A New Era is Darcy’s fourth design for a major production presented by The Dream Dance Company. Darcy is always looking at pushing what is possible with a lighting design and with the last production Gode, held at Sydney Town Hall, featuring a large amount of architectural lighting in the show’s design as well as the standard lighting system. Before that was Icon with nine high as possible truss towers with Martin MAC Auras hanging off of them. All very rock’n’roll, but new when brought into context with dance.
Darcy comments that a truss circle with some lights on it has been done before.
“I mean, look at most Pink Floyd shows and you’ll see an obnoxiously large circle with a lot of lights around it and some projections in the middle,” he said. “However, their lightshows are the best in the world. So I’ve wanted to experiment with a truss circle for a while and when the opportunity came up where the brief was ‘futuristic, probably involving circles’”’ my first thought was ‘what’s the biggest circle I can cram into a theatre’!”
Six metres was the answer with room above and below for the 24 x Claypaky Mini-Bs to work their magic.
“Their tight beam created intricate patterns on the Z plane of the stage,” commented Darcy. “At the same time, the zoom range on the fixture allowed me to wash the stage or focus on one or a select few performers at any point during the show.”
The Circle became a creature-like figure at the back of a stage, something to be respected and feared.
Complimenting this was a 6 x 3 grid of Ayrton Ghibli or Perseo, depending on what side of the country they were on. These had a variety of tasks from top wash, specials and gobo projection onto the stage deck.
“Dance is also about sidelight and I’m a big fan of sidelight,” added Darcy. “Previously, I have opted for GLP X4 Bar 20, Prolights ECLProfiles and now I’m favouring moving lights so I can project gobos onto bodies. I opted for the Ayrton Mistral this time for their compact size and punchy luminous output.”
Darcy has been using CuePoints for everything timecode for the last year saying it has halved his programming time and allows for far more precise lighting changes.
“This then gets loaded into the console, where the design part happens,” he explained. “I’ve started using XYZ programming and utilising MArkers rather than the traditional Pan and Tilt values that are popular. This has streamlined the process for updating position presets as once the rig has been calibrated, each position preset is automatically updated.”
ei Productions has been one of Darcy’s long-time production suppliers on the East Coast, providing Ghiblis, Mistral and Mini-B for the Sydney and Gold Coast Shows.
In 2022, Darcy was introduced to Granston Productions who supplied Perseo, Mistral and ShowPRO R3 BeamWash instead of Mini-B for this 2024 season.
