Live@Work - 19_CW07 - One last time a travel through time

After many successful years in choir work and many different musicals, the former cantor couple of the Stuttgart district Vaihingen, Germany said goodbye at the beginning of February with the youth musical "NACHHALL", performed by the "Kurrende" youth choir. This time, the "Stadtkirche" in Stuttgart-Vaihingen was the venue for the performance, but new ways of using the space were taken: The stage was set up in the nave of the church and the visitors sat in the choir area and where the altar usually stands. Unusual paths were also taken in the plot of the musical, because instead of learning history by traveling to different historical places, the main characters of the play - a group of pupils together with their teacher and the tour guide Ralf - stay at the same place but traveled with the "Temuto" time traveling machine to different epochs in the past. The group experienced various little stories such as the Stone Age people's blessing dance for a mammoth, a goddess worship in ancient Rome or the desolation after the Thirty Years' War.

Since the play was made with changing canvases as background pictures, it was not possible to illuminate the canvas from below as in "Max und die Käsebande"; (see here). Instead, these spotlights were used for the colored lighting of the gallery and the columns. To optically extend the stage in such way, 12 Eurolite PS-4 HCL and two Futurelight EYE-7 Zoom were used. Another four PS-4 HCL illuminated columns and a wall. The front light for the stage was provided by four Arri 1000 and two Showtec Q4-18 hung up on two crank tripods. The two LED fixtures were mainly used to change the color temperature of the front light depending on the scene. Two Futurelight DMH-160 for gobos also hung on the same tripods. Two Q4-18 were used as a kind of edge light and four ADJ Dotz Par were used as blinders. The latter ensured that in the "tempmutation" phases (the pauses between two epochs) the audience was blinded by some flashlights to hide the changes on stage. Of course, DMXControl 3 and the Nodle interface were used for the light control.

In the lighting concept, each epoch and scenery had its own suitable lighting atmosphere. For example, in the medieval scene (first picture) a white and a pastel red were used, whereas the worship of the goddess was held in purple with turquoise (third picture). In nearly all scenes a quite warm front light was chosen, only in the scene after the Thirty Years' War was consciously illuminated with cold white from the front. Thus the oppressive mood of the scenery became also optically visible. In most cases, static lighting scenes were used to not distract from what was happening on the stage. But especially at dances with many actors moving lights illuminated the actors.

The musical was a great success and on both days practically all seats were taken. Now we can only hope that the next cantor will bring comparable performances on stage.

Your DMXControl-Team