Since opening in 1990, the Ravenna Festival in Italy has gained a reputation as one of Europe’s most prestigious events, hosting a wide range of performing arts in equally varied venues, several of which are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. For its Autumn Trilogy dedicated to Puccini, two of the productions were staged in the town’s Dante Alighieri Theatre, a gem of traditional architecture.
The trilogy comprised Puccini’s most popular masterpiece, La Bohème, presented with the Cherubini Youth Orchestra and a talented young cast, as well as a Bohemian divertissement titled “Mimì is just a flirt,” proposing an original slant on Puccini’s themes, and a recital conducted by Riccardo Muti.
La Bohème, a new co-production with the theatres of Vilnius, Piacenza, and Novara, was based on an idea by director Cristina Mazzavillani Muti, who pursues her research in the field of high-tech applied to opera, with an all-LED lighting rig designed by French LD Vincent Longuemare and extremely atmospheric video mapping by David Loom.
Regarding her approach to direction, Mazzavillani stresses, “It stands out, thanks to the use of the latest lighting and video technology, particularly in a traditional genre such as opera, which, in many cases is stifled by convention. However, this doesn’t mean putting technology before music or words, but it must be at the service of both. In fact, the words and melodies evoke the images on stage. The latest addition to the highly qualified, well-proven production team I’ve worked with for many years and have shared numerous successes with—Vincent Longuemare, video programmer Davide Broccoli, and costume designer Alessandro Lai—is visual artist David Loom. As well as being technologically advanced, his work has a deeply personal approach and was a further stimulus for our process of integrating operatic tradition and modern video technology.”
The director says that she rediscovered the work of French Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whom she calls “a lover of the bizarre and decadent tradition, imaginary and the grotesque, who managed to transform even the most commonplace subjects, such as flowers, by means of the metamorphosis of memory and imagination. This complex vision was the area I suggested David explore to find images closest to the ironic, disenchanted, and sometimes even ferocious and pitiless spirit I read in Puccini’s masterpiece.”
Broccoli is a well-known face in video production circles. Recent projects on which he has worked have included a touring production of Aida in German indoor sports arenas, while upcoming projects include a trip to Seoul for a production of Handel’s Rinaldo. As well as his work on opera productions, Broccoli works with increasing frequency on interactive multimedia content for key exhibitors at trade expos. He is a stalwart Christie fan and explains, “I convinced the theatre to purchase the Christie Roadie HD+35K we used for front projections on four pairs of 1.8x7.5m mobile screens with Peroni Nerissimo PVC film. My advice was based on a series of reasons, not the least important of which is its reduced running cost, compared to other units. For example, the lamp costs a third of the price of less powerful models, and if you think that, on this production alone, I used the lamp for approximately 280 hours, this aspect plays a very important role. Then there’s the image quality: The Christie projector is hard to fault as far as this is concerned. It has an excellent white, wonderful color management and image regulation.”
Loom’s video content was fed out to the screens via a coolux Pandoras Box Quad SSD standard server, and a Christie Roadster HD20K-J 3DLP unit was deployed on rear-projection duty, on a Peroni Notturno New (zero hotspot) full-black PVC backdrop/rear projection screen. Broccoli enthuses, “The video content’s pre-production by David was perfect, so that onsite fine-tuning took just a couple of days during the three weeks of rehearsals.”
Illuminated Darkness
Born in Dieppe, France, lighting designer Longuemare has been based in Italy since 1996. During his varied career, in addition to opera, contemporary theatre, and dance, he has designed architectural lighting and held workshops, seminars, and training sessions. In 2014, Longuemare had almost finished the draft of a handbook for lighting designers, when one of the proofreaders drew his attention to the fact that the chapter dedicated to LED lighting was rather negative. “He said I risked sounding like one of the old guard, wary of innovation, but this isn’t the case,” he says. “I’ve always been in favor of advanced technology, if used in an artistic, poetic manner.”
However, the comment spurred Longuemare and lighting industry veteran Pino Loconsole, founder of rental firm Luci di Scena and Ravenna Festival lighting supplier, to embark on an ambitious project: testing practically all the relevant LED fixtures available. “We saw dozens, carrying out A:B tests between fixtures of the same category, focused on dimming, linearity in the progression when switching fixtures on and off, compensation systems, yield, luminous efficiency, beam distribution, color rendering, and mixing systems, as well as the mechanical aspects of the motorized units,” says Longuemare.
For the Puccini productions, as far as fixed profiles were concerned, he had initially considered ETC’s Source Four LED Series 2 Lustr fixtures, but when he discovered the manufacturer’s ColorSource Spots were available, opted for them for their greater luminous efficiency and four-color LED format, as well as their “decidedly attractive price tag.” Loconsole supplied 16 ColorSource Spots with 25° to 50° lenses and 16 more with 15° to 30° lenses, deployed for two levels of side-lighting. “These gave an excellent pictorial result, with perfect light distribution over the entire beam aperture, and, in terms of intensity, I never went over 60%,” Longuemare says.
Other fixtures that impressed the LD during his tests were High End Systems’ SolaSpot Pro 1500 and SolaWash Pro 2000. “The first we tested was the profile, a category of fixture I used large numbers of,” he says. “I had to understand how they responded to dimming and how the color temperature held even with low settings of 20% or 30%. I need to create atmospheres even with low intensity, the famous ‘illuminated darkness,’ which picks out the characters on stage without exaggerating.” Longuemare was initially dubious as to whether LED fixtures were able to maintain a good intense light and show the details of the characters and their historical costumes, and he adds, “This ability to define shapes is a feature for which halogen lighting ruled the roost for decades.”
He had to change his mind and eventually worked at 30% to 40%, obtaining excellent definition of the field of vision and the ability to pick out the singers perfectly. “Thanks to its framing system, the SolaWash can be used almost as a beam light, picking out faces from a long distance,” the LD says.
Loconsole’s company was the first Italian rental firm to field the SolaSpot and SolaWash fixtures and explains, “We installed 12 of the former and six of the latter for Vincent.”
Longuemare concludes, “Redon painted exclusively in black and white, until he fell in love, and began painting colorful flowers. I therefore divided the opera into black and white acts with a variety of chiaroscuro, and acts with color. The fixtures turned out to be extraordinary tools for the job of showing both the white and the black surrounding it, thanks also to their great aiming precision and total containment of light spill.”
Mike Clark, ex-sound engineer, road manager, radio personality, and club DJ, is a UK-born journalist residing in Italy and specializing in entertainment-related technology. He has contributed to Live Design under its four names for 20 years, and, as well as contributing to UK, Russian, and Italian periodicals, also works as a technical translator for audio and lighting manufacturers.
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