When Taiwan’s National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) hosted a revival of the German/Taiwanese co-production of Puccini’s Turandot earlier this year, Mr Chien-hao Kuo, lighting designer and head of lighting, boldly chose to replace all the discharge moving lights of the original design with LED fixtures.He carefully selected 26 Ayrton Khamsin-S profiles which were supplied to the venue from its rental stock by Hispot Workshop of Taipei, Taiwan, a company which has been dedicated to theatre design and equipment rental for over twenty-six years. Mr Kuo’s choice was a considered one as he had used Ayrton Khamsin-S on several operas in the past and knew them to be both powerful and quiet.

Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater marked its upcoming 100th anniversary with a stunning special 10-minute music and light show featuring more than one hundred Claypaky Axcor Profile 900 LN high-wattage moving head LED spotlights and HY B-EYE K25 moving head LED wash. The theater’s Lighting Designers Ruslan Mayorov and Alexander Matveev created the lighting spectacular with Sergei Dobrikov, Software Engineer from equipment supplier and installer Doka Center, choreographing the intricate play of beams to music by Faustas Latenas.  An invited audience was in attendance for the show, which featured forests of parallel beams, dancing beams, textured curtains of light and giant beams that broke the boundaries of the proscenium to sweep the audience.  The theater’s heads and the Russian government’s Minister of Culture were on hand to offer congratulations.

Robe’s news team visited Queensland Theatre back in February … just before the pandemic turned 2020 upside down! This is the story of the theatre’s experience with their Robe LEDWash300+s. Queensland Theatre – usually – sits at the buzzing heart and soul of Brisbane’s lively arts and performance scene, producing around eight or nine main stage productions a year between the 351-capacity Bille Brown Theatre in the south of the city and at the 4-venue Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC). The theatre also has a strong youth and educational program which allows school-aged artists to stage shows with the company. On top of that, they also receive shows at both the Bille Brown and QPAC, and tour productions across Australia throughout the year.

The Roman-style stone arch was built in the 1750s at the end of one of the major roads traversing Bordeaux, now called the Cours Victor Hugo, which is a major thoroughfare for both cars and pedestrians crossing the city. It is also clearly visible from across the River Garonne. With its prominent position and historical significance, the city council are keen for La Porte de Bourgogne to be a highly visible ‘communication portal’ welcoming people to the ancient centre, so they wanted a great looking, energy-efficient lighting scheme to replace the old one which was installed over a decade ago and was starting to look dated!

Recently, SMT was invited to have several "cloud conversations" with the Expo Dubai 2020 Organizing Committee, hoping to use SMT's self-developed “cloud-based total solution” to highly integrate multiple “new technologies” and help the Expo Dubai 2020 Organizing Committee to successfully create the first "Cloud Expo", and achieved the destination of breaking the record of online exhibition scale and number of visitors.

#handforahand is an initiative that collects donations for a private solidarity fund to support freelance lighting, sound, video and AV technicians, stage hands, production and event workers. These professions are the most affected by the current crisis. Several of them are falling through the federal government aid programmes finding themselves dependent on basic social security through no fault of their own. The funds of #handforahand are distributed monthly according to the instructions of an independent allocation committee, and quickly and directly reach the people from these professional groups who are most urgently in need of financial aid.

The 21st edition of the Asia TV Forum & Market (ATF) and the 10th ScreenSingapore, Asia’s leading platform for TV, film and digital entertainment content, will be held online from 1 to 4 December 2020.
Themed “Prelude 2021: Be Part of the Conversation”, the year’s conference aims to bring the industry together to review what has been a year of rapid transformation, as it navigates the new year ahead.

The Tallinn Salme Cultural Centre is one of the Estonian capital’s largest cultural institutions, and usually a busy hub of activity for concerts and live entertainment shows as well as hosting conferences and events. Recently, the venue has invested in 20 x Robe T1 Profile moving lights and 18 x Tetra2 moving LED battens which were specified by head of lighting, Margus Ruhno, and delivered by Robe’s Estonian distributor, E&T. The additional equipment is needed to support the venue’s increasingly busy programme, although there are currently no performances due to closure amidst the pandemic.

