UK - The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) staged the London premiere of Scuttlers in its city centre GBS Theatre, an intense drama about the struggles and power politics of 19th century Manchester street gangs set against a steaming, grinding industrial revolution backdrop bringing massive social change and great uncertainty. The work was written by Rona Munro in response to the UK’s unsettling spate of urban riots in 2011.
Directed by Hannah Eidinow, the production was lit by Declan Randall, a South African theatre lighting specialist living in the UK, who made use of a number of different Robe fixtures available at RADA.
Declan was asked to light this production by Matthew Leventhall, RADA’s head of production lighting, working alongside a team of RADA students.
The stark, raw industrial set – designed by Postgraduate Theatre Design (Set & Costum

Germany - Video designer Ben Miles has praised the Avolites Ai R6 media servers in their performance for festival opener Coldplay at the star-studded Global Citizen Festival in Hamburg, Germany, ahead of the annual G20 Summit.
The Festival calls on governments and the private sector to increase support and funding of issues associated with extreme poverty. This year was the first time the event had been held in Europe - and featured performances by world-renowned superstars including Pharrell Williams, Shakira, Ellie Goulding, German superstars Herbert Gronemeyer and Andreas Bourani - all opened by multi-million selling British band Coldplay.
Miles, who has been responsible for Coldplay's stunning visuals throughout the band's A Head Full of Dreams tour, comments, "Coldplay has so many 'big hits' it's difficult for us to know which of them they will play at festivals

UK - Secret Garden Party (SGP) has been staged at Abbot’s Ripton near Huntingdon, UK since 2004 by Fred Felloes. It was hand-crafted as a boutique alternative to the established mainstream music festivals. 2017 marked the last SGP event, finishing on a high note of success and major impact in the world of alt.culture.
West London based lighting and visual rental specialist Colour Sound Experiment has been involved with the event for the last decade and this year supplied stage lighting to six main live performance areas and video to one. Additionally, they delivered lighting and special effects to over 40 other venues, bars, lounges and clubs dotted around the beautiful site, all helping revellers enjoy their final chance to catch that special SGP ambience.
Colour Sound’s crew of 22, led by Alex McCoy, arrived on site on Monday morning and had to be ready for a Fr

UK - Audio specialist tube uk delivered sound systems to a diverse mix of over 30 shows, site specific installations and one-off performances in a variety of venues across the city throughout the 18-day Manchester International Festival 2017 (MIF17).
tube's Melvyn Coote oversaw all the projects, collaborating closely with the festival’s technical director Jack Thompson.
The tube project management team of Adam Taylor, John Redfern, Dan Steele and Melvyn ran the numerous jobs from a pre-production and planning aspect – then a top team of seven warehouse and logistics staff, headed up and orchestrated by Jamie Sharman, implemented the equipment preps and the hectic delivery schedules.
A further 15 - 20 regular freelance engineers and technicians implemented the installation, rigging and operating of the various shows and gigs.
The pace was relentless wi

USA - A pair of grunge rock heavies teamed up for a once in a life one-off at a music hall 150 miles outside Chicago this July, and were support by some punchy looks from an equally powerful duo: The Intimidator Beam 350 LED and Intimidator Spot 255 IRC from Chauvet DJ. Fresh off their appearance on the Make America Rock Again tour, Puddle of Mudd and Saving Abel visited the Boiler Room, in Kewanee, IL for a sold-out show. Jeff Hinton, working for Jonny B. Enterprises, supported their intense non-stop 90-minute performance with a hard-hitting lightshow that featured 16 of the moving fixtures.
“These were big name artists for this town and this venue,” said Hinton. “We wanted to create a lightshow that had a full production look, but we had a small stage and limited power. The Intimidators allowed us to create some impressive visuals despite this limitation, not

Moldova - Elation dealer Eventika Grup SRL of Moldova recently finished an interesting project that the company worked long and hard to complete. After the USSR collapsed, the circus in the town of Chisinau, Moldova, disintegrated along with it, leaving behind a large circus building that had the potential to be an excellent performance space.
After years of laying idol, Eventika was able to partially restore the building on their own, without foreign investment, and held a 20th anniversary tribute concert at the venue for the Moldavian rock band Gindul Mitei (Cat’s Thoughts).
The circus building, Chisinau City Circus, opened in 1981 and was once the largest auditorium in Moldova with over 50 performances there each year. With post-communist era struggles however, the venue was abandoned in 2004. For the 2017 20th anniversary tribute concert, bands and solo artists

