The company was due to perform Wagner's Ring Cycle in Shanghai to support the World Expo in the city, followed by a journey to Beijing to perform Don Giovanni. However, their house desk, a Transtechnik NTX, was needed in Cologne.
Andreas Frank, head of lighting at Cologne Opera, explains, "Although the show had been programmed for its performances in Cologne using our house desk, we would only have a few days from arriving in Shanghai until the first show. So we had to get a desk which could easily handle moving lights, and not have any difficulty importing the NTX show files.
"Our contacts at ETC in Germany put us in touch with Peter Younes, a freelance programmer and operator, who was very familiar with the Eos desk, and was sure that he would be able to import the show in just a few minutes."
There was then the matter of actually getting a desk in China, which ETC's office in Hong Kong solved by putting Frank in touch with Hangzhou YiDaShi, ETC's Chinese mainland-based dealer, which was able to supply a desk and personnel.
"Everything went really smoothly," continues Frank. "Once the show was imported, there was only a small amount of focussing and tweaking. Peter and I pre visualised the entire show in Cologne with ESP Vision, so we had a very good idea of how the lighting would look.
"The only issue we had was with a gateway which blew up! It wasn't supplied by ETC, but they were kind enough to send us a new one anyway. We were really pleased with the service we got from ETC, both in Germany and China."
Peter Younes, who was booked to work on the show by Cologne Opera because of his knowledge of Eos, says: "I love how the Eos does colour picking, and can do complicated things really easily, such as copying between two different fixtures. There are a lot of functions which are very close to the process of lighting design, and it works the way a lighting designer thinks."
The Ring was televised for Chinese TV and was taken to Shanghai to coincide with the World Expo, where Germany had a large presence.
(Jim Evans)
