administrator to handle orders and to provide "the same great level customer service that City Theatrical is known for".

(Jim Evans)

LSi 40 - Banner - July-Nov 2025

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China/Sweden - Wireless Solution Sweden AB is bringing the latest development of Wireless DMX control, W-DMX Generation 4 to PALM Expo 2010 in Beijing, China, 20-23 May at the China International Exhibition Centre. W-DMX products can also be seen at the Prosperity Lighting and ACE/Clay Paky booths.

Attendees will learn about how the new G4 product line brings innovative features to the award-winning W-DMX line of products, including Adaptive Frequency Hopping technology for peace of mind when using other radio products, W-DMX invisi-wire and data-safe technologies for fidelity, and support of RDM so units can be configured remotely with no fuss or cables.

Niclas Arvidsson, CEO of Wireless Solution says, "Just remember these points: It's a dual band BlackBox; Immense flexibility for the user; The only Dual band Wireless lighting control with 2.4 and 5.8 to ensure interfere

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UK - Black Light recently moved to new premises in the Granton area of Edinburgh. Thanks to this relocation, Black Light says it is now able to offer an improved level of service to all its customers.

"We're now in a superb warehouse that allows us to offer all our services under one roof," says Black Light's managing director Gavin Stewart. "This is our third move in Granton. We love the area and now we've found the perfect building we can concentrate on developing the business and adding new equipment and services."

According to Stewart, the move has gone smoothly and has been a great opportunity for the company to think about how to serve our customers even more efficiently. Before the move the company had to divide its equipment and workforce between a number of buildings. Now, anyone who visits Black Light will be able to view and assess all of its pro

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UK - Stage Electrics has recently signed a new sponsorship with the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD). The college is the national conservatoire of Wales offering specialist practical and performance based training in Acting, Music, Opera and Theatre design.

As part of Stage Electrics' long standing commitment to training, which includes support in the past to the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and RADA in London, a new sponsorship agreement has been put in place with the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to provide financial assistance to students who would otherwise be unable to take up professional work placements of their own.

The RWCMD's thriving Stage Management department which offers a three-year BA (Hons) Stage Management degree course at their Cardiff campus is accredited by the National Council for Drama Training and at the heart of the sponsorship de

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Mexico - To launch their new partnership, Clay Paky and Hermes Music organised a special event in April at the Aldama Theatre in Mexico City, where over 200 dealers, lighting designers and rental companies took part. The event was an opportunity to get together, but there were also plenty of in-depth technical demos regarding lights and new applications.

Clay Paky sales and marketing manager Pio Nahum presented the company to the guests, stating, "Clay Paky is a sturdy company, which has managed to get over the crisis that affected the world economy unharmed. We are counting on the strength of Hermes Music to grow further in the Mexican market."

Francesco Romagnoli, Clay Paky sales manager for North and South America, said "There was an immediate mutual understanding between Clay Paky and Hermes Music both on a personal and business level. Hermes Music is very w

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UK RAT Music Stands has introduced a mains voltage LEDlight which needs no separate power supply, and can therefore be plugged straight into the mains.

"An enormous number of venues around the world are still using lights we made literally decades ago using candle or golf ball bulbs" says sales manager Keith Hogben. "The new mains voltage LEDlight enables them to get into the 21st century by upgrading those old lights to the very latest technology."

The new light uses warm white LEDs which operate in the only part of the spectrum that professional musicians will tolerate. They give very bright and very even illumination of the score, and the sharpest cut-off of any light on the market.

"Our customers face a constant battle between the musicians and the lighting designe,r" says Andrew Michell, MD of RAT Music Stands. "The musos always want m

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USA - The week of 23-28, the Wybron Mobile Showroom begins its eighth leg, hitting the Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, WI areas.

The Mobile Showroom presents a survey of Wybron's products, including the new Cygnus LED Wash Light, in a environment more intimate than a trade show. "The challenge of this industry is to actually get information to the people who will benefit from it," said Wybron, Inc. CEO Keny Whitright. "A trade show is terrific, sure, but you're often lacking time to connect with all the folks you would like to."

