Lighting designer Peter Rubie recently lit The White Album Concert and Dirty Dancing in Concert tours that overlapped and so he designed an adaptable rig to suit both shows.
Both shows were produced by Spiritworks, with CVP handling production management and video control for Dirty Dancing. The client wanted an affordable design that could reproduce locally in each city, as the tour schedule did not allow for a touring rig.
“The musicians on both shows were lovely to work with and incredibly talented,” said Peter. “I didn’t get much of a brief from anyone in terms of lighting design wishes, that gave me the freedom to let my imagination run wild and not be constrained or tempted to recreate any previous iterations of the shows, both of which have been running for several years.”
Peter’s starting point was finding a way to frame the screen for Dirty Dancing In Concert as he wanted the design to feel like an extension of the film that fills ¾ of the show.
“Many of the cues for Dirty Dancing while the film is rolling are simple colour shifts when we move from inside to outside matching the grey rainy sky, or the warm glow through a window which I echoed from one side onto the stage. I’m a big fan of filling the mid void between the stage and the lighting rig on most of my designs already and we needed something that any city and supplier could reproduce so I opted for several droppers in a staggered angle design to frame the screen. These consisted of a moving LED wash at the end of the dropper and a pixel-mappable batten along the dropper itself. These helped to portray those scene shifts mentioned above.”
The droppers were not only staggered in height but also spread downstage to upstage so a vast majority of Peter’s time was spent in CAD looking at 3D recreations of the venue and the rig to get the right formation and shape of the lighting on the droppers from the audience perspective viewpoint. Those many hours paid off, except in a few cases where the venue drawing or location of the PA turned out to be inaccurate or missing and they had to improvise at the bump in!
Time and lack of sleep were Peter’s biggest challenges. They only had one day in each city to get the rig in, rehearse and do a show that evening.
“The droppers in particular look great when they are all up and the end look is well worth it, but they are fiddly and take time, so always the stress of holding up other departments as the rigging went up was a challenge,” he added. “Keeping up with advancing upcoming cities with quite different stage sizes and available line-sets plus AV configurations while on the road and doing full production days with few hours to sleep before lobby call the next day. That is always a challenge when touring as the LD / Operator and Touring Electrician under one hat, but because we were flipping back and forth between the two different shows, it was extra challenging. In a couple of cases, both shows were running in different cities. Lila Neiswanger looked after Dirty Dancing in Brisbane and Adelaide for me whilst I did The White Album concert at the Sydney Opera House and then flew straight to Perth.”
One thing that helped with the ‘double bill’ was that, luckily, as both shows had the same producer, Peter could design the two rigs such that the hung rig remained largely the same between the two shows. The only main change was some fill-in-the-void where the screen hung for Dirty Dancing when they swapped to The White Album. Peter devised two different ‘set lighting’ looks in the form of the floor package to give the two shows their distinct flavour and feel.
MAIN RIG
- 12x Pixel LED moving washes (ShowPRO Pluto 4000 XE / Robe Spiider / GLP X4): On staggered droppers to fill the mid-air, backlight the stage in strong bold colours and beams and sculpt around the screen. Also, set to pixel mode for effects and gradients to complement the video.
- 4x Hung Pixel LED moving washes (Pluto 4000 XE / Robe Spiider / GLP X4): overhead to fill backlight into the centre stage
- 8x Hung Spots (Claypaky Sharpy Plus / Robe MMX / Robe Esprite / Robe T2 / Claypaky Alpha Spot 800 QWO / Claypaky Mythos 2): for overhead textures
- 8x Floor Spots (Ayrton Karif LT / Claypaky Sharpy Plus / Robe Esprite / Robe Megapointe / Ayrton Mistral) for aerial textures and beams
- 12x Pixel LED Battens (Fusion Bar QXV, Elation Sixbar, Tourpro Pixbar Pro 1212) crowd-facing eye candy on the dropper pipes between the overhead bars and the dropped-down LED moving washes.
- 10x Various moving profiles/washes at FOH for band keylight.
DIRTY DANCING FLOOR PACKAGE
- 9x COB LED eye candy pixel bricks (ShowPRO Brix FC, Pixelpads) brought the retro look that the film needed in moments, often glowing and lighting up in the on-screen band and stage moments and then added some poppy flashy fun later in the show.
- 8x full-colour LED Fresnels (Tourpro Studio Fresnel 180TW, ECL Fresnel TW, Lustr 3 with fresnel adaptor, Zoom Pars) these sat in pairs on pushup T-bars behind the band. Peter wanted to echo an amateur lighting rig look to this as if it were lighting the talent show stage at Kellermans, so they featured mostly when the band fired up whilst still being practical and backlighting the band which was tricky to otherwise get a shot of being placed below a projection screen. Doing it in this way meant he could get some nice backlight on the band without washing out the film.
THE WHITE ALBUM FLOOR PACKAGE
- 10x Retro Vintage Lights, 6 floor & 4 hung (Tourpro Corona, Portman P1 Mini LED, BT Vintage) Peter needed a nice warm tungsten element in the rig to nod back to the era in which the Album was created, saying “Nothing can beat the pure tungsten filament in front of the golden reflector in the unit types. The Corona is probably still the best LED rendition of the classic I’ve found in hire stock here that can cut above the rest of the rig and the LED ring surrounding the reflector whilst not so vintage gives another element to play with which I used for some of the more silly and quirky tracks”. In addition to the Retro lights, the Fusion Bars on the dropper pipes that supported some of the Retro lights and LED washes often echoed warm tungsten looks for the White Album set.
Knowing this would be a very busy touring schedule, Peter wanted to have both shows fully pre-vized before getting on the road. He uses Capture for his visualiser and Vista for his lighting control on the road.
“Both pieces of software work very fast for quick programming and updates on the road and because of the way the Vista software is designed, I can very easily program away on a single screen without having a console or expensive and bulky channel-unlocking hardware hooked up to it,” he commented. “In actual fact, thanks to a seat being free beside me, I even did set up updates in the air with Vista and Capture running on a laptop, something I would have struggled to do on my other onPC consoles (ETC and MA) without lots of window/view flipping slowing me down.”
The film ran in its entirety and post-credits were half a dozen of the hit songs played in full volume from the live band where the audience didn’t hesitate to get on their feet and dance and sing along. The whole show was running on timecode which helped keep the party lighting at the end bang on in sync with lots of hits and accents pre-programmed to the timecode. Most importantly, the timecode ran from start to end without stopping for the film allowing Peter to follow the scenes in the film and echo them across the lighting rig.
SUPPLIERS
Resolution X (Melbourne: Both Shows)
Intense Lighting (Sydney, Brisbane, Newcastle + Canberra: Both Shows)
AJ’s (Adelaide: Dirty Dancing)
Novatech (Adelaide: The White Album)
Evolution AV (Perth: Both Shows)
Creative Productions (Gold Coast: Dirty Dancing)
Oceania (Auckland: Dirty Dancing)
AC Lighting (Christchurch: Dirty Dancing)
