Robe pulls the right strings in Tallin
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Located in the heart of the charismatic Estonian capital’s Old Town area, the theatre underwent extensive renovations in 2015/16, which resulted in the new 400 capacity main Ferdinand Theatre being created. This is run together with the Small Stage with which can accommodate 200 and the Oval Hall with 80.
Head of lighting Madis Kirkmann and his team of four look after the lighting for all three venues and have had Robe moving lights in the house for some time, including 300 and 600E Spots and LEDWash 300s and 600s which are currently lighting the Small Stage.
Robe first came into the building in 2013 after all eight state-run theatres in Estonia upgraded their lighting inventories with Robe moving lights.
When the Ferdinand Theatre was completed at the end of 2016, Nuku purchased 58 new moving lights - 34 x DL4S Profiles and 24 x DL4F fresnels, all supplied by Robe distributor E & T.
Profiles are a key to lighting puppet theatre where focus is crucial for the genre, and good lighting is essential to the convincing delivery of any show - revealing as well as concealing - and generally the ‘art of illumination’ is often taken to extremes!
Tasks like pinpointing the puppet character and the actor have to be achieved very specifically and that’s why they need a lot of profiles, and there is always a huge disparity in the sizes of different objects onstage ranging from the very large to the minuscule ... so shuttering and precision direction of the light is essential.
The shutters in the DL4S Profiles and the barn door effect in the DL4F fresnels have all been a hit with the lighting team, together with reliability, which they already knew was good from their previous Robe experiences.
Before Robe hit the scene at Nuku, they had only conventional lighting, so having moving lights in the house has enormously enhanced the overall production values.
Madis touches on the importance of service and backup, “Having responsive technical backup and support is essential and through E & T we have the ability to solve any issues extremely rapidly.”
The big new Nuku summer show for this year is Gulliver’s Travels, which runs this summer with lighting designed by Priidu Adlas from the theatre’s lighting department. It will also return for more shows during summer 2019.
(Jim Evans)
