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Robe Esprites for Singapore Ballet production

Singapore-based lighting designer Adrian Tan of The Light Project recently utilised 32 Robe Esprite moving lights - sixteen Profiles and sixteen Fresnels - to light a production of “Swan Lake” staged by the Singapore Ballet at Esplanade Theatres by the Bay in Singapore.

Twenty-eight of these fixtures were part of a new lighting package which has been added to the theatre’s house rig, and, as Tan needed a couple more of each type to complete the detail of his design, more were sourced through Robe’s Asia Pacific office, also in Singapore. This was the third re-light of this “Swan Lake” production at the venue, the second time that the Singapore Ballet has been accompanied by the Metropolitan Festival Orchestra, and the first time that Esprites were used as the main workhorse lighting fixture. All the Esprites were positioned above the stage, and the trim height of the fly bars was around ten metres.

This staging of “Swan Lake” was very classical, so the lighting needed to emulate this tungsten aesthetic using the latest technologies. As a designer, Tan appreciates the subtlety and texture of the pastel colours, and until this experience with Esprites, he says, the warm tones of any LED fixtures were “never warm enough”. So, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the warm sunlight glow - at around 3000 K - that he desired for this show looked “really nice”, and that generally he didn’t have to do so much colour mixing. Primarily the colour temperature whites covered the very specific tones that he wanted. For the lake scenes, he arrived at a 5600 K tone with all the right nuance and texturing, again without having to spend too much time producing the hue with the Esprites.

By his own admission, Tan is “a stickler” for hyper-sensitive linear dimming and elegant refined pastels, cool steels and decent warm whites. “Most manufacturers can do a saturated blue or a red, but when it comes to pastels, colour mixing, especially using an LED source, it is a whole new art form.” He notes that creating the gobo scenes required for this production was “substantially faster” using Esprites and moving lights than it had been previously, and that he had the additional benefit of being able to repurpose those same fixtures that were instrumental in building the gobo scenes, for something completely different just moments later as the story unfolded.

Tan has also recently used more of the new Robe fixtures at Esplanade Theatres by the Bay including Paintes in the Black Box space, and Footsie2s and T32 Cycs when lighting a hybrid/contemporary dance piece. These were all part of the same lighting upgrade featuring a total of 170 Robe products among other lights.

(Photos: Bernie Ng)

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