Robe Shines At 2006 Michael Elliot Trust Awards

The 2006 Michael Elliot Trust Awards, a charity dinner recognizing the best of UK theatre and TV performance, featured 60 Robe moving lights. The event was staged in the Great Room at London’s Grosvenor House. Attila Keskin designed the lighting, which was supplied by HSL.

The show was replete with many special guests including Dame Judi Dench and David Suchet. Performers included Chris de Burgh, the cast of two of Bill Kenwright’s leading theatre tours of the moment – This is Elvis and Whistle Down the Wind and Camilla Dallerup and Ian Waite from Strictly Come Dancing.

Keskin’s challenge was to light a low headroom space serving as both dining room and a performance area. The stage was extremely limited for lighting positions, so HSL rigged a box truss in the center of the room flanked by two outside trusses either end of the auditorium, plus a long goal-post truss at the rear of the stage. The Robes--30 ColorSpot 1200 ATs and 30 ColorWash 1200 ATs¬¬--were scattered across the three auditorium trusses. They squeezed 14 fixtures onstage, some on the floor, and some on the goal-post truss.

Keskin was pleased with Robe’s optics and colors, “the brightness is amazing, and they are really fast,” he says. He used them for a myriad of effects, including sweeping across the tables with break-up gobos for the dinner session, across the stage the presentations and performances. He operated the show using a Virtuoso lighting console, and was also running an M-Box Extreme digital media server for the SoftLED backdrop onstage.

“We have the largest rental stock of Robe kit in the UK and it’s all constantly working. The units are proving really reliable for all applications. That’s a major consideration for any rental house, and specially on a gig like this, where there’s so little time to get everything in and working in time – you need to know it’s all going to work first time,” says HSL’s Mike Oates, who coordinated the event for the company.