Australian dance-theatre piece Intimacy by Michelle Ryan and Torque
Show recently traversed the globe to take up residence at the Southbank Centre in
London. Part of the 'Unlimited' disability arts festival, the piece was lit with
eight Philips Selecon LED PLprofile1 luminaires, chosen for their crucial
colourising flexibility by lighting designer John Ford.
Ford, of lighting design consultancy Relume, specified the Selecon luminaires when
it came to lighting the piece during its previous run at the Malthouse Theatre in
Melbourne.
"I chose the PLprofile1 luminaires as I knew I needed something flexible to get as
many lighting options as possible into a small space, and a conventional rig can be
limiting in that sense," says Ford. "I used the PLprofile1 luminaires in dance
booms, because I wanted a wide range of color, and they gave me the variety that
made the design work. The white to pastels gamut is particularly good, they look
like real whites rather than RGB trying to mix to white, and I'm a fan of the
saturated blues. Whilst I think it will be a long time before we get a Lee Congo
Blue out of an LED, the Selecon PLprofile1 engine comes very close."
Ford employed the Selecon fixtures to wash the tight performance space with clean,
shifting hues to perfectly accent the progression of dancer Michelle Ryan's story.
"The color accuracy between units was impressive, with good consistency, and even
live shifts were clean and behaved well," continues Ford. "The Selecon fixtures are
also great in terms of optical performance. The color is fully mixed before it
leaves the lens tube, so you don't get RGB dots on the frost in the gel holder or
RGB streaks in the haze in the first part of the beam. If they're visible from the
audience (as they were in this show) and you just bring them up in the first cue
with a warm white, most lighting people in the audience are going to think they're
conventional profiles with gel. It's not until you change color for the first time
that you know they're something different.
"They also do very clean shutter cuts and while I didn't use them with gobos in this
show, I've seen them with gobos in and they project as cleanly as the halogen
version. I'd say I have fairly limited experience in using LEDs in theatre
applications, mostly because I haven't been convinced until now that there's a
fixture available that can do what I want. However, the PLprofile1 allows optical
and color control to a degree that makes it more than useable for theatre."
Michelle Ryan started dancing when she was four years old and went on to be one of
Australia's most celebrated performers. Intimacy is her response to questions about
her 10-year break from dancing after being diagnosed with MS. Torque Show are
Vincent Crowley, Ross Ganf and Ingrid Weisfelt.