The Mobile Showroom presents a survey of Wybron's stable of products, including the new Cygnus LED Wash Light, in a environment more intimate than a trade show. It provides hands-on demonstration of Wybron offerings and an opportunity for tΩte-à-tΩte with lighting professionals, including their local dealers.

The Mobi

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UK - Love Never Dies, the sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber's hit musical The Phantom of the Opera, opened in London in March with an ETC Eos control desk and a plethora of ETC Source Four Revolutions and Source Fours.

Control for the rig as a whole is from an ETC Eos control system, including an Eos 8K desk and RPU backup together with a remote video interface (RVI) complete with X-Keys keyboard, in order to provide video to the lighting designer, Paule Constable. Well known for her work in the fields of opera, drama and musicals, Constable has specified 48 ETC Revolutions among the moving lights in the rig, which also includes 40 ETC Source Fours of varying beam angles.

Commenting on the Eos, she says, "I'm the world's biggest fan; it does everything I want it to do. As well as running the lighting, I also had it running a Hippotizer media server and F:light s

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Festivals Boost - The popularity of festivals has helped fuel a rise in the fortunes of live music events, new figures show. UK fans spent £1.45bn on gigs in 2009 - up 4% from the previous year, according to songwriters' body PRS For Music. Some £275m of that was spent on festivals, up about £50m - a sharper rise than any other area of live music. "This seems to be a UK phenomenon," PRS chief economist Will Page said. "I don't think anywhere else in Europe has seen the same explosion in festivals."

There are more than 670 events being held in the UK in 2010, according to efestivals.co.uk guide. PRS For Music put the boom down to promoters appealing to all types of music fan by offering a wider variety of events, with innovations including crèches for families. "They're growing this market with incredible acumen," Mr Page said at t

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Jordan - Robe lighting has appointed a new Jordanian distributor - Tarkeeb AVL - based in Amman.

Tarkeeb AVL is a new division of leading rental company Pro4 that has been set up to supply lighting, video and audio solutions, design, consultation, sales and installations for all types of projects and venues, including restaurants, hotels, multi-purpose and live entertainment venues.

Robe's Middle East regional sales manager Elie Battah explains that he had been looking for a distributor in Jordan for some time as the market is strong there.

Pro4 has been using Robe moving lights exclusively for the past eight years, and so the brand already has a track record in the country. "When they decided to set up the new division, it made real sense to offer a distribution deal" confirms Battah.

Through their work with Pro4, the Tarkeeb team had also already received all t

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UK - Designer Baz Halpin and show producer William Baker have created a new, sophisticated set for Westlife's Where We Are arena tour. No fewer than 80 GLP Impression moving LED's have been incorporated into the set - positioned on ladders above the video screens to accentuate the height of the overall backdrop.

Halpin has become a devotee of the Impressions, specifying them on Alicia Keys' recent Freedom Tour. "I was impressed with their power, flexibility and reliability," he stated. "Given their compact size and speed they can be placed in areas where most traditional fixtures cannot."

Explaining the design rationale, he added, "For the Westlife tour, William was keen to create a feeling of height akin to city skyscrapers. The Impressions were the obvious choice and I constructed a series of 10ft and 20ft custom ladders to peer over th

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USA - Hollowell Church had to make some tough financial choices when faced with a major capital expenditure. The Pennsylvania congregation had outgrown its main worship facility and needed more space. But the expense of constructing a new, larger facility would have seriously cut into the church's budget for its all-important community outreach programs and other essential activities.

Thanks to some help from Maryland-based Gadget Media and Elation Professional lighting, Hollowell Church was able to convert its existing gymnasium into an adequately-sized part-time worship centre at a fraction of the cost of constructing a new facility.

