Robe Pointes light Mirror Mirror in Beijing
- Details
The work was produced by L!VE Kingway at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing in June and will tour China in August allowing a wider audience to experience how Zhang Yimou breaks the form of traditional stage presentation by blending Chinese folk arts with modern technology, creating a unique performance concept in the process.
For Mirror-Mirror, Christopher utilised 30 x Robe Pointes as his primary lightsources, which worked in unison with 102 x Kinetic Lights WinchLEDpixels and 34 x Mirror Disc lighting fixtures.
Each mirror is controlled by three winches which give 7m of up / down plus pan / tilt, so they can move smoothly on XY and Z axes making their movement fluid and three dimensional. The mirror movement is controlled via ArtNet by Kinetic Lights’ proprietary KLC software platform and the whole system is networked.
The Pointes are arranged on ladders in three layers, each with five Pointes, running upstage / downstage. Utilising these traditional dance performance lifting positions was one thing, but the technique was fully subverted with the mirrors which were able to bend, reflect and refract the light beams in any direction in -ir.
SKALAR was lit with 90 x Robe Pointes in conjunction with 65 x double sided mirrors - each with a perimeter ring of 180 addressable pixels - suspended on 195 of the WinchLEDpixels.
The luminaires were supplied by German rental company MOTION on a dry hire basis and will also be on the tour which visits Tianjin, Xi’an and Nanjing in August.
(Jim Evans)
