TURKU, Finland – Stephen Page from Manchester, UK-based DBN Lighting designed the lighting for the Opening Ceremony of Turku's year as 2011 European Capital of Culture. Page was hired by Walk The Plank, which was commissioned by the Turku 2011 Foundation to produce a 35-minute show for the opening ceremony. The show, a fire and lighting spectacular, was created and directed by Mark Murphy, produced by John Wassell for Walk The Plank and staged at the former Wärtsilä Shipyard on the River Aura.
Page has collaborated before with Walk The Plank, and designed the lighting for their shows to open and close Liverpool's European Capital of Culture year in 2008.
Tom Ralston and Pete Isherwood assisted Page, and DBN supplied 36 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 700 moving lights from the UK, with an additional two Alpha Beam 1500 units supplied by Clay Paky.
In Turku, the DBN crew worked with Helsinki-based lighting rental company RMC, who supplied 10 crew members and the rest of the lighting equipment needed to illuminate the 500-by-200-meter performance space, part of which was on the frozen river.
"The piece was a combination of intimate small scale theatrical moments, coupled with large scale spectacle and pyrotechnics, and the key challenge for the lighting design was to link all the different elements at various scales across the huge site so that the audience could follow the language of the piece as a whole," Page noted.
"I used Alpha Beams as the key element of the design, both to link the smaller theatrical moments and provide big, dramatic looks to complement the larger scale parts of the show. There were no relay screens so we had to work really creatively to communicate the story across the site to a huge audience, as well as meeting the needs of a live TV broadcast."
The show included aerial performers swinging from cranes, a large fire drawing rigged from the rock-face at the back of the shipyard, a choir of 500, a row of performers in cherry pickers just in front of the audience and pyrotechnics. The narrative was a love story set against a historical backdrop of the City.
There were three main areas for performance, centred around the historic shipyard area of the city. On one side of the river a Gantry running along the top of a rock face at the rear of the shipyard (effectively "upstage") and a large slipway below this where ships had been launched into the water.
The third area was on the opposite side of the River, based around a large historic crane and running down the riverbank in front of the main audience position. A walkway on the crane was used as the principal stage area, and the crane itself was used for rigging a substantial amount of lighting equipment.
Along each of these three areas, Page positioned three rows of 12 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 700s, which were his main effects lights across the site, shooting tight, bright beams up into the night sky and swooping down to texture the iced up and snowed over river with gobos and colours. On both ends of the site on the shipyard riverbank were two Alpha Beam 1500s, which were used to track aerial performers and define the extent of the site.
For the Alpha Beams located in the pyro fallout zones, DBN designed and fabricated Perspex weather domes, as the standard inflatable ones could not be used.
Other lighting fixtures included Martin Professional and Robe moving lights, Studio Due City Colors, Atomic strobes, lots of LED and conventional PARs, a host of 500 Watt floods, 4-lites and i-Pix BB4s – over 400 lights in total.
The whole site was covered in heavy snow for the entire period of the load-in, rehearsal and show, and that challenge was coupled with issues related to the sub-zero (F) temperatures and cabling distances.
Page pre-programmed as much of the show as possible using a WYSIWYG 3D visualiser, and ran it on a Jands Vista T4 console with the latest version 2 Byron software, with a T2 running as hot backup.
Despite the cold, about 50,000 people attended the ceremony, which was broadcast live on TV.
"It was a privilege working on this event and a real pleasure to partner with RMC and engage in the great teamwork that made it happen so successfully," Page said.
For more information, please visit www.dbn.co.uk.
