Robe in Limpopo for OppiKoppi festival
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Pretoria based rental company Stage Effects, run by Theo Papenfus, has been involved in OppoKoppi for several years. Papenfus first worked as a tech on the event, and since 1999 Stage Effects has been a supplier. This year they provided site-wide lighting and visuals for five production stages.
Production lighting for the main stage (James Phillips Stage) was designed by Erik de Bruin, who this year used Stage Effects’ new Robe MegaPointes.
He also used 12 x standard Pointes, plus some other fixtures including LED washes, LED battens and 4-cell blinders.
OppiKoppi 2018 was only the second time Erik had used MegaPointes – supplied to Stage Effects earlier in the year by Robe’s South African distributor DWR. The first was a daylight show for rockers Seether in Johannesburg, where he was impressed with the brightness which still registered in the sunshine, allowing beamwork and some serious depth to be added to the artists onstage, which made a real difference.
With OppiKoppi and the opportunity of running several dynamic shows after dark, he explains: “I am seriously impressed with what I’m seeing”. He particularly likes the zoom and the prism effects as well as the incredibly compact size of the MegaPointe and its nifty 22kg!”
Three trussing goalpost structures were installed on the James Phillips Stage to maximise the space. A larger one square-on upstage, flanked by two smaller and slightly angled ones left and right, to give side lighting positions.
The MegaPointes were all rigged on the cross members of these goalposts, six along the back and three on each side.
Eight Pointes were placed along the front lip of the stage and the other four were squeezed in upstage together with a small LED screen fully utilising what was a very tight space by the time any band’s backline was onstage. Lighting control was a grandMA2 console.
OppiKoppi - sloppy Afrikaans for ‘on the hill’, referring to what is now the ‘Small Bar’ and the original venue for the friends and family get-together performances that started it all 24 years ago - is also famous for its dust.
It’s spawned the hashtag “In dust we trust”, and this is another area where using Robe fixtures proved resilient as they can stay functional even in the most exacting environmental conditions.
Erik and eight crew from Stage Effects started work on site on Sunday to be ready for the event which opened the following Thursday. Everything ran on generator power, and being in the middle of the bush, the prep had to be meticulous, as it wasn’t a case of ‘just nipping back to the warehouse’ to get any bits that might have been left off the truck.
(Jim Evans)
