Over 100 Robe moving lights - a mix of ColorSpot and ColorWash 1200E ATs - were used for the show in a design by Bovey Xie, with all the equipment supplied by Beijing based rental company Wen Jing Xuan's Shanghai office, along with 30 lighting crew.
Xie's creative starting points for the design included making it look big, bold, bright and lively with an appropriate sense of spectacle. He also needed to make each of the 12 performances - which included Kelly Chen, Alan Tam, SunNan, JiangKun, A-Mei and many more - look different and individual, matching each of their styles with the right lighting.
The 15m wide by 14m deep stage contained a set designed by students of the Shanghai Theatre Academy (from which Bovey Xie is also a lighting design graduate), which featured three staircases, different levels of ramps plus scenic elements, as well as a large thrust stage going out into the audience used extensively by all artists.
"It was a big space to fill and I needed really bright lightsources that would cut through," explains Xie when asked about his choice of Robes, which also had to hold their own against large areas of scenic LED surface integrated into the set.
Sixty of the Robes were hung directly above the stage on a series of trusses flown below the stage roof. They were arranged in 11 upstage/downstage lines for maximum coverage. To the offstage sides of the back wall, facing forwards, were seven ColorWash fixtures a side rigged on the scaffolding, used as cross stage-fill lighting.
The other 40 units were deployed on the deck and stage floor - along the top of the staircases and ramps, in a straight line across the bottom of the set, and around the edges of the thrust.
(Jim Evans)