Blackmagic Design today announced that a multicam live production workflow, built around Blackmagic URSA Broadcast, was used to deliver simultaneous events across the ten days of the annual Cheltenham Literature Festival. Bubble Production enabled the internationally renowned festival to go ahead in a digital format for the first time in its 71 year history. Graham Essenhigh, managing director at Bubble begins, “Having successfully delivered more than 300 events online for the Hay Festival earlier in the year, the challenge of Cheltenham was brought to us. The biggest difference on this occasion was that we would be back on site, delivering to screens in venue as well as to a digital audience.”

Although many of the 2020 Milan Fuorisalone (Design Week) events had to move to a virtual platform, the organisers wanted to make sure this year’s theme of ‘green’ ran strongly throughout the program. The opening event did just this: a live performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and ‘Quattro stagioni’ by Astor Piazolla, performed by the La Barocca ensemble of Milan’s Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra, from the leafy setting of UpTown Park. Tickets were available for a smaller, socially distanced audience, but in order to bring the event to as many people as possible, the concert was also livestreamed through Fuorisalone TV, the Design Week’s online channel. 

An exciting new collaboration between Robe and the acclaimed Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art at Trinity College Dublin sees a quantity of Robe moving lights – including T1 Profiles and T1 Fresnels, LEDWash 300 LEDs and ParFect 150s – made available on long term rental, which were used to great effect for the Lir Academy’s 2020 Gradfest event. This featured four back-to-back new productions presented in Lir Academy’s two studio spaces, all lit by students completing their master’s degrees in fine art, for which Gradfest was a final segment requiring completion before they gained their qualifications.

Britannia Row Productions Training is one of 2,049 cultural and creative organisations across the country to have been awarded £409m of urgently needed support (up to 24^th October 2020). The Culture Recovery Fund grants programme is being administered by the  Arts Council England on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Further rounds of funding in the cultural and heritage sector are due to be announced over the coming weeks. BRPT was founded in 2012 to provide holistic training for those wanting to enter the live events industry as live audio technicians. Courses available from colleges and universities are not targeted enough for this niche sector, making it hard for graduates to enter the workplace as invariably a certain amount of re-training is required. Furthermore, these institutions tend to lag behind with teaching the latest technologies, equipment and working practices.

The Songcheng Group is the first performing arts company in China to go public and is also a global top 10 theme park group. With its core competence in performing arts, Songcheng Performance has built a number of established brands including ‘Songcheng’ and the ‘Romance’ show series. The company owns 74 theatres with a total capacity of 175,000 seats, which exceeds the combined number of seats available in two of the world’s most famous theatre districts, namely London’s West End and Broadway in New York. In fact, the spectacular ‘Romance’ series of large-scale, hi-tech productions has broken box office records with more than 8,000 performances per year to an annual audience of over 35 million people. Recently, six of Songcheng’s ten dedicated ‘Romance’ theatres – many of them sited in dedicated ‘Romance’ theme parks across China – have upgraded to powerful KV2 Audio sound systems.

Naturkraft is a new experience centre in the Danish town of Ringkøbing, West Jutland, which aims to increase awareness of nature and the forces that shape our world as a way of encouraging more sustainable behaviour. Visitors are treated to a rich array of exhibitions and learning experiences – outside there are eight different types of natural environment whilst indoors, an iconic 5500 sq metre building designed to integrate into the flat coastal landscape offers a range of fascinating exhibitions. Digital experience creators, No Parking, were responsible for the design and development of the main installations inside the Exploratorium including IT and AV equipment. No Parking selected a Smart IP sound system from Genelec as the ideal audio partner for their designs.

It’s been a tough time for all performance venues and especially for community theatres like The Congress in Cwmbran which cancelled all its shows in March as Covid-19 took hold, mid-way through one of its busiest seasons! However, through successive lockdowns, the venue has been reimagined as The Congress Virtual Studio, a fully equipped streaming facility encouraging local artists and businesses to record and broadcast music shows and engage in events, generating interest and at least some income during this period.