"The church had initially drawn up plans to build a larger worship facility, and it would have been a very nice building, but construction costs were skyrocketing at the time. What they conveyed to me was that if they built it, they wouldn'

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UK - Since its launch as an independent UK company at ABTT 2009, Goboland UK has seen increasing business and flourishing sales in both custom and catalogue gobos. The company's award-winning Black Steel gobos, glass gobos and custom and Credit Crunch gobos will all be on Stand 125 in the Lawrence Hall of ABTT next month (June 16 -17, Royal Horticultural Halls, London).

Vicky Fairall comments: "Our Credit Crunch Gobo, which we launched last year to celebrate the formation of Goboland UK, has been so successful that we have decided to continue the offer indefinitely."

(Claire Beeson)

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UK - London-based control, lighting and test equipment manufacturer, Artistic Licence, exhibited for the first time at PLASA Focus in Leeds with very favourable results.

Artistic Licence managing director Simon Hobday reports, "It was our first time at PLASA Focus and I was very impressed with the organisation, venue staff and general atmosphere of the show. We met a lot of new customers and discovered the potential for many more. We also gained very valuable feedback, not only about our products but what is missing in the industry.

"The new DALI products, Rail-DALI-DMX and Rail-DMX-DALI, generated a good deal of interest. The received customer feedback has already given rise to another new product which we will release within the next six months."

Artistic Licence also showed products across the Art-Net and DMX Distribution range. This gave the customers nort

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China - Martin Professional and the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI) at Aarhus University, Denmark, in collaboration with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) architects, have designed, developed and installed the façade and auxiliary areas for the Danish Pavilion at World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

The Pavilion is a spiral-shaped structure that curls the exhibition space in a double loop, with pedestrian and cycling lanes and a central harbour bath as the main features. A colour-changing architecture that pulsates with life as art, the media facade gives a new form of expression and experience for the visitor as a communicative and interactive facade.

More than 3500 full-colour LED lamps have been installed in holes in the Pavilion's perforated external walls. The lamps are controlled by day lighting and temperature sensors installed in the Pavilion, which combined

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South Africa - The Fugard Theatre, with performances by the Isango Portobello theatre company recently opened in the District Six area in Cape Town. The theatre has been named in honour of Athol Fugard. The Train Driver, written and directed by Fugard, had its opening night at The Fugard on 24 March, and is being met by sell-out houses and standing ovations.

Thanks to UK based producer Eric Abraham, who established Isango Portobello in 2006, The Fugard Theatre is equipped with some of the best possible equipment and DWR Distribution, MA Lighting's distributor in South Africa, were privileged to contribute a grandMA2 ultra-light console along with backup support.

Mannie Manim, executive director at The Fugard and formerly the CEO at the Baxter Theatre has lit shows across the globe. "grandMA is the state of the art lighting board of this time," he said. "T

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UK - Lighting industry veteran Guy Merchant has returned to Multi-Lite (UK) after a short period of time working for a Scottish lighting distributor. In his new position as sales manager he is now responsible for acquisitions, customer relationship and customer service to lighting professionals not only but emphasized in the entertainment industry.

Guy Merchant and his team will be at the at ABTT show in London next month (Lindley Hall Stand 7.)

(Jim Evans)

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Taiwan - GlacialTech is launching the T8 low-power Light Emitting Diode (LED) lighting tubes under the GlacialLight brand. The T8 LED tubes are an improvement as well as innovation of the existing models, says the company. The main advantage is that the tubes are extremely low in power consumption with under 10W for a 2ft tube, and under 20W for a 4ft tube.

The T8 features an inbuilt Over Temperature Protection (OTP) that automatically shuts down the tube at a relatively high temperature as well as starting up the tube at a relatively low temperature. When the input voltage does not fall within its specified range, the OTP shall be triggered. The T8 LED tubes are designed to replace the equivalent Cathode Fluorescent Tubes (CFT) currently available in markets. Using a relatively lower wattage, the T8 has the same structure and style of traditional CFTs but delivers a brighter pe

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UK - On 12 February Enter Shikari played the last date of a UK tour at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. Lighting designer and programmer Steven Bewley's brief was for a 'big, brash, in-your-face' rig that could keep up with the breakneck pace of an Enter Shikari show and he turned to some of Martin Professional's newest MAC luminaires.

