ETC Source Four LED Lustr+ helps The Royal Ballet’s Don Quixote get big applause in Shanghai

Audiences at the Shanghai Grand Theatre were bowled over by a performance of Don Quixote by The Royal Ballet from London. The show used a large number of Source Four LED™ profiles and was run by two Gio® consoles . Simon Bennison, lighting manager for The Royal Ballet comments on the Source Four LED: "It enabled us to recall an effective color palette on tour without using scrollers."

The lighting for Don Quixote was designed by Hugh Vanstone, a Tony® Award-winning lighting designer. Bennison wanted to ensure authenticity while recreating the piece away from Covent Garden, the home of The Royal Ballet: "It's my role to reproduce Hugh Vanstone's lighting accurately. It's a sizeable work with some exacting looks across the scenes."

The Shanghai Grand Theatre inventory provided enough Source Four LED Lustr+ luminaires to allow them to be used as the pipe-end systems and in the front of house. "This seemed the logical route to take," Bennison adds. "Overall they worked well. I was pleasantly surprised by the way they were able to take color information from our original show file and also by the quality of light." 

From daylight to sunset, and a somber tavern to the bright, clear quality of the town square, the Source Four LED luminaires were able to react smoothly and rapidly to fulfill the demands of different scenes and mood changes while complementing the design.

Sixty-eight of the instruments were a significant amount for the piece, but the Gio control system proved flexible and easy to use, with two Gio consoles linked - one as master and one as backup. "The Gio was a wonderful thing as we got the advanced features of Eos Ti, but in a smaller, more manageable format. Even scaling down from Eos, we still had a fully functioning board with all the preset capabilities we expect from the larger one," says Bennison. "We use its sibling, Eos, back in London, and will be switching to Eos Ti in the summer."

Florian Baeumler, The Royal Ballet's lighting board operator for Don Quixote , was equally pleased with the way his Gio desk interacted with the lighting. He updated the software to the latest version (v2.2) and took advantage of the user-friendly features. He said switching between three workspaces on each monitor without having to use snapshots was a real timesaver in a busy programming session. " I did not really miss my external monitors, with the three individually configured windows on each internal monitor," Baeumler explains.

Baeumler really enjoyed the versatility offered by ETC consoles: "They adapt to your way of working and not the other way round. The way one can choose how the console presents information is fantastic. You can see at a glance what is going on in a cue, or switch to table-view and drill down to all the attributes of a moving light." 

As ETC's official dealer, Hangzhou YiDaShi provided great help to make the show perfect in the Shanghai theater.

Don Quixote is a new production from The Royal Ballet, reworked by Principal Guest Artist Carlos Acosta. The first ballet version of the Spanish novel Don Quixote de la Mancha appeared in 1740 by Franz Hilverding in Vienna, Austria. Don Quixote has since been interpreted into many different versions, becoming a classic of ballet repertoire.