This year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe saw Edinburgh sound and lighting company, Northern Light, and venue producers C venues collaborate to reduce the direct and associated energy consumption of performance lighting at C aquila – the latest addition to C venues’ stable of performance spaces.
Two lighting rigs – one for each space in the C aquila venue – were specified and designed in a collaboration between Head of Hire and Events for Northern Light Nick Read, production manager for C venues Richard Williamson, artistic director of C venues (and international lighting designer) Hartley T A Kemp, and industry journalist Sarah Rushton-Read, The aim: To substantially reduce energy consumption during the month-long festival, without compromising visiting lighting designers’ creative output.
Space technician – and ETC ion programmer – at C aquila’s main theatre, Kariss Leigh Ainsworth, reports: “The visiting artists were delighted with the rig. It allowed them to do so much more with their shows. Lighting was quick and easy to set up and programme. The design also reduced the need to stock large quantities of saturated colour gels for back and sidelight and enabled companies to select exactly the colours they wanted to use.”
Owen Thomas, theatre manager for C aquila, adds: “The rig not only offered visiting artists much greater flexibility in their lighting design but also reduced the amount of heat generated throughout the day in each space. It cut down on the use of consumables considerably and allowed the companies to programme more complex lighting designs in less time and with less labour.”
Northern Light measured the power throughout the Festival and reported that significant reductions had been made to day-to-day running costs and emissions. Read elaborates: “Edinburgh Fringe Festival venues are unique in the fact that they are generally not purpose built theatres and operate in performance mode for up to 20 hours per day. They have limited power available and the rooms are low ceilinged and not generally air-conditioned. C aquila was running two spaces each with up to ten shows per day, every day for a month. In this situation a conventional fixture lighting rig would have heated up the rooms very quickly. This would have demanded the constant use of high power fans and air conditioning to ensure a bearable temperature for audience and performers.”
Williamson notes: “Turnaround between shows is tight, which presents visiting companies with a number of challenges. With a conventional rig, gel and gobo changes have to be made, between shows, in lamps that are still very hot; they can therefore be awkward to swap out. We get through a lot of saturated gel colour during the festival. Most fixtures that require colour or gobo changing also need refocusing – often there’s simply not the time! To achieve more than one colour wash per show requires scrollers. In small spaces these can be noisy and the extra length they add to the fixtures can be distracting. The use of the ETC Selador LED washlights instantly eliminated many of the above issues, enabling designers to make use of an infinite number of saturated and subtle back and side wash colours. The Robert Juliat Aledin fixtures front of house (FOH), with their super-cool gate, ensured gobos could be swapped out easily and refocus between shows was fast and presented no risk of burnt fingers! These benefits, plus the use of low wattage FOH fixtures from Selecon, radically cut down on power consumption and use of consumables, heat emissions and reduced the need for fans and air con, while still providing warm and natural FOH washes and specials.”
Kemp comments: “This shows that low-energy units can be used to great effect to reduce power consumption, while accommodating all the varied needs of visiting designers in a busy Festival programme. We’ve had many favourable comments on the quality and versatility of the equipment at C aquila. I’ve been very impressed with the kit myself, and look forward to specifying it on future productions.”
Northern Light also welcomed many quality visitors to its two ‘C aquila open days’, during which Read demonstrated the new lighting fixtures and their benefits.
Read discusses: “We’ve been delighted with the results of our experiment and with the considerable reduction in power consumption that it has delivered. In response to feedback from power monitoring, the technicians and visiting companies we’re compiling a detailed report of the true environmental impact of our choices.”
The report will detail: the reduction in consumables used; the true cost of hiring a low energy rig compared to a standard rig; the benefit to the visiting companies in terms of the ability to better artistically express themselves in a shorter space of time; the reduction in heat emissions and the associated reduction in the use of fans, air-conditioning etc; the travel miles of getting the state of the art kit up to Edinburgh from London and a plethora of other factors. All these figures will be translated into CO2 emissions, financial cost and power consumption.
Read concludes: “We would like to thank Bryan Raven of White Light, ETC, Robert Juliat, Selecon, Prism and iPix for all their help and support and for loaning us the latest in low energy and LED technology, we could not have done this without their support. All our results will be published on our website but if anyone would like us to send them a copy of the report direct they can register their interest by emailing [email protected].”
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