KRISTIANSAND, Norway — Stage Concept supplied Robe DigitalSpots and moving lights for the Club Salamander stage for the five-day Quart Festival. The venue was a temporary structure built partially over water in the middle of a forested area on the festival’s island site. Club Salamander, which has a capacity of 3,000, was packed for each of the festival’s five nights, featuring performers ranging from DJs like Guru Josh, Bob Sinclar featuring Big Ali, DJ K-Mixx, Inkfish and others.
The design was a collaboration between Spantax from Robe’s Norwegian distributors Live Technic, Rudi Andreas Åvitsland from Stage Concept and Kristoffer Engen from Bærum Lyd, who also supplied LED lighting and the Jands Vista T4 lighting console plus all the audio and DJ gear.
As the exclusive distributor for both Robe and Jands Vista in Norway, Live Technic was asked by Stage Concept to assist in setting up and programming Club Salamander.
The main dancefloor area was under an 11-meter-by-13-meter ground support structure with a grid and several straight pieces of trussing hanging from it at various heights. These were used to rig six Robe DigitalSpot 7000 DTs, six Robe ColorWash 2500E ATs and four ColorSpot 700E ATs.
In addition to the straight truss pieces, there was a 5-meter-diameter circular truss suspended in the middle of the ground support, rigged with 12 ColorSpot 700E ATs along with strobes and strip light battens.
Another six ColorWash 2500E ATs, eight ColorSpot 700E ATs, three exterior color washing fixtures and 60 LED PARs were scattered around the venue to provide mood and environmental lighting. These fixtures were also used to uplight the surrounding trees and mountains, bringing the natural landscape into the visual mix, which was also reflected in the water.
{mospagebreak}The DJ “booth” was a 7-meter-by-8-meter scaffolding structure, completely clad with Chroma-Q ColorWeb that was pixelmapped, and also backlit with another four Robe ColorWash 575E AT Zooms. The DJ area was finished off with two 50-inch plasma screens, displaying content fed from a HippoCritter media server.
All the networking and system setup was undertaken by Spantax from Live Technic, with the DigitalSpots and media servers run via ArtNet directly from the console. The initial setup, layout and DigitalSpot programming was also completed by Spantax. Lars Erik H. Bratlie operated throughout the event and was in charge of the rest of the programming, keeping the lighting matched to the music.
“It was impressive to see the ColorWash 2500E ATs output,” Spantax said. “Even before the sun had set, we could wash a whole mountain in Congo Blue from an 80 meter throw.”
The RDM (Remote Device Management) capabilities of the Robes also proved useful because the rig had to be flown before all the fixtures could be powered.
With a Robe DreamBox, the crew was also able to connect to the fixtures and set modes and DMX addresses without having to send a climber up the truss, and the DreamBox came in handy again when many fixtures were positioned in inaccessible places.
“Apart from the brightness, the Robe fixtures are very responsive and the build quality is unique,” said Spantax, adding that throughout his 12 years on the road, he’s never taken a rig of this size that has been in the air for a week outdoors in a “hostile environment” without a single failure.
“This is one of the reasons that an increasing number of companies in Norway are investing in Robe — you simply don’t have to deal with the issues of so many of the competitor products,” said Spantax, who has opted to use moving lights on all the shows he has worked on for the last couple of years.
For Quart 2009, additional Robe fixtures were sourced through the Robe Rental Network from HSL in the U.K. and Konsertsystemer A/S, Norway.
For more information, please visit www.robe.cz
