Elation Proteus meets challenge of high-rise ballet
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The CFP national championship presented an opportunity for the city to shine. Over the weeklong festivities, Dodd lit up the JW Marriott hotel and Lucas Oil Stadium, along with a series of concerts by national acts that took place at Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis. One of the more extraordinary events however took place high above Monument Circle on the 701’ tall Salesforce Tower, where a vertical dance troupe performed across the façade of the building.
“The College Football Playoff gave the city the chance to step into the national spotlight and was a nice opportunity to jump start events again,” commented Andy Meggenhofen, lighting and production designer at Dodd Technologies. “One of the more unusual happenings the city planned was a performance by a group called Bandaloop, an aerial dance company that perform choreographed dance on the side of high-rise buildings using climbing equipment. We were called on to light the performance, but with wintry weather and performers hundreds of feet up on the side of a building, we were faced with a number of challenges.”
The aerial troupe, who custom-choreographed the show based on the building architecture, performed at night between the 23rd and 49th floor of the high-rise. The circumstances demanded an exceptional lighting fixture. “We required quite a bit of horsepower and also needed a fixture with shuttering capability and the Proteus Maximus fulfilled both of those roles. We also needed an IP-rated fixture that could stand up to the demands of working high up on a skyscraper in the winter,” Meggenhofen stated.
This was the first time that the CFP national championship game has taken place in a cold weather city and true to the season, there was a lot of freezing weather. “We had an ice storm one night and single digit temperatures throughout,” Meggenhofen says, “but it was probably even lower 700ft up in the air. One of our concerns was how were these fixtures going to deal with being exposed for eight days.”
Meggenhofen and his team mounted four Proteus Maximus on top of the building on 12” x 12” truss that hung out over the edge of the building, far enough so that the fixtures could fully rotate. From below, nine Maximus provided uplighting onto the building from positions across the street. In addition, twelve other IP-rated fixtures were used for base lighting.
“A big purpose of the uplighting was to better capture the event on camera,” said Meggenhofen, noting that there were three camera positions, one on the building, another 600 ft away, plus a drone camera. “To maintain a proper field of light for the cameras, we wanted to make sure we had enough horsepower and the Maximus were vital for that.”
Colour and pattern bathed the building while illuminating the dancers themselves, their shadows mimicking the dance that played out across the façade. Meggenhofen says that taking a theatrical show outside into the elements, although a challenge, and especially at such a distance, the focus was to remain on the art. “Even though it was extreme conditions, the expectation was to have a theatrical look and feel,” he said. “This was all about the finesse and subtlety of a theatre show, we just happened to be doing it under extreme conditions on the side of a building from distances that are 10 times what they normally would be. They aren’t typical positions that you would light.”
Dodd Technologies employed other Elation lights elsewhere in the city, namely high-power CW Profile HP IP IP65-rated ellipsoidals to project team logos (Apollo gobos) onto building facades.
Elation product support on the project came from manufacturer rep firm Five Lakes Marketing, with whom Dodd has a longtime relationship. “The rapport with Ed Cheeseman at Five Lakes and Elation has been really good over the years. There are a lot of things that we work on that is not necessarily normal production work so we often need special solutions to some of the challenges we face.”
