Working behind the scenes, lighting designer Clifton Taylor was given the challenge to blend all these production elements seamlessly together and to help him accomplish this he put together a comprehensive lighting package from Philips Entertainment which included Showline SL BAR 640, Philips Selecon PLCyc LED, Philips Vari-Lite VL3500 Spot, VL1000 ERS and VL5B Wash luminaires.
"For A Dancer's Dream, the creators and Maestro came up with a wonderful scenario that reshaped the original works into one common story which carried throughout the entire evening," began Taylor. "The Fairy's Kiss is a contemplative piece with an internal story taking place among the ballet dancers as the orchestra plays the accompaniment, but in Petrushka the orchestra actually takes on the role of characters in the piece along with the dancers.
"The biggest challenge with the design was that there were so many competing interests on stage. There was lighting for the camera, for the live audience, and then for the puppetry projection elements as well. While these three lighting essentials were not always happy to be together, it's my job as a lighting designer to keep all three up in the air at all times so we needed to bring in fixtures that were strong and up to the creative challenge which is why I chose the Philips Entertainment luminaires."
He continued, "For the puppetry projection elements, we had small scale puppets and props which were integral to the story at various locations on stage. While the audience could physically see them, they were really too small for theatrical scale. They were shot by steady-cam operators and projected in HD video on a screen above the orchestra and we needed to create lighting specific to these vignettes.
"To do so, we created a lightbox 4ft high and 15ft wide with a scrim to make a small theatrical cyclorama but we now needed a light that could produce multiple colour fades across the top and bottom so we built the Showline SL BAR 640 luminaires into the lightbox. On the HD video these scenes scaled up to be very large and I really loved the color of the SL BAR 640 and the capabilities of each LED light engine. Having each cell individually addressable is fantastic and it enabled me to do very subtle color fades and changes which were really important in this application."
(Jim Evans)