UK - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is going international, with technical equipment hire company Hawthorn supplying lighting equipment for the award-winning production.
The international leg of the Curious tour will visit Amsterdam, Toronto and other international cities to be announced.
Hawthorn is continuing its relationship with production after supplying lighting for this year’s UK tour and has worked with renowned lighting designer Paule Constable to supply the lighting equipment for her Olivier award winning design. This included supplying industry workhorses such as the Martin MAC TW1 and the ETC Source 4 Revolution combined with newer technology such as the ETC LUSTR 2 LED Profile and the VL3500Q Spot.
The remaining rig is made up of a number of conventional ETC Source 4 profiles and PARS, Selecon Arena 2.5K PCs, Rainbow 12” S

Sweden - The Polar Music Prize is recognised as one of music’s most prestigious international honours and this year’s ceremony saw Hippotizer Media Servers playing a key part in Sundin Designers Sweden’s lighting and image display for the show.
Founded in 1989 by the late Stig ‘Stikkan’ Anderson – Anderson was the publisher, lyricist and manager of ABBA and the name stems from his legendary record label – the Polar Music Prize customarily goes to one contemporary musician and one classical musician. This year saw Sting and Wayne Shorter, the American jazz saxophonist and composer, become laureates and the venue was again the beautiful Stockholm Concert Hall.
Designed by Ivar Tengbom the 1920s-neo-classical creation is one of the Swedish architect’s most famous works, and Sundin Designers Sweden was charged with video and lighting design for this beautif

USA - Leading New York City-based national concert promoter The Bowery Presents (TBP) recently opened its latest live music venue, Brooklyn Steel, a new 20,000sq.ft space in East Williamsburg, New York that is outfitted with L-Acoustics K2 line arrays, plus delays and stage monitors.
A gantry crane retained from the former steel fabrication business enables the flown arrays to be repositioned, along with the movable 50,000lb steel and concrete stage, to scale the audience area according to the expected attendance at each show.
TBP’s in-house team designed and installed Brooklyn Steel’s L-Acoustics loudspeaker system, which is patterned after a similar rig at Terminal 5, a 3,000-capacity venue in Manhattan that the promoter also exclusively operates.
Mark Friedman of Long Island City-based See Factor supplied the speaker setup as well as the rest of the new cl

UK - CPL (Central Presentations) working for creative event producers Bright, took its experience and knowledge of festival productions and delivered full technical production - sound, lighting, rigging and some AV - for the 2017 OVO festival.
The event, now in its third year and a big hit with OVO’s staff, families and friends, was again staged at Mojo Active, Almondsbury near Bristol. CPL and Bright are regular collaborators and there is a great synergy between the two companies in their respective roles and end-goal of ensuring that event environments are smooth, entertaining, memorable and fun for all guests.
CPL’s project manager Mike Radford commented: “We were delighted to be involved again, and enjoyed working closely with Bright’s team led by their PM Mike Matthews. The brief was to bring all the production values of a premium festival to this event

Singapore - Nexo’s new mid-size line array, the Geo M10, has made a spectacular and high-profile debut in Singapore, as the main stage PA at the IGNITE! Music Festival.
The two-day outdoor IGNITE! Music Festival is organised by the Republic Cultural Centre (Republic Polytechnic). Featuring an all-local line-up of artists and bands from Singapore, this is the republic’s primary student music event yet it is recognised for its technical staging standards and has a reputation for providing a state-of-the-art audio-visual experience.
Under the banner of distributor Yamaha Music (Asia) Pte, the AV partner for the festival, the latest Nexo and Yamaha products were deployed for the event, which doubles as a showcase for potential customers.
The main stage is powered by Nexo’s newest line array system, the mid-size Geo M10, which partners a 1.4″ titanium diaphrag

USA - The US capital is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. Yet ironically, the US Travel Association’s annual IPW convention never took place in Washington until this summer, when the group held its first ever convention in the city. Making a positive impression on a select group of the convention’s 6,000 guests from 70 different countries was a lavish VIP dinner held at the majestic Washington National Cathedral.
Accenting the beauty of the towering Neo-Gothic limestone structure during this event was an enchanting and endlessly fascinating lighting design by Elizabeth A Coco that featured 160 Chauvet Professional and Chauvet DJ fixtures supplied by Atmosphere, Inc. of Silver Spring, MD.
Coco, a USA 829 union designer, relied on multi-coloured uplighting to draw attention to some of the historic building’s captivating architectural features,

