Perpetuum Jazzile, celebrated their 40th anniversary with a series of shows at Ljubljana’s Cankarjev Dom asking Crt Birsa from design studio Blackout to create lighting suitable for the occasion.
Birsa created a visual showcase, working closely with Mark Pirc, who brought in as video content creator and co-show director with Aljaz Bastic for the performances. Birsa has lit the group several times over the last 10 years, and specifically more regularly in the last two after as Blackout has become their permanent lighting design provider.
For this show, the basic elements of his programming from the last two years were taken as the starting point. Initial ideas for the 40th included a stage at 45% to the audience with a shallow thrust protruding in an arrow shape, and above that, they wanted a circular truss, which Birsa morphed into a triangular shape that more mimics the shape of the deck below.
He then filled the eight metre equilateral triangular truss above the performance space with lights rigged on sub trusses, creating a Floydesque ‘monumental chandelier’ effect that provided multiple layers of lighting that could be stripped right back or fattened out.
The concept worked with the other visual aspects including the angled stage and an upstage 16m by 6m LED screen.
The lighting kit was mostly supplied by Intralite, with some pulled from the Cankerjev Dom’s house rig – which also featured a lot of Robe fixtures. The numbers added up to eight Robe BMFLs, 24 LEDBeam 150s, 16 FORTES – part of a recent investment by Intralite 10 MegaPointes, 34 Spiiders and 20 ParFect 150s.
These luminaires constituted the majority of the lighting rig with 32 LED strobes, 12 more LED PARs plus six of the venue’s own genuine Svobodas which were rigged on the triangle and created an ambience of their own.
12 of the FORTES were used for the primary back lights in a line upstage. While they looked like they were on a single truss, they were flown on a combination of house LX bars which are arranged in rows left, centre and right of the stage. The other four FORTES were utilised for side keys. He used them to project gobos over the singers during the song “Mesto Sanj” (Dream City).
The eight BMFLs were positioned upstage on the floor and were the only rear lights from this low-level position. They were also an effective counterbalance to the FORTE beams coming in from above.
The 10 MegaPointes were placed inside the triangle, arranged in four rows in a 4-3-2-1 pattern, and they were used as blocky light sources to complement and contrast with the Svobodas.
The LEDBeam 150s outlined the structure of the triangular truss, eight fixtures on each of the three structural truss pieces creating the shape. Crt described them as “exceptionally handy” fixtures.
The LEDBeam 150s were also used for audience lighting, an ongoing nuance of the venue to make this work is dealing with the high balconies, and the LEDBeam 150s assisted in finding a solution.
The 18 Spiiders formed the main stage wash looks, with six doubling up as the principal key lighting for the soloists and guest singers.
The six key lighting Spiiders were from the house rig and positioned on the lighting bridge together with all the house profiles. They allowed Birsa to match the colour temperatures of the TV lighting as one of the shows was recorded for Slovenian national TV.
Six ParFect 150s toned the triangle with another four boosting the side lighting positions for the solo singers when standing on their downstage marks. Another 10 augmented the audience lighting, so plenty of colour and energy could be added to the audience looks for the broadcast wide shots.
Overall challenges included Crt persuading everyone on the merits of going with a triangular shape (rather than a circle) above the stage and getting the whole rig together with the LED screens at the right trim heights, because theatres do not have unlimited clearance.
The get-in for the first show started at midnight and Birsa finished finessing the focusing of audience ParFect 150s one minute before doors. The style of the show was a big hit with everyone, and Birsa even found himself during programming paring some lighting back to ensure the artists stayed central to the picture and being reinforced proportionately by lighting and video.
He enjoyed the collaborative process of working with Pirc on the content, show directors Mark Pirc and Aljaz Bastic – Bastic was also multi-cam director. Birsa benefitted from receiving the video content before the show which gave him some prep time to think about matching lighting looks, scenes, and texturing to what would be appearing onscreen. Crt and his team at Blackout regularly specify Robe fixtures for their projects. The brand has a very strong presence in the Slovenian market thanks to distributor, MK Light Sound.