"This was the last show in the UK for a while so the band wanted to go out with a bang so to speak," Bewley reports. "The show had to be quickly rigged and be totally flexible as the tour stretched over a week with venue sizes ranging from big to small. These had to be shows the audience would never forget; they had to walk away feeling hungry for more, which I feel we achieved with the rig chosen."

Bewley created the feel with an arena style set up that fit comfortably within the confines of venues like the Hammersmith Apol

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UK / USA - The spring season has seen a number of high profile new plays and musicals choose to use FocusTrack to give them a complete, accurate record of their show lighting. In New York, these shows include the musicals Come Fly Away and The Addams Family and the play Red.

Come Fly Away, the Twyla Tharp show based around the music of Frank Sinatra lit by Donald Holder took the showfile from their grandMA console into FocusTrack to work out which focuses were used by which lights in the show. The lighting team, including associate lighting designer Jeanne Koenig, assistant Caroline Chao, programmer Joseph Allegro and head electrician Brad Robertston then used FocusTrack to control the console to bring each light on in each position in turn to take a photograph, which was then incorporated into the show's FocusTrack.

The Addams Family, lit by

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Italy - Outline now manufactures a third of its loudspeaker systems with the help of the sun. A few months ago, a modern amorphous silicon photovoltaic system for the generation of clean energy was installed on the roof of the Brescia loudspeaker system manufacturer's premises.

"Approximately a third of the energy necessary for building our loudspeaker systems is provided by this photovoltaic system," says Outline's Stefano Noselli. "We're at the beginning of the road but are rightly proud. The aim we're determined to achieve by 2015 is to considerably reduce the energy consumption necessary for our activities by means of a series of projects that have already been planned for some time."

In sync with the concept of maximum efficiency and respect for the environment, Outline and its R&D department have built up an expertise enabling it to achieve ambitious

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UK - London's Albany Theatre has invested in a new grandMA2 ultra-light console to replace their old lighting desk. The Albany in Deptford east London, is a busy producing and receiving house, and one of London's leading performing arts venues. The decision to go with grandMA2 was made by head of production Fiona Greenhill and technical manager Ben Wallace.

Hosting many one night theatre shows and a host of interesting music gigs, they wanted a multi-functional console that would be good for busking and fast programming 'on-the-fly' as well as for handling detailed pre-programmed shows.

grandMA was initially recommended to the Albany by lighting designer Lawrence Stromski, and originally they thought it would be beyond their budgets, but then Greenhill and Wallace took the opportunity to check out what MA had to offer at PLASA 2009. Here they saw grandMA2 in action and were se

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UK - Having enjoyed enormous success at the recent PLASA Focus Show in Leeds, entertainment lighting supplier White Light is now bringing the same extensive range of lighting products from the many manufacturers it distributes in the UK to the 2010 ABTT Theatre Show in London next month.

Making one of its first public appearances in the UK will be Robert Juliat's Aledin LED profile spot which will be shown alongside the award-winning RevEAL colour-mixing LED washlight that is already attracting great attention in this country, plus the JB A7 Zoom moving LED washlight.

Other LED technology on show will include the LDDE LedCyc9 cyclorama lighting panel, and the Coemar StageLite LED FX asymmetric floodlight. Both products will be shown alongside others from their respective ranges, including Coemar's Infinity Spot M, ACL M and Infinity Wash S moving lights, and LDDE's SpectraWow+

  1. Aztec Event Services invests in MicroTiles
  2. Visual Productions confirms Canadian distribution
  3. MAC 401 Dual illuminates Golden Gods Awards
  4. Coemar Infinity S in King Arthur spectacular
  5. White Light to distribute PIGI projectors in UK
  6. White Light hosts standards seminar
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