Taiwan - Two Allen & Heath dLive S Class digital mixing systems were employed to manage the Poetry & Cultural Festival, held in Taipei.
Comprising a DM64 MixRack with S5000 Surface at FOH and a DM32 and S5000 on monitors, the systems were provided by local PA company, Just Music Co.Ltd. dLive managed a variety of acts over the two-day festival including spoken word performance, an 80-piece orchestra, pop bands, and an Aboriginal band.
“dLive has proved to be fast and easy to set up, and the system is very versatile, handling a huge variety of different musical genres. With over 90 channels and quick changeovers to manage, it was a testing event but dLive made the task so much easier,” comments sound engineer, Gao Min-Fu.
(Jim Evans)

Korea - As Korea’s largest island, Jeju has been the country’s favourite domestic holiday destination for years thanks to its beautiful beaches, luxurious countryside - and its theatre for Nanta, a popular South Korean non-verbal comedy show incorporating traditional percussion. Now, visitors to Jeju Theatre can enjoy the show even more, thanks to world-class acoustics delivered by a range of APG loudspeakers.
Nanta premiered in Seoul in 1997 and has since been staged in 18 countries including in Broadway. Run by PMC Production, the show is also performed daily in four Seoul theatres, making it the longest-running show in Korean history. Built for Nanta performances exclusively, the 659-seat Jeju Theatre has welcomed over one million visitors since its opening in 2008 and was due for an audio upgrade to provide the best sonic experience to its audien

USA - t’s been said that “experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.” John Garberson, owner of Creative BackStage, picked up some valuable experience recently when he worked a Hello Arizona-produced show by Nile Rodgers.
Garberson had created a design for the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer that was built around a lot of high-energy aerial effects. At the last minute, though, he learned that he would not be allowed to use haze. With his original lighting concept severely crimped, he and his LD and programmer James Simpson reworked their plans and created a lushly coloured stage design using the 32 Chauvet Professional Rogue washes in his rig. For added good measure, they turned up the eye candy volume with the four STRIKE 4 multi-formatted fixtures on their front truss.
“Lately, we’ve become more aware of building versatility into our rigs

UK - When lighting designer Cate Carter first conjured with Elbow appearing at the Barclaycard Summer Time (BST) annual concert series in Hyde Park this year she was immediately presented with two dilemmas.
“One was the sheer scale of the stage, that enormous wall of LED screen cannot be ignored,” she said. Supplied by Video Design, the wall has, since last year, been extended from centre stage across and right down the outside edges of the PA wings. Wrapping the entire performance platform, it measures 200ft across and 35 high, a total 650sq/m of 9mm.
“The other thing was about timing,” Carter continued. “We started supporting the new album Little Fictions, earlier this year in February/March. As it was a theatre tour we decided on no IMAG, relying instead on pure content projected onto a rear cyc. Our slot at Hyde Park made both those factors anachr

UK - Space Spectacular, the annual space-inspired music co-production between the Royal Albert Hall (RAH) and promoter Raymond Gubbay, needed a spectacular lighting and effects show to live up to its name.
With limited time to set up and programme the extensive rig, RAH’s lighting design manager, Richard Rhys Thomas, was able to put together a stunning show in only a few hours using a Jands Vista L5 Console.
He commented: “For me it comes down to limited time availability and being able to maximise time to create the actual design looks, effects and sequences with ease. The fact that over 180 moving lights, 100 LEDs and 200 dimmers, together with all attribute controls and palettes were accessible from a single layout on a large screen meant there was complete control at any one time. This greatly speeds up the programming process and is a fantastic credit t

UK - London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), took full advantage of the capabilities of one of MDG’s ATMe haze generators during their recent production of Rona Munro’s Scuttlers.
“The brief from the director, Hannah Eidinow, was to create the atmosphere of Manchester in the 1890s: hot, industrial, sweaty, dirty, polluted and foggy, so clearly we needed to use a hazer that was up to the job,” says guest lighting designer, Declan Randall. “And MDG’s ATMe haze generator was more than up to the task.”
Scuttlers was first performed at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in 2015. It follows the exploits of the city’s first street gangs, set against the background of Manchester’s cotton mills and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century.
The recent production at RADA moved the setting from the 200+ seat theatre-in-the-ro

