Elation Proteus Hybrid lights Andersen festival
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While over the last five years complex projection mappings were popular, this year the festival director wanted a new concept and commissioned the Berlin-based artist collective, phase7 performing arts, with the task.
Under the artistic direction of Sven Sören Beyer, phase7 performing.arts handled concept development and implementation of the new show and used 40 new Proteus Hybrid moving lights from Elation Professional to realise it.
Based on Andersen's narrative Sunshine, freedom and a little flower, a Danish cast brought the show to life on an irregular, six-story Layher scaffold reminiscent of a fairy-tale castle. In addition to the figure of Hans Christian Andersen himself, embodied by Jesper Dupont, there was a singer, Marie Schou, dancers from the Royal Ballet School, and musicians from the South Danish music conservatory. The scaffolding stage was suspended front and rear with a cyc on which video was produced. Realtime-video content, designed by Frieder Weiss, was triggered by the dancers and actors themselves.
To light the exceptional stage, lighting designer Björn Hermann used 40 of Elation’s recent PLASA Innovation Award winning Proteus Hybrid lights, which saw its European debut before the public in Odense. "Many of my events take place outdoors, under the open air," says Hermann. "In theory, one can also use any other light open air, but then need a dome as weather protection. In Odense, however, we were not dealing with a 100-meter stage; also, the lights were not far from the action, but right in the middle. In such a setup, domes need a lot of space and quickly destroy live and camera images."
Beyer reiterates the importance of IP65 protection for open air performances. “This is a feature that is generally underestimated,” he says. “However, weatherproof lights are very important because domes quickly destroy the picture. Quite apart from that, the light quality also suffers.”
The interactive video content was clearly the focus of the performance. "With light, video is broken," says Björn Hermann. "Therefore, the lighting design should be knitted around the video content. Nevertheless, of course we needed the typical 'big picture' for the final. Therefore, my choice fell to spotlights.”
The IP65 certified Proteus Hybrid came in handy for Hermann with lighting positions defined by the free space available in the structure of the scaffold platform. Hermann placed three Proteus Hybrid fixtures in each free space. A few other spotlights found their place on cantilever braces, with which the lighting designer optically extended the stage and set a light frame. In total, 24 of the new hybrid Proteus lights were used on the scaffold platform.
In addition, two smaller Layher scaffolding platforms (8 x 2m) were placed to the right and left of the stage, each about 15m away, on which a further 16 Proteus Hybrids were used.
The half-hour show was performed from Wednesday to Saturday, altogether seven times, with 10,000 spectators at each show. The team was composed of Sven Sören Beyer, Björn Hermann (lighting design), Uwe Bossert (composition and guitar), Søren Monrad (composition), Christian Steinhäuser (Arrangement), Frieder Weiss (Interactive Video art), Jana Posth (project management phase7) and Steffen Fuchs (technical management).
(Jim Evans)
