Continuing the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s tradition of adventurous contemporary commissioning and collaborations, Home, Land and Sea presented three intriguing ballets inspired by journeys in unknown seas, and what it means to come home.
Two of the ballets, The Way Alone and Home, Land and Sea, were lit by Jon Buswell, whilst Dan Wilson lit Chrysalis. This was the first performance to utilise RNZB’s new lighting rig, hired through Grouse Lighting and featuring Ayrton Huracán Washes and Martin MAC Viper XIPs.
Huracán Wash introduces a 1000 W monochromatic LED source specially developed for studio and theatre applications, called the “ST”. This LED source delivers a light output of 45,000 lumens and a D65 white point, allowing for perfect colour reproduction with a CRI greater than 80. Perfect for ballet performances.
Jon Buswell first encountered the Ayrton Huracán Wash while working with the Australian Ballet a couple of years ago, and since then, several of his designs for them have featured the fixture.
“I view the Huracán Wash as the next workhorse for my designs,” he said. “I particularly like their colour, what you get as a sort of native white is really good. It’s really crisp, and the fact that they have a Fresnel lamp, yet you can almost get a hard shutter on them. It’s really odd, the optics in them are really strange, but in a good way.”
In The Way Alone, Jon positioned one Huracán Wash upstage centre, and it was able to wash the whole stage due to its 75-degree beam angle. In fact, the luminaire boasts a wide zoom range, from 6.2° to 75°, providing flexibility for beam shaping and coverage.
“When I re-lit Nijinsky at the Sydney Opera House, we used eight Huracán Washes to replace four 4K HMIs with scrollers, and I was turning them down!” he added. So, just for output, colour and angle, they’re terrific. They’re also extremely quiet, which is very important in theatre.”
For the RNZB production, the Huracán Washes were predominantly used as large backlights and big washes. Both Jon and Dan used gobos in them, with Jon stating, “We both had a play with the gobos, which we thought were kind of rock and roll type things, so we’d never thought we’d use them, but we put them in, and we’re like, oh, these are pretty good. That sort of opens us up to considering, in the future, putting gobos into a wash unit, which is a pretty unusual thing to do, but whatever!”
With little or no set on stage, the Huracán Washes fill the space with big statement lighting coming from various directions.
Huracán Wash is factory-equipped with full features, including a framing section that allows for the accurate positioning of four barndoors on a 100% surface area in all positions, enabling the user to frame any object regardless of the luminaire’s position. Huracán Wash also offers a wheel of seven rotating gobos, a 15-blade iris diaphragm and a beam ovaliser filter.
Grouse also supplied fourteen Martin MAC Viper XIPs as a replacement for the rig of discharge MAC Vipers previously used. With the MAC Viper XIP’s uncompromising package of high-output optical performance, XIP smart weatherproofing technology, premium feature set, low noise, smaller footprint, and ease of serviceability, it’s easy to see why.
Jon comments that they are a good substitute and is impressed by their output, even field and consistent native colour, which he says the older MAC Vipers struggled to achieve. Jon sees them becoming a standard workhorse in the industry.
“They are also near silent in operation, have good colour mixing and framing with less ‘banana-ing’ of shutters when zoomed out,” he remarked. “What would be useful in ballet is if Martin would consider providing a ‘Viper Performance legacy mode’ where the first 32 or 40 channels directly map to an original Viper attribute set. That way, older shows coming back into rep after say 10-15 years would be easier to get back, the newer attributes could go behind the standard set so that they could still be accessed.”
Grouse Lighting is delighted to support the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s creative and sustainability goals with the supply of leading-edge LED technology and looks forward to a long-lasting and fruitful relationship.
