Tina Arena has toured Australia with a nationwide encore tour of one of the country’s highest-selling albums, Don’t Ask. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the album, the tour is entitled Don’t Ask Again with lighting design by Peter Rubie.
The stage had no LED screen or imagery, with the show’s creative visuals focused on a touring lighting rig supplied by POWA Productions, including Martin MAC Aura PXL, Ayrton Eurus, and their brand-new zactrack Smart plug-and-play automated follow system. Jason Henderson, from POWA, is on tour, calibrating the zactrack system and leading the bump-in for each tour stop. Lyndon Buckley is also on the touring LX team as 2nd LX.
“We’ve got four dedicated Spots for Tina with two Ayrton Eurus on the front truss and two Claypaky Sharpy X-Frames for backlighting, along with a curtain-wall linear array of other lights for effect, all utilising zactrack,” explained Jason. “It takes on a distinctly different look depending on the song and the number.”
Jason reports that the zactrack Smart is an excellent piece of software, easy to use. He adds that they’ve had great support from Show Technology, which significantly enhances the user experience.
“It makes it a lot easier to use,” he added. “If you’ve got questions, you can always ring Branden at Showtech, and he can answer them on the spot. He’s been invaluable with it. I’ve found it helpful, and it’s pretty easy to give the LD control of it. I think zactrack provides the show with so much more dynamic lighting because you’re not just getting followspots from the front; you’re getting them from the back and covering all different angles.”
Peter says he runs two tags on Tina for redundancy and smoothness averaging, and two additional tags for the support act of Dylan Wright.
“The system has been great,” he remarked. “It’s so lovely to have a tracking backlight and front light on a performer, and the ability for the colour, intensity and precise levels to run in complete sync with the rest of the design is a wonderful thing.
“Plotting that level of detail into the cues right from the start of Previz sessions becomes so intuitive, and it makes a lot of sense from a design point of view to execute a truly theatrical vision of which this show leans heavily into. Because the show is fully timecoded, it means I know Tina’s lights are going to fade up and down at exactly the right moment and fade duration every show, something that is harder to achieve when calling spots with new operators in every city.”
Peter adds that, aside from the X-Frames, the Eurus are his only spot in the show, and he’s been impressed with their output.
“The colour mixing has come a long way from earlier Ayrton fixtures,” he noted. “I cluster the Eurus in groups of three, giving some nice, powerful looks.”
POWA has close to fifty Ayrton Eurus in its inventory, with Jason commenting that they’re very bright, punchy and have a great range of gobos. A total of twenty-three are in the rig.
Hung upstage of the band is a backdrop of four ladders, each holding four Martin MAC Aura PXL. The positioning of the MAC Aura PXLs on the ladders creates a backdrop of fixtures that gives a curved illusion.
“I wanted to move away from traditional straight lines,” explained Peter. “The blinders are also formed in curved arches from the floor booms up, through the ladders, overhead trusses, and back down. The LED backdrop of movers replaces a traditional upstage LED wall, and I create custom effects using Madrix for both the main 37 x LEDs and the 141 x MAC Aura PXL backlights. The fluidness and organic feel of the MAC Aura PXL backlights are lovely, and you can achieve both shiny, sparkly effects and soft diffused content depending on where the lens sits in the zoom range.”
Peter runs sACN/Ethernet directly to every MAC Aura PXL, since each fixture requires a whole universe. The main fixture and 37 x LED backlights patch into the console, and then Madrix takes the console’s output, and HTP merges it onto the stage.
“The ladder MAC Aura PXLs bathe the stage in colour and effect through the show, but for the times I use them facing the crowd, I lean heavily on the Aura LEDs for sparkly eye candy looks and gentle waves,” Peter added. When using the main LEDs as eye candy, I don’t run them over 10% due to their brightness, which presents some fun dimming curve challenges. The fallback to the Aura LEDs is a good saver here, and they throw a fair bit of light and create interesting criss-cross shards of light when there is a good level of haze in the space.”
The tour has just wrapped up its final show in Adelaide after an 8-city run, including Perth, where EAVP provided a similar rig.
