HES & ETC shine at Athens’ SNFestival
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Athens' most modern cultural landmark - the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre - played host to the annual, week-long festival. The centre's gardens, the canal, the National Library and the Greek National Opera were transformed into stages for music and theatrical performances, family activities, educational workshops and sports for visitors of all ages and backgrounds.
George Tellos of LightingArt oversaw all lighting design for the festival. With a team of five lighting programmers, Tellos was tasked with illuminating the vast and varied schedule of events while under tight time constraints. It involved designing, programming and operating 50 shows over eight days. This was a manageable challenge for Tellos, who is familiar with working under pressure, thanks in part to his role as LD for the Sochi Medals Plaza at the 2014 Olympic Games.
This year's events featured concerts by Neneh Cherry, Rita Wilson and Andrew Bird, Ana Sánchez-Colberg's dance performance Seven to Seventh, Brian Eno's music and image installation 77 Million Paintings and the festival's largest collective work, Tape Art.
“For the Alternative Stage we needed absolute silence for some of the performances and High End Systems’ SolaFrame Theatre fixture was perfect for this,” Tellos says.
“For some of the shows, including Rita Wilson, I used the SolaFrame 3000,” he adds. “I wanted an amazingly bright and precise fixture, and anything else looked subdued in comparison. With its high CRI, low shutter distortion and great zoom range it was an obvious choice.”
Supplied by PRG XL Video and UTG, the SNFestival lighting package also featured products from ETC - High End’s parent company. These included an Eos Ti and two Gio lighting control consoles; and Source Four LED Series 2 Lustrs, Source Four LED CYC Adapters, Source Four Fresnels and ColorSource Spot fixtures.
“ETC and High End Systems products are first-class,” Tellos concludes. “Working on this production I was reminded that even with a little quality equipment you can do great things.”
(Jim Evans)
