The stages - Main, Freestyle, Arena & Flawless - were spread around Olympia, and a production lighting design for all of them was created by HSL's project manager Dave Singleton. Singleton has designed this show before but this was his first time working for HSL who have been lighting equipment suppliers for the last two years.
One of the challenges they had to content with was the high daylight factor due to the venue's arched glass roof, and the other was the very tight get in/rigging time.
For the load in HSL supplied 16 lighting techs, crew chief Simon Lynch and rigger Ian Stevens, plus four students from technical courses at the Brit School of Performing Arts who were on work experience. For the out they were joined by 14 local crew and rigger Steve Belfield.
Main stage was a 13.5 diameter circular construction, with a catwalk emanating from backstage area. HSL installed a 20m square mother grid in the roof, below which were flown three circular trusses, decreasing in diameter and all at staggered heights - in a reverse wedding cake effect - which was the basis of the lighting rig.
Across all the circles were a selection of moving lights - 22 Vari*Lite 3500 washes, 12 V*L3500 Spots and 12 Robe ColorBeam 700E ATs. Lining the edge of each circle were a total of 184 Chroma-Q ColorBlock DB4s. Twenty four ETC Source Four profiles were utilised for key light and four drop bars spanned between each of the circles, each rigged with three PixelLine LED battens and three 2-lite moles.
On the floor six lighting positions were used to cover the dancers in the round. Each position featured two Robe ColorWash 750AT Tungstens and a Robe ColorBeam 700E AT. For rear light upstage of the catwalk were three Robe Robin 600 Washes on a truss that was ground supported on genie towers.
Lighting was programmed and operated by Simon Horn using a Chamsys MagicQ MQ100 Pro console with two fader wings.
Each day saw different showcase performance every 30 minutes, amounting to about 200 different artists across the three days. The rig had to be very flexible to be able to cover the range of styles and genres of dance and to keep each show looking different and a bit unique. Two days pre-programming in HSL's WYSIWYG suite in Blackburn proved invaluable due to the restricted get in and technical time available on site.
(Jim Evans)