USA/Europe - Canadian singer / songwriter The Weeknd is currently rocking plenty of style and enjoying success, critical acclaim, multiple awards and several hits from his chart-topping third studio album Starboy, propelling him a long way from his underground roots and early anonymous mixtapes uploaded to You Tube in 2010.
Lighting for 2017’s Starboy Legend of the Fall tour has been designed by Sooner Routhier who picked Robe Spikie moving lights together with BMFL Spots and WashBeams to be at the heart of the rig.
Sooner has worked with The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) since 2012. She and design business partner Robert Long of SRae Productions were contacted by his creative directors Lamar C Taylor and Drop last year and asked to assist with this tour, which involved lighting an impressively beautiful flown sculpture created by production designer, Es Devlin.

Poland - Stadion Miejski, located in Łódź is the home stadium of football team Widzew Łódź, one of Poland’s best known football brands. Designed by architect Jacek Ferdzyn, Stadion Miejski is an entirely new construction with an all-seater capacity of 18,018. The design meets the requirements of UEFA Category 3 classification, with the option of adapting to higher categories if required.
The contract for design and installation of the stadium’s sound systems was awarded to Tommex Żebrowscy Sp. J. The first stage of the system's design was a detailed EASE acoustic simulation for loudspeaker selection and placement.
For Stadion Miejski, Tommex again chose Community’s R Series loudspeakers for their high power, intelligibility, controlled coverage and all-weather reliability. Flown from the roof canopy in a distributed configuration, Tommex achieved full cov

Russia - The Nashvill rock festival organized by NASHE Radio took place recently at the Trud Stadium in the Russian city of Nizhniy-Novgorod. The festival line-up included popular Russian rock bands and was attended by more than 5000 people.
The grey skies, relatively cold temperatures and rainy weather could not dampen the rock ’n’ roll spirit, and the main stage saw live-shows from legendary Russian bands, Mumiy Troll, Splean, Animal Jazz, Knyazz and Noize MC, performing their greatest hits through Martin Audio’s premium MLA PA system. The second, smaller stage was given to bands such as Magnitola, ХХХХХХХХХХ, Kimakima and Moona.
The Festival sound and lighting systems were supplied by locally based rental provider, Citysound. The choice of MLA for the main stage was clear – the top-rated bands required detailed and powerful sound throughout the fes

USA - For a recent collaboration with the Cavalettes Dance Team in Austin, TX, Lake Travis High School students Max Dalton and Trenton Schoonmaker used High End Systems SolaSpot 2000s to take the group’s production Love to a new artistic level.
The technicians at the Lake Travis PAC are all students enrolled in the Technical Theatre program at Lake Travis High School, and are part of the LTHS Student Chapter of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology.
Lake Travis PAC managing director K.J. Bartosh comments: “We’ve worked hard over the last decade to transform our dance show from a very basic recital into a spectacular community event that adds a great deal of production value to the talent of our dancers, as well as to stretch the significant educational opportunities for our technical theatre students. The Cavalettes are a highly-decorated dril

Canada - Ontario's Canada Day celebration at Queen's Park has been a tradition since 1967 and commemorates the formation of Canada as one country on 1 July 1867. The event draws audiences in their thousands, offering music and dance performances, roaming performers, games and children's activities.
This year, the festivities extended into the evening, with musical performances to celebrate Ontario and Canada's 150th anniversary. Bespoke Audio Visual was brought on board by the Ontario Provincial Government to provide all the audio/ visual/ lighting/ staging and technical support – site-wide – for the event, and with a bigger lighting package in use to illuminate the event into the evening, the company turned to BroadWeigh to supply load cell monitoring and logging for their rigging package.
Andrew Bernacki, production manager at Bespoke Audio Visual, explained: "Wi

The Netherlands - The newly built and inaugurated Atlas Theatre in Emmen, Netherlands is a multifunctional performance space in the heart of the city and part of a 250m euro development.
In addition to the two Atlas auditoriums - with capacities of 822 and 300 – the complex also includes a full convention centre, catering outlets, offices and is an access point for the Wildlands Adventure Zoo - and Robe moving lights.
The plan to replace the old De Muzeval theatre in the city actually took around 40 years to come to realization for a complexity of reasons. The construction eventually commenced in 2014 and was finished in 2016, with its spectacular, gleamingly modern architectural style, the state-of-the-art facility opened in autumn of last year.
In the meantime, the technical specifications had been completed by acclaimed Amsterdam based theatre consultants